The last week or so has been agony for model watching coldies wishing for a snowy end to winter.

Solutions have often flip-flopped between a mild and cold outlook. Even this morning at 6 days out the GFS and ECM model temperature outcomes differed by some 20C, a choice between spring and deepest winter!

Sometimes you have to try and second guess what is going to happen by looking at previous patterns from years past.

Yesterday at Philip Eden‘s funeral I spoke to Woodford Green resident Ron Button. He pointed out how much this February reminded him of February 1962, a month that was non-descript for the first three weeks before turning very cold and snowy. Ron, who has kept a meticulous record of the weather ever since his interest was prompted by the severe winter of 1947, produced diaries of 1962 when he was living in Stratford. The entry for 26th / 27th read: “4 inches of snow with drifting”!

The March that followed was the coldest of the 20th century, ranking 10th in my list back to 1797, and 0.3C colder than March 2013. The fact that the monthly sunshine in 1962 was only slightly below average is testament to how cold the source of the air must have been. March 2013 was very dull by comparison!

An entry in London-weather.eu reads that March was colder than any of the previous 3 winter months: “The first three weeks were mostly mild and dry. It was often breezy which resulted in fewer than average night frosts. Frontal systems off the Atlantic passed through the London area, most of them weak though on the 12th, nearly 8mm of rain fell with southwesterly winds gusting to 57 knots. During the last week of the month, it became much colder, and on the 26th snow fell with the temperature not rising above -0.3C all day.”

There was no stratospheric sudden warming that winter and ENSO was neutral.

The winter of 1961/62 ranks only 14th in my list of worst winters, mostly because the core of the cold happened in March which is considered spring in meteorological circles

The Snow Survey of Great Britain also makes interesting reading with these entries for February and March.