“While the emerging impact of greenhouse gases is an important factor in the changing Arctic, what was not fully recognised until now is that a combination of an unusual warm period due to natural variability, loss of sea ice reflectivity, ocean heat storage and changing wind patterns working together has disrupted the memory and stability of the Arctic climate system, resulting in greater ice loss than earlier climate models predicted,” says Dr Overland.

“The exceptional cold and snowy winter of 2009-2010 in Europe, eastern Asia and eastern North America is connected to unique physical processes in the Arctic,” he says.

This is, of course, terribly reminiscent of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Fifty Degrees Below, one of the books which provoked me to start this website.

Of course, it’s worth bearing in mind that some of the longest spells of lying snow, and some of the deepest snows recorded in the Isles, have fallen in February. The snow that fell in February 1947 lasted more than a month in Ireland.

My own electronic thermometer recorded a low of -4.7°C on Christmas Morning, and it has since hit -4.5°C on the morning of the 2nd of January. It was -2.6°C when we were leaving the house yesterday morning. The Royal Canal has had ice on it pretty consistently since the 23rd of December, and nearly all precipitation has been as snow or ice pellets, with some occasional sleet to liven things up. Mostly, it’s been dry.

The weather forecasts on some services are reading like science fiction (Kim Stanley Robinson, to be precise). Metcheck is predicting -8°C during the morning of Saturday 8th January, and indeed, -10°C on the following Monday morning. These dates are more than three days out, and as such are unreliable, but it’s a fair indicator that it will continue to be cold.

Metcheck also says that there will be snow in my area by tomorrow morning, or at least, tomorrow afternoon. Sometime, anyway.

yr.no, a service less given to histrionics than Metcheck, agrees that there will be snow in Kildare by tomorrow morning. It doesn’t extend to the early days of next week, but predicts a much more likely -4°C for Saturday. It’s hard to remember, somtimes, though, that it’s just using a different model or ensemble of models, and isn’t inherently more reliable - it underestimated the cold on the morning of January 2nd by quite a long shot, for instance.

Neither of the services is predicting much above 3°C for the foreseeable future, though. For a country where that’s the average minimum for January, that’s quite notable.

Some of the weather discussion boards are hoping for snow in Ireland during this period. Much as I’d like to agree, I don’t think we’ll see snow this side of January, but we’ll certainly see some hard frosts. Weather should remain fairly clear in and around these temperatures, so ice on roads shouldn’t be a major problem - but frost itself can be dangerous enough, so be careful with travel for Christmas.

And Met Éireann, although they don’t use the word frost, are saying temperatures might drop to 4C, which is just about low enough. Time to get the tomatoes in, I reckon…