This blog post is on the third analogue that I have made for Winter 2018-19 and it is on the theme of solar activity continuing on from Autumn 2018's most recent analogue which had the same theme of Autumns during or just before Solar Minimum. This is the same with Winters in this analogue and basically is the Winters that followed on from them Autumns in the previous analogue. The 500mb height reanalysis of these Winters shows a blocking area of above average heights over Greenland, Iceland and into Scandinavia with a very deep low over Iberia forcing the winds to come in from an easterly direction over the British Isles. Easterlies in Winter can be bone chillingly cold and create very heavy lake effect snow if the sea surface temperature anomalies are well above average. This is a very snowy and cold reanalysis indeed!
Just like the previous analogue on Autumn 2018, I have taken the liberty into making the following table of Central England Temperatures for the Winters in the analogue. The brighter the red, the warmer the anomaly. The darker the blue, the colder the anomaly. The diff. row is of the anomaly of the mean temperature all of these Winters combined against the 1981-2010 averages. There are a good few cold and snowy Winters in there but of course as always, there are exceptions. The most notable exception is Winter 1922-23 where each of the Winter months were well above average in terms of temperature resulting in up to 2017-18, the 25th warmest Winter on record for the CET. In contrast, Winter 1878-79 was bitterly cold and snowy with it being one of the coldest Winters ever recorded.
