Not according to the Iceland metoffice it wasn't.. and there us nothing on Iceland volcano forums to suggest it has been either in recent months. Your source is complete nonsense - unless your making up stuff?

Er, sourced from the Iceland Met Office... albeit this was from the summer I notice and changed back quite quickly.  The point is that there is volcanic activity that can affect weather, perhaps too soon for this winter.

http://en.vedur.is/about-imo/news/the-flood-in-mulakvisl-has-subsided

 You might simply have asked for my source, rather than suggesting I'm making it up?

Latest on Siberian snow cover - looks like it is cooling down and snow cover is starting to progress. That said it's only end of September and it could retreat or melt in October but so far this isn't bad for snowfall and even if any melting did occur it would be brief before it re-freezes - some early snowfall for part's of Siberia!?

http://www.natice.noaa.gov/pub/ims/ims_gif/DATA/cursnow_asiaeurope.gif

What do you think? Look forward to Gav's Weather video Fourth Winter update tomorrow. No doubt Siberian snow cover will be mentioned.

A rather unnecessary accusation. Perhaps if you had checked th facts yourself before accusing people of nonsense you would see that Katla’s status was briefly upgraded to yellow due to heightened activity at the end of July. This is not evident on the IMO site currently as it is not a current issue. I watched the developments closely at the time.

http://en.vedur.is/about-imo/news/the-flood-in-mulakvisl-has-subsided 

Tally

IMO snow cover means nothing for the UK . Seen past years with good cover in October , needs about 80 other factors to hit the jackpot for us to benefit 

I did check the facts hence my post. Nothing in my post suggested otherwise. Now if he was referring to a past colour change he should have said as his post gave the impression he was referring to current - he mentions it with the current Bali volcanoe in the same sentence! 

Yes play decently otherwise your account will be deleted. 

Yes I get that but not bad for them. If we were to get an easterly in November and December then it would mean a greater chance of colder air coming our way because that's where the air will be coming from?

That's certainly how it seems if you listen to the pages of over complication that are often seen on Net Weather in the winter months. One wonders how we ever got those spells in the eighties if such a complex array of factors have to come together. The classic last year was that Northern blocking wasn't happening because a storm in the Indian Ocean hadn't moved quite as quickly as had been expected. 

I think we did see a departure from what had become a relentless pattern around the turn of the decade, this IMO was related to solar factors more so than anything else. Since then the 'new normal service' has been resumed. Certainly in around 2004 people were discussing whether a winter easterly would ever occur again and as Darren (Retron) laments, we simply don't see those synoptics anymore in the winter months. And of course northerlies are scarcer too, and often short lived marginal affairs when compared with the punch they used to pack.

The bottom line is that Northern blocking is much less likely now in winter than it was prior to 1988 - that is a clear quantifying statement and the numbers bear that out in terms of CET returns. I'm not suggesting that the European winter is a thing of the past - indeed South East Europe will continue to benefit from above average cold spells when compared with previous long term averages. 

The thing is Ian, a decade ago you were trying to tell us that winter northern blocking was pretty well extinct. At least that is what I interpreted from your remarks at the time.

Now you are saying it is "much less likely", so it looks to me as though you have moved the goalposts to some extent.

Good point, SC.

Not sure about that Ian. Didn't January 2013 see an easterly spell towards the end of the month, albeit one that didn't produce severe cold?

I don't regard that as a proper easterly.

It was caused by an Azores ridge arcing up to the north, then moving down over eastern Europe via Norway (for a day or two). Another ridge from the Azores High then moved NE'wards, but after a day or two the new high collapsed as the jet roared away on a SW -> NE path.

The easterlies that stopped in the 90s typically built via a westwards extension of the Siberian High, rather than a northeastwards expansion of the Azores High. The latter seems to collapse far more readily and due to its origins rarely picks up any deep cold air. They're the sort of thing where we see the models initially buckling the jet, but invariably nearer the time the jet is either stronger, or subject to fewer pertubations that were modelled.

There's more to it though than just the lack of favourable synoptics. December hasn't changed a great deal, but the warming in January and February (at least at Manston!) is huge. This table shows the mean temperatures at Manston for the past few decades.

As mentioned in my "death of the midwinter easterly" thread, it seems beyond coincidence that as the AMO flipped to its warmer phase, so too our winters have warmed. There's background warming going on, but it seems to have been amplified by the AMO. I'll be very interested to see what happens in another 10 years or so as the AMO finally flips back negative. At the very least, I'd expect to see at least once proper deep cold easterly with icicles and the rest in the 2020s.

That statistic is incredible. I need to keep up with the rate of warming because locally I still use 4.5 c as the mean in January and February.

The dip in the average February temperature in the 80's were as a consequence of mid winter easterlies. 1983,1985, 1986.

It illustrates the sorry story very well.

I've updated the table (for Manston) with all the available data, going back to the 30s. The 50s, it should be noted, had hardly any data so take those values with a pinch of salt! It seems the recent winter warmth is unprecedented in our lifetimes.

EDIT: Source data is from here: https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/pub/data/weather/uk/climate/stationdata/manstondata.txt

The December 11-16 values (no 17 yet, of course) are skewed heavily by the astonishing December of 2015. The monthly mean at Manston was 10.5C, which is warmer than some Octobers and Mays!

2010 is a sore point around here - yes, it was cold but that was largely due to calm winds, clear nights and a little snowcover, rather than the advection of deep cold. The 850s did fall as low as -10C or -11C for approximately 60 hours at the start of the month, but thereafter they struggled to reach -5C, let alone -10C. A deep cold easterly, of the sort we don't seem to get any more, would deliver negative teens - and it's these, in conjunction with strong winds coming off the sea, which gave the infamous "lake effect" snow down here.

It's all about getting deep cold uppers for as long as possible so as to create instability. Annoyingly in 2010 they remained just out of reach to the east, with just the merest hint here. Further inland it was a different story, but here near the coast it's nigh on impossible to get the sort of winters I remember as a child without having some seriously cold air aloft.

Feb 2005 is the closest we've come to it, but it was just that little bit too late. Here there were 14 days of sopping wet snowfall, with lots of convection off the North Sea due to 850s of -14C - but even that couldn't deliver ice days. Two weeks earlier, mind you, it'd have been a different story!

Here's the chart for the 28th Feb 2005.

http://old.wetterzentrale.de/pics/archive/ra/2005/Rrea00220050228.gif

This was a very snowy day here, far more so than anything 2010 had to offer. Outside of coastal Kent, though, you'd be forgiven for wondering what the fuss was all about!

Here's the AMO plot since 1856:

Source: Wiki

At a glance the correlation with winter temperatures in the UK looks to be either non-existent or weak, but I will be happy to stand corrected on this.

Here's another chart (sources: MetOffice, NOAA and Tutiempo)

It shows CET, AMO, plus the number of ice days and days with sleet or snow falling at Manston. I've also added days of just snow falling - as you can see, the majority of "snow falling" days are actually just sleet. Click for a bigger version.

My conclusions:

• The 80s really were special!


• Ice days have been much less frequent since the switch away from a negative AMO


• The amount of "pure snowfall" days has fallen, but not as much as the number of ice days


• Everything's become just that bit more marginal down here

The marginality is key. It really is a rare thing to get days on end of snow, but when it happens it used to linger for a while (which markedly increased the chance of ice days, once the cold air aloft had moved away). With more marginality, what little does fall gets washed away or simply melts that much faster. Snow depths here have become much less since the 90s - if you counted snow depth days (simply adding the snow depth at 9am, in centimetres, each day there's a cover) you'd find a startling drop since 1997. Again, 2005 is an exception here as it did manage a slushy covering for several days in a row.

The snow:sleet ratio for the decades from the above data is as follows - a higher percentage means more snow dayes versus sleet days:

72-80: 17:81 (17%)

81-90: 38:86 (31%)

91-00: 11:52 (17%)

01-10: 19:53 (26%)

11-16: 6:33 (15%)

As can be seen, again the 80s come out as special. The 90s don't, which is interesting as that decade had plenty of ice days and was the last time we had icicles here and deep powder snow. The 00s (whatever you want to call them) have a high ratio too, but this isn't due to 2010 (which only had 3 "pure snow" days), no, it's 2008 which had a large number of "pure snow" days - at 6, it contributed a third of the decade's total. Despite all that snow, there were no ice days - a key difference to earlier decades, as it meant the snow that fell thawed every day.

Phew. What turned out as a simple exercise turned into a marathon, but yet again it shows our winters down here have changed in the last 20 years. I'd be interested to see figures from our friends further north and further inland!

Interesting chart I saw on Twitter: trend in 300mb heights from 1950 to now in the winter months. Tells the picture well as regards the decline of the NW Europe winter.