No let-up from cold as winter gathers pace

THE time has come, I fear, to face the fact that autumn is fading and we are in winter mode. The signs are there: the first ice on the car windscreen in the morning, piles of wet leaves on the pavement to send you flying and adverts for special snow tyres. More tellingly, its getting pretty cold – just 19.9F (-7C) overnight in Oxfordshire this past week.

We have been caught for some time now in the path of a slow-moving easterly drift of winds, rain and cloud which has been chilling those on the east coast in particular to the bone. And there is no let-up today. If anything it will be a notch or two colder than yesterday.

What is driving the mercury down in our thermometers is high pressure coming down over the UK from the North. So first to feel the pinch is Scotland, with 44F (7C) in Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Glasgow, rising slowly to 46F (8C) in Hull, 48F (9C) in Norwich and a hardly toasty 50F (10C) in London.

At least the rain that plagued southern England yesterday will mostly be gone. And it is worth remembering that these temperatures are close to the seasonal norms, against the wider picture just released by the World Meteorological Organisation of greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere at record highs.

For the start of the working week, it is more of the same. Expect little sun and plenty of cloud. You seem hardly to have finished lunch and you are turning on the lights, but as Tuesday passes into Wednesday change is afoot, with an Atlantic low pushing in from the west. The immediate effect is hardly to be cheered – more rain – but as that low is replaced by others, the direction of travel shifts southwesterly. That means mild air sucked up from way down south near the Azores, so that by the end of the week, even if our trees are bare, we can still fool ourselves it is autumn.