Could Britain's Big Freeze happen again?

It is the 50th anniversary of Britain's coldest winter this Century. "Could we expect another one like it?" asks science journalist Tatiana Moreno.

Although it is unlikely, it is not “out of the question” that the British Isles will end up with another winter as cold as the one in 1963 as the weather is getting more extreme, according to Dr Stephen Burt of the Royal Meteorological Society. 

At a recent  talk on ‘The bitter winter of 1962/63 in the British Isles’, Dr Burt explained which meteorological conditions led to the rare, long and cold months of the Big Freeze.

“The normally easterly flow from the continent brought very cold air that had been sitting in a big anticyclone, essentially getting colder and colder due to radiation cooling. That flow moved over to the British Isles. The atmosphere stayed more or less the same for a couple of months, which is quite unusual”.

Burt explained that it remained cold for such a long period of time because the normal mild westerly winds of the Atlantic did not make any progress and there was no circulation to move the cold winds away.

When asked if these extreme weather events are related to climate change he replied that “climate changes are producing different extremes, so it may be that weather is getting more extreme’.

He concluded that it is not likely that this kind of weather event could happen again “but whether it is in five years or five hundred years, it is not out of the question that we could end up with another winter as cold as the one in 1963”.

The winter of 1962 and 1963 is supposed to be the third coldest winter in Britain’s records, only beaten by the winters of 1683/84 and 1739/40. 

The big freeze started a few days before Christmas Day of 1962. The cold weather persisted for three months, until the second week of March. Drifts reached 20 feet in some places and temperatures were down to  –19.4C, in the Scottish border.

Dr Burt’s talk was part of a Royal Meteorological Society meeting on “The long-range forecasting problem: mythology, science and progress”, held in collaboration with the Grantham Institute, at Imperial College London on 16 March.

The meeting also hosted an exhibition of photographs, weather reports and newspaper cuttings from the severe winter of 1962/63.

--

The author, Tatiana Moreno, is a science journalism Masters student from the University of Lincoln on placement at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London.