Valentines Day 2021 saw the cold spell come to an end in the London area. Maxima over the past 7 days never exceeded 2.3C on any day, the yardstick I use for a spell of cold weather to qualify.
Though some places did get a decent amount of snow precipitation in this area was very low ; lying snow at 9am at this station never exceeded 3cm. Very cold, dry air however was enough to preserve cover out of the sun.
As cold spells go it was two days longer than the median of 5 days, so slighter colder and drier but with double the amount of sunshine.
A couple of years ago I tried to rank cold spells in this area since 1960, with mixed results. I’ve since revisited the method and have achieved better results using the following algorithm.
(Number of days * total precipitation)*(mean temperature of spell)-(total sun hours). This gave the following list.
And the next 26 cold spells
There’s been many images that define this spell but this post probably nails it in that I’ve never seen the ice thick enough on the marshes to tempt someone to ice skate.
Wanstead Meteo 