I've just seen Gavin P.'s winter forecast and it is true that with his swingometer feature for that which had been doing throughout his winter updates, that had come out 50/50 for cold/mild.

If you had watched that video all the way through to its end though, you will have seen that he has actually gone for a slightly colder than average winter overall with around average rainfall.

That leaves our own Brian as the odd one out here with his milder forecast, but this just shows that everyone has their way of doing things, and will always have their own different views on that which they are perfectly entitled to have.

Let's just hope though, that those who went for a colder winter end up being right in the end.
 

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The WAI is absolutely remarkable at the moment. The top 10 for the current week has in it:

2009, 2017, 1981, 1978 and 2010.

https://www.theweatheroutlook.com/premium/weather-analogues.aspx?dt=week1 

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Looks like it's safe to say that the first half of December is now a write-off (a sixth of the winter gone by then), so that leaves the run up to Christmas as the next period of interest.

There are two crude proxies I use for the next 15 days, and they are the number of GEFS members below -10C at 850 for London, and the number of EPS members showing ice days for my location - again, over 15 days.

Last week we hit a point where there were around a fifth of GEFS going below -10, and around a tenth showing ice days here - that, plus the general synoptic setup, looked promising for a time (having a lack of a deep polar vortex over North America is always helpful). Sadly (for coldies like me) that's all bled away, and we're now left a slightly cooler version of the usual zonal sinewaves for the foreseeable future.

I've never fully bought into the massive teleconnection following that's popular on the other side, as my experience is that though things like the MJO can give things a shove in the right direction, equally well we're so far away that smaller local effects can seemingly override it without too much of a problem. It's worth noting that the MJO will be in a more favourable position in another 10 days or so, and hopefully there'll be another opportunity to see some nice charts at least!

For now, though, I'd imagine our forum will be pretty quiet, as weather wise things get back to normal for a while.


 

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There is much colder than normal cold pool over Scandinavia.
This could potentially cause the jet stream to buckle and move well south of UK in Jan or Feb, bringing a really severe Artic plunge. Potentially (although not as intense) rerun of 1985.

The colder temperatures can easily be seen by comparing Baltic Sea temperatures with their norms

https://www.smhi.se/oceanografi/istjanst/produkter/sstcolor.pdf 
 

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I always believe UK can get 1985 winter type set up every year if the nasty SW height does not exist at all.  The main problem is the height to the SW are not normal to be around permanent position all year round that destroying our summer and winter seasons.  It just send lows to get stuck over UK most of summer season then by winter is preventing lows from passing SE to Europe.  I am sure we not the only one that hate this? Ski resorts hate them as well.