Winter 2011-2012 Summary

It's been a while since my last blog and I have decided to do monthly summaries so its easier to compare month for month in future years.
To supplement this I will also issue 'season summaries' so I thought I would start with the winter just gone.
December always brings the most anticipation if you like the prospect of a picture post card Christmas, little children with rosy red faces peering into brightly lit shop windows being briskly pulled away by mothers with fur collars and long scarves laden with bags of shopping, tree lined avenues, branches heavy with snow, lead laden skies that threaten more, and the prospect of arriving home to a roaring fire and a hot mug of soup...
The reality of December 2011 was far different from the picture that I have just described and completely different to the previous year that delivered the coldest start to winter for one hundred years.
There were many weather 'agencies' and hopeful amateurs that predicted 'snow-maggeddon' and although I was broadly accurate with my December forecast, I, like many others, were caught out by just how mild December turned out to be, the mean temperature for the month was 6.6C much warmer than 2010's 0.4C and the second warmest in Hawley since I started keeping records in 2005. ( for information, Dec 2006 was the warmest @ 7.2C) and of course no white Christmas!

So did things improve in January? with a mean of 6.0C it was colder than 2007 & 2008 (7.8C and 7.5C respectively) but again was a mild month overall, five nights mid-month recorded temparatures of -3.4 - 5.9 and that was really the highlights of January.
I predicted February would be the coldest month and indeed it delivered a reasonable snowfall, but it really was a month of two halves. For the first two weeks it looked like that the mean for the month would be below zero, but from mid-month onwards there was a dramatic change with un-seaonally warm temperatures that persisted until month end. Interesting stats: Lowest Temp, -10.3 Highest Temp: 19.8 and the mean ended up 4.3 ( second coldest since 2005)

So there it is, a rather boring winter and actually fairly typical of our winters of the last twenty years, the really cold weather never reached us and stayed in eastern Europe that in some places had the harshest winter for many, many years.