I think the strongest influence has been the near record strong El Nino  which encourages a strong NAO + circulation ie mild cand windy.

Not sure what the cold SST,s do but suspect they add to rather than subtract from the generation of Atlantic LP's

Some very unusually warm and dry weather toward the end of the month!! Winds coming all the way up from N. Africa and Spain. It's a long way off but I just hope that we get gfs charts like this in the summertime:

http://theconversation.com/weird-weather-blame-the-north-atlantic-53271

Here is an excellent article about the cold blob in the North Atlantic

These are the things I think are most important:

• Warm SSTs off the US coast and cold SSTs to the south of Greenland, conductive to cold air pouring out of the USA.


• These have been record breaking in magnitude so some other variable will have to be extremely strong to overcome it.

Hopefully we can see the back of this cold blob and not see another cool westerly based Summer. SSTs have consistently been at very cool / record breakingly cool since January 2014.

However I emphasize that this is speculation... but there is something strange going on in the Atlantic and we seem to be seeing more extreme persistant NAO values. 

According to the Gibraltar-Reykjavik NAO index there will probably be 3 winters in a row with an NAO index above +2.0

Mods feel free to move if off topic but those are my interpretations.

That's an excellent piece.  I will start a new thread in the Climate Forum, as the contents are highly relevant to the discussions that take place there.

That cold anomaly in the north Atlantic has been the subject of discussion in the Climate Forum. As the article says, it stands out starkly against the backdrop of record warmth globally.

That's the confusion - one would have thought that a colder than average SST would mean less powerful named storms - colder air holds less moisture!?? - ALl a bit confusing - so is this due to the sheer strength of the El Nino.

Storms are the result of imbalances in the atmosphere; it's temperature contrast that matters.  There has been some discussion of the possible impact of the cold pool. My view is that the very strong El Niño has been far and away the dominant driver: there's a lot of warmth being transferred to the atmosphere in the Pacific and driving the behaviour of the jet stream.

Agreed the midweek snow has reduced significantly in likely hood this morning. But Sunday night Monday morning looks a lot more promising. It's coming with in the hi res models now. NE England looks like the sweet spot at this stage could be good.

http://www.weatheronline.co.uk/cgi-bin/expertcharts?LANG=en&MENU=0000000000&CONT=ukuk&MODELL=euro4&MODELLTYP=1&VAR=prty&HH=48&BASE=-&WMO=&ZOOM=0

GFS takes us into an early spring next weekend. 14c quite widely you wouldn't rule out somewhere hitting 16c!

http://www.meteociel.fr/modeles/gfs/royaume-uni/temperatures-maximales/186h.htm

Was on the high side of the run though

Snow on leading edge for a time on Wednesday

A couple of hundred miles is a big leading edge!

I didnt want to big it up Michael

 GEFS shows Negative 850 continuing out to the end of next week.And as above shows still plenty of negative members out into FI.However most likely outcome  for the rest of February is the rather cold nothingness as per METO forecast.

The 850 values become less relevant wrt daytime maxes assuming some sunshine as we move out of winter. The suns influence increases markedly in February. In most situations you would need 850's of at least negative 5'c to get anything wintry at ground level away from high ground so once we're through this week it may not be that cold

When can we expect the effects of SSW to appear in the model output?

I suspect they have been modelled all along? The warming in the stratosphere seems to have been especially well modelled although technically (and this was always the forecast on the Berlin site) it doesn't meet the full SSW criteria as the 10hPa zonal wind flow did not reverse - although it was close.

The global pattern will no doubt have changed as a result. As for the UK - that was and still is a long shot and uncertain/unpredictable link.

However it certainly isn't "off" and one could argue that it was never on, if it was, it happened as predicted.

http://www.geo.fu-berlin.de/en/met/ag/strat/produkte/winterdiagnostics/index.html 

Edit: Looking into it further I'm not sure if this would suggest it did sneak into the category? http://users.met.fu-berlin.de/~Aktuell/strat-www/wdiag/figs/ecmwf1/ecmwfzm_u_a12.gif