How to Survive Winter

The Guardian are providing really good coverage of weather- (and therefore winter-) related matters this year. The latest is a brief note on why the UK can’t cope with cold.

Here’s an interesting quote:

Too many people go outdoors in the cold without a thick hat, coat, gloves or boots. Even standing in queues waiting for buses and trains, the average Briton stands stock still instead of moving around. Homes are often poorly insulated and badly heated. In a survey of 14 European countries, Britain had one of the worst rates of cold-related deaths. Even the Netherlands, which has a similar climate to England, has around half our winter death rate. The difference is that these countries have better insulated homes, and people dress in much warmer clothes.

Now, you can lump Ireland in there. We’re possibly even worse, to be honest. I commute at pretty regular times, so I see a good few of the same people on the trains. Monday morning of this week, I saw a woman getting off the train in the city, and emerging onto the footpath, shivering. She was shivering because she was wearing a knee-length skirt and a light jacket, had no hat, scarf or gloves, and further, no tights above what looked like slippers. Fair enough, maybe she wasn’t expecting that kind of weather – I’ve some sympathy for that. However, when I saw her on Tuesday morning again, with different clothes in the same general shape, shivering again in temperatures around 3°C with some wind chill, I lost the sympathy.

But that’s an extreme. You do see plenty of people who have decent coats and footwear, for instance. But even then, they’re often lacking a scarf or gloves, and it seems like about three-quarters of the population just won’t wear a hat of any kind, until there’s actually snow on the ground. This boggles me. You can get a woolly hat, a fleece scarf and some cheap gloves for under ten euro, and it’ll make a vast amount of difference. There’s nothing undignified about it!

Two more predictions for very cold winter weather have come to light. Neither has much of a record of accurate predictions that I’m aware of, but each one presents at least some reasoning for their forecasts.

The first is from Christopher Nankervis, who writes for weatherlogistics.com. His forecast for the UK gives a good bit of reasoning (including a 14-to-21-day teleconnection with the US East Coast weather, which I’ve observed myself), and this chunk of prediction:

A deep cold snap over the East coast of the US points toward an abrupt and intense Arctic-type weather scenario in the UK in 14 to 21 days time. This deep freeze may see temperatures plummet, with significant widespread snowfall and perhaps blizzard across Britain during mid-December 2011.

Meantime, Harry Kershaw, described in the Manchester Evening News as an “amateur weatherman” who bases his predictions on matching patterns with historical weather, is reported thus:

he fears this winter could be as cold as that of 1812-13

The article goes on to quote information about Moscow and Napoleon’s retreat in that winter. Now, if Mr. Kershaw is matching patterns, he’ll also need to match the geography, so quoting Russian winters in comparison seems to miss the point. There are very few direct quotes, though, so I suspect the Manchester Evening News has boosted the signal a little. Oddly, in this part of the world, 1812-13 doesn’t seem to have been all that terrible, although there was a foot of snow in March in Edinburgh. On the other hand, the Thames froze over in 1811, and again in 1813-1814 – which was one of the most severe winters on record.

So if Kershaw’s pattern-matching theory is correct, this coming winter should be chilly but manageable, and then 2012-2013 should be extremely cold. There are more predictions for cold this winter than otherwise, so we’ll see.

Are we going to get some proper winter weather before the end of the year? There’s no knowing what December will bring, but predictions out to the end of November are looking for things to remain fairly mild, if getting a bit more unsettled as the days go by.

The Guardian has two articles which are relevant and interesting; one about the weather in October, which was unusually warm across the UK, and one about the same in November, which is set to be the mildest in 300 years (and therefore the mildest on record), unless something changes drastically. Temperatures above 15°C have happened in a few places in Ireland, which is downright strange.

It is, of course, still autumn in meteorological terms; December, January and February are the real winter months, and while it’s mild now, that really has little enough bearing on the weather through the rest of the season. Peter O’Donnell’s forecast has January as the coldest one, which is much more in line with the “traditional” British Isles winter. I do feel like I’m about ready for some colder weather.