An interesting year so far but has it got a surprise in store?

2013 so far has been a very interesting year from a weather perspective, a very cold spring (one of the coldest since records began) was followed by a warm dry summer with a heatwave in July lasting three weeks, most unusual in the modern era UK climate.

And As I write this three quarters of the way through the first Autumn month, I was compelled to do so because so far this autumn I have not needed to wear a coat for walking the dog , unless it was to keep me dry, indeed I have not even needed to wear a jumper and the way this month is going it could be a record breaking warm month.

The CET for Oct 1-19th is 12.9 deg C which is + 1.5 deg C more than the average, when checking back on my own records Hawley's mean is currently  12.7 deg C,  +2 deg C  on 2012 and as the forecast suggests wet and very mild until the end of the month I will likely break my own record.

So whats my view on winter 2013/14?

grass is loving the warmth and the wet, not much colour
 on the trees either.

I have been trawling daily through the various global forecasting models and I can see no clear signal or trends to suggest a colder or milder than average winter for the UK, It would   be easy to get sucked into the hype and the sensationalist Daily Express headlines predicting a long hard freeze but the truth is there is simply no scientific facts to back up those claims.

Given the extremes of this year mentioned above my own view is that within the three month winter period the UK could see two or three weeks of extreme winter weather, similar to December 2010 but when? I have no idea and that is just the way it should be.