Good news: the hours of daylight are growing longer and will become more noticeable in the weeks leading up to the spring equinox in March. This is an astronomical feature, but a reminder that spring is on the way.
The rest of winter in the UK may feel the influence of tropical seas in the Pacific, currently in the throes of La Niña, when a vast upwelling of cooler waters spreads out across the equatorial region. This is the third bout of La Niña over the past three years, which is rare, and this current event is predicted to carry on through winter into early spring.
For the UK and much of Europe this could be good news, bringing a milder but wet and windy late winter and early spring.
Another benefit of La Niña is that its vast swathe of cooler seas helps to restrain rising global temperatures, although it is only temporary before the Pacific returns to normal later in the spring. And so the Met Office is predicting global temperatures in 2023 will be among the warmest on record as climate change continues relentlessly, but unlikely to be record-breaking.
Other events thousands of miles away could also influence our winter weather. Winds racing around the stratosphere over the tropics and a strong polar vortex in the stratosphere over the Arctic could both help to drive mild and wet westerly winds over the UK. But a band of thunderstorms travelling around the equator may reach the Pacific this month and could drive spells of colder weather our way.
Advertisement
How can events thousands of miles away in the Pacific affect the UK’s weather? Global weather patterns are interconnected in some surprising ways, a phenomenon called teleconnections.
Many of these linkages are driven by huge waves in the atmosphere spanning the globe called Rossby waves, which travel north and south through the atmosphere and help to create low and high-pressure systems around the world, with huge impacts on temperature, rainfall and other aspects of the weather.
