COOL BRITANNIA!
Horses feel chill as winter bites
FOR those who revel in the chilly delights of a proper winter, scenes such as this have been all too rare this year.
Yesterday, however, many woke to their first icy dawn of the season, with fields, trees and shrubs covered with frost and blankets of fog.
But forecasters don’t expect the conditions to last and 2020 seems set to continue where 2019 left off – with average or mild temperatures and plenty of rain.
Monday night’s cold snap saw the mercury plunge to minus 5.3C (22.5F) in Benson, Oxfordshire, and Pershore, Worcestershire. But elsewhere the ‘topsy-turvy’ conditions meant temperatures in Aviemore in the Scottish Highlands fell no lower than 7.3C (45.1F).
Yesterday’s frost was particularly heavy across southern England, and early risers were treated to wonderful winter scenes. But forecasters are not predicting any significant snow fall in the next few weeks.
Colder air from Canada should blow in next week and that could result in ‘wintry showers across the northern half of the country with some snow on the hills’, said Paul Knightley, senior forecaster with DTN Weather (formerly MeteoGroup).
‘But we don’t really see any indication that there’s likely to be any really cold weather,’ he added. An indicator of how rare these hard frosts have been this year is that the average temperature in central England so far this January has been 2.5C (4.5F) above the 30-year average.
It follows a 2019 that the Met Office said was ‘warmer, wetter and sunnier’ than average.
According to provisional UK figures it was the 11th warmest year on record with a mean temperature of 9.4C (48.9F).
That is just outside the top ten warmest years, which have all occurred since 2002.