Abstract
THE period of winter for purposes of the present article may be defined as embracing the six months October to March, although when dividing the year into four seasons, the winter then for meteorological purposes is comprised in the months of December, January and February. Generally speaking, temperature is the most important factor in deciding whether a winter is severe or otherwise, although there are other aspects which render the weather disagreeable. When gales occur with more than ordinary frequence the winter is characterised as stormy, and similarly when rains are heavy and of common occurrence the winter is characterised as wet. Our winters in England vary to so great an extent in their general character that it is not always easy to say with scientific precision whether a winter may or may not be styled as remarkable. It generally happens that when a winter is cold the weather is fairly dry and there are fewer gales than usual, although, on the other hand, the quiet conditions are favourable to fog formation. In a mild winter the weather is usually wet, and storms are of common occurrence, the mild weather being very intimately associated wTith the arrival of cyclonic disturbances from the Atlantic, and as the common track of these storms takes the centres of the disturbances over the northern portion of our area we, in England, for the most part experience the south-westerly and westerly winds which bring us the moist and warm air from off the ocean to the westward of us. For the purposes of comparison the data used refer almost wholly to Greenwich, where the long series of observations made at our national observatory is eminently suitable, and, so far as the weather of a winter is concerned, there is probably no real disadvantage in restricting the area of comparison to one locality, since in a general sense it would be equally applicable to most other parts of England. The coldest winters of recent years are those of 1890-1 and 1894-5, m which there were respectively ten and eleven days with the temperature below 20° F. at Greenwich. In the last sixty years there have only been two other winters with so low a temperature on ten days; these were 1854-5 with twelve such cold days, and 1880-1 with ten days. The greatest number of days with frost during the period of sixty years was eighty in the winter six months of 1887-8, and the winters with seventy or more days of frost were 1844-5, 1846-7, 1854-5, 1874-5, 1878-9, 1879-80, 1885-6, 1886-7, 1887-8 and 1890-1. Using this as a test for the mildness of the winter, the least number of frosty days was nineteen in the winter of 1883-4, there were fewer than thirty-five days with frost in the winters of 1845-6, 1850-1, 1858-9, 1862-3, 1865-6, 1876-7, 1881-2, 1883-4, 1895-6 and 1897-8. In the five out of the six months already elapsed of the present winter there have been twenty-one days with frost, and as yet the screened thermometer has not fallen below 23°.6. The winter (six months) wTith the lowest mean temperature at Greenwich is 1844-5, when the mean was 38°.8, and the winters with the mean below 40° were 1844-5, 1854-5, 1878-9, 1885-6, 1887-8 and 1890-1. The winter with the highest mean temperature was 1898-9, when the mean for the six months was 45°.4, and the mean for each of the six months, with theexception of March, was above the average. The winters with the mean temperature above 44° were 1845-6, 1847-8, 1848-9, 1862-3, 1876-7, 1883-4, 1897-8 and 1898-9. The mean for the five out of the six winter months already elapsed (1902-3) is 44°.6, so that it is most highly probable that the present winter will rank as one of the foremost for its general mildness.
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HARDING, C. Remarkable Winters . Nature 67, 466–467 (1903). https://doi.org/10.1038/067466a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/067466a0