Atmospheric circulation patterns associated with extreme cold winters in the UK

• Published in: Weather
• Main Authors: Burgess, Madlen L., Klingaman, Nicholas P.
• Language: unknown
• Published: 2022
• Subjects: 54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES; Arctic; North Atlantic; North Atlantic oscillation
• Online Access: http://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1565274; https://www.osti.gov/biblio/1565274; https://doi.org/10.1002/wea.2476

Extremely cold winters have been reported in the UK since records began, yet the exceptional temperatures during the winters of 2009/2010 and 2010/2011 greatly increased interest in this topic. With a mean temperature of –0.7 °C, December 2010 was the second coldest December in the Central England Temperature record (CET; Parker et al., 1992) which dates to 1659, rivalling only December 1890 (–0.8 °C). Previous research into the causes of such cold events has found associations with the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), Arctic Oscillation (AO), the East Atlantic Pattern (EA), the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), blocking events and solar activity, as discussed below. Many of these studies have been limited to the past 60–70 years due to a lack of four-dimensional reconstructions of atmospheric conditions (i.e. reanalysis data). Our research uses the recently available Twentieth Century Reanalysis (Compo et al., 2011) to provide the first reliable estimates of the state of the atmosphere during some of the coldest winters of the past 140 years, most of which have fallen outside the scope of past studies.