It's that time of year again when we look for stratospheric warming events (SSW's). These occur at the top layers of the atmosphere, at 100,000ft+ (the chart below is for 10mb). When warming occurs the layer expands, and because it can't go upwards it has the effect of pushing down on the

We are already looking beyond Christmas on the ECMWF 46-day models. And wow the confidence in the forecast beyond next week is low. I've tried to take a middle road on the forecast below, but bear in mind there are some signals which give a significantly more wintry appearance than I've shown

So this is a tricky one, but I'm pretty relaxed about it! You may remember that in the December Month Ahead forecast we spoke about how the middle stages of December showed signs of turning colder. In Monday's Look Ahead I showed how the GFS ensemble and the CFS were building a