Not the best of pics but I captured this over the Cairngorms yesterday on my drive up to Invergordon (half hour north of Inverness). Nice to see the snow again!

Arctic Oscillation At It’s Lowest October Value Since 2002

Interestingly the Arctic Oscillation is now down to -4, the lowest value for October since an all-time record (for Oct) of -5.09 was achieved back in 2002.

Great graphic by Ralph Fato.

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Could this be an indicator? I believe so given that the trend is NEGATIVE and so there’s no reason to think this won’t happen once we get into the winter season. This during winter favours sudden stratospheric warming events which deliver our true cold blasts.

NAO is also pretty negative.

Here’s for me, the important thing… the trend and it’s a negative one!

Upcoming 5 Days

As for the next 3-5 days, low pressure trundles it’s way slowly over the UK bringing a largely ‘sunshine and shower’ regime. Some may see heavy downpours with the odd rumble of thunder but this low, while fairly unimpressive moves slowly thanks to ridging on all sides. Expect a chill, even frost where skies remain clear overnight.

Medium to Long Range

Well, well well. Looks like the deterministic and operational has lost sight of the big blocking positive and positive NAO towards the second half of October. An unsurprising flip back. I think the index will try to come up, perhaps only reaching neutral before falling back negative which holds more low pressure in the means over the UK and western continent.

GFS has flipped in the day 8-16 from yesterday which had opposite of now.

ECMWF (day 3-10) holds with more positive.

What do you believe? Given the depth of negative at the moment, I think there’s a delay in the recovery back to positive and therefore a cooler, unsettled theme may linger.

CFSv2 however sways more towards the ECMWF with a turn to positive NAO week 3 and 4. IT SHOULD GO BACK POSITIVE probably late October or early November for a time before flipping back once again. In my opinion, if that does happen we may want to watch that next drop into negative as it may bring winter our way!

See video…

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