Hmm, could be changes afoot at t168? Will be interesting if we have a good cluster of cold solutions on the ensembles later 

Good from ECM at 216

I prefer eggs benedict 😉

To be fair Mike it's still only two runs with the 00Z version having very little support but it's now on the radar under 'very loose potential long term'.

Maybe a new trend from ECM as you can't get better consistency than that. Virtually down to a T.

All about the trends, as mentioned this morning

People probably won't be interested in this in light of the amplification shown on the EC and UKMO later. However here is the UKMO saturday chart with fronts and 850hpa -5C estimates.

Cold, wintry showers, snow with any elevation at all and potentially something more wintry for N scotland.

Yes, just 2 op runs but one cannot argue that it has 'gone off on one' now. Maybe gone off on two but not one

P.S Yes.... give up on the nut crunch cornflakes and sub it for eggs  Cereal spikes your sugar/insulin and sets you to crash an hour or two later. Poison!

Notice how the prevalence of purples over Canada is very much diminished here.

Strange for the ECM to go off on one,  but we did see it the other week when it went for a return to mild T96 wrongly.

That run was pretty much an outlier on its ensembles and I'm sure this will have little support post day 6

And if it does have support...? Will you still back the GFS?

Do you honestly need to ask that?

GFS ens pert 4 has got all excited.

http://www.theweatheroutlook.com/twodata/chart.aspx?chart=/charts/gefs/4_294_850tmp.png?cb=746

Er no on two counts.  IIRC "Bartlett high" was christened from Paul's comments on the winter of 1988-89  and is nothing like a single feature such the euro high of Feb 98.  I think it was used to describe the semi permanant belt of high pressure that kept forming and moving from south of Newfoundland, through the mid Atlantic and into southern Europe.  It was not a description of a single high in "the wrong" place for a few days producing mild conditions in the UK.  I think it was more describing the broad features over an entire season thus being something that waxes and waned over short tiem periods. So a Feb 98 high could be an offshoot of a Bartlett, but it is not a Bartlett high!

Or "another trip up the garden path"

I'm afraid all the signals do not indicate a strong ridge can be maintained and enough energy diverted south. Maybe later in the month, but not so soon

UK and ECM very similar .....................there is hope yet

That is correct.

That's pretty much spot on - it's a pattern, not a solitary feature.   I do think you might be 1,000 miles too far north in the origin of the high pressure cells though.

My strong recollection of those winters was of a raging jet coming across north of Scotland and barrelling through Scandinavia with successive high pressure cells moving east and settling over central Europe.  A contributor of many years ago used to forecast the weather based on the SLP over Berne in Switzerland.

Although we all look for the comfort of ensemble support it doesn't mean necessarily that the Op evolution is wrong; all it means is that the evolution is delicately balanced. It's the opposite of when there's very good ensemble support and then the Op and the ensembles all flip together, like when the Greenie high suddenly wasn't in the build up to the recent cold spell.

When two successive Op runs end up with almost identical evolutions then I'm interested.  Nothing conclusive obviously at this range.

I somehow get the feeling that if the roles were reversed and ECM showed a milder outcome and GFS a colder one, Ian would likely go with the ECM in such an instance.

I agree with Beast, this evolution seems too early.

The GFS is very good at handling the Iceland/Greenland area, often picking out northerlies way in FI. Its not on board with this, and for now neither am I

It wasn't in successive op runs over the course of 2-3 days during the first week of January, Ian. Surely even you can't take issue with that fact.

I missed that first time round - it's quite a striking member all round. A long cold easterly fetch with plenty of instability, some epic LP vs HP battles that would probably bury someone in the North and a chilly end with cold air in situ under a ridge of HP, extensive Northern blocking and an absence of the PV.

Just one member of one run but would be lovely if it attracted a few like minded fellows

On the ECM front, colour me stunned

Before I checked that I was convinced this morning's optimistic outcome would be washed away in banal zonality and instead it goes and carbon copies it

Worth raising half an eyebrow but would suspect that things would have to go exactly right to get that evolution and it's much more likely they'd go a bit right and we'd end up with a brief toppling ridge or something

Still, being the straw clutching type at least some of the reason why GFS isn't showing similar is the strength of the Atlantic which GFS often gets carried away with, particularly mid-term. Maybe it'll show something similar on a few runs time if it is currently modelling things with too much oomph

But nodody is suggesitng a protracted cold spell, are they?  ECM shows the real potential for several days of cold weather.  Nothing more, nothing less.  So talk of 'too early' is a classic red herring, IMHO.

Your fondness for GFS might be coloured by your fondness for a certain style of posting, perhaps, but does not reflect the very poor performance of GFS during the last cold spell when it was astonishingly slow to pick up on the obstacles to a raging jetstream blowing away our cold spell.

You could argue that GFS is actually not to good at handling northerlies because it repeatedly waters down the synoptics or drops them altogether.

Found the source discussion that spawned the term Bartlett high.

https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!msg/uk.sci.weather/OWaVXlmYlis/cskUin3H5kAJ

Sorry if it's going a bit OT, but I really wish we had a sticky so people would use the term correctly. Oh the source is quoted as labrador, rather than Newfoundland, so nearly correct!