England was colder than the North Pole in winter yesterday!

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In true Mylot style I’m here to tell you it’s snowing in England! We don’t get a lot of it in the southern half of the country where I live but we are in the grips of a rare and sustained Arctic blast from the East and snow is falling every day. It started on Monday and Tuesday when it was snowy rather than snowing and not much accumulation but some areas of England have got quite a dump in the snow hit and miss approach. But today we got some chunkier showers and the ground much whiter with more big showers to come. This is more like winter in North America where the day time temperature doesn’t get above freezing so any laying snow isn’t going anywhere. It’s that powdery snow that doesn’t crunch or squelch under foot and blows around like sand. The very gold air is sweeping over Russian and then Northern Europe as the tops of the Norwegian mountains and the North Sea introduce moisture and so the clouds and showers stacking up like B17 raids over Germany. This unusual weather is due to a rare and somewhat worrying phenomenal where an unseasonably warm bubble of air has parked itself over the North Pole and pushed down the cold weather over northern Europe like pouring brandy sauce on a Christmas pudding. Normally for England we only get snow when moist air from the west hits a cold high pressure over the country but this thing is just rushing icy wind in from the east all week and so any cloud coming with it is dumping snow. Again that is not normal for us. Current Arctic temperatures near the current North Pole are an unprecedented 20 degrees warmer than they should be, above freezing yesterday -20 where it should be, and that is in perpetual Polar night when it should be incredibly cold. Is that the future, we wonder, as global warming continues to cause mayhem. It also happened two years ago.