Question re North America arctic blast creeping east

Significant cold usually comes to Ireland from the other direction, with the width of the Atlantic requiring 3-4 days if not longer for cold North American air masses to cross the ocean, only a modified cold can be expected from any that make it all the way without further modifications from storm development.

That being said, the current pattern does promise colder weather, but it will arrive next week after remnants of this North American cold have come and gone. And that will arrive from the east due to high pressure dropping south from the polar regions into the far north Atlantic.

I've done a lot of statistical studies of eastern North American and UK temperatures long-term and mild signals from the Great Lakes region often arrive in waves about 3, 6 and 10 days later in the UK, would assume the same findings would probably be obtained from Irish data over the same time scale (talking about 160 years of data).

Cold patterns over the eastern regions of North America are not well correlated with either warm or cold patterns in Britain. The most likely temperature regime during colder than normal winter weather in Toronto (my data base) is near normal. This is probably because all that cold air pouring off the North American continent is bound to drive a fairly active storm track and there will be remnants of the cold air entrained, so you could expect the sort of weather that we're seeing this week, a mixture of mild and cold but essentially "zonal" or westerly.

Not all mild signals from that region make it across the North Atlantic and there are frequently teleconnections of mild Pacific flow in North America and cold, blocked easterly flow in Europe. However, the coldest spells in UK weather records are often correlated with blocked cold patterns in eastern North America, the type that don't move east off the continent but remain steady state. This seems to be related to Greenland blocking.

goat2 wrote: »

watching sky news there,
they are saying that it is likely that this freezing vortex that has the united states going through hell, that it is likely that they in britain will get,
if that is the case, we are on the path and are also going to get it

Many multiples of factors need to happen first.

wexie wrote: »

that looks like ice being pushed up from a lake. What happens is ice forms on the lake and then breaks and is being pushed onto shore by wind and current.

I think that video is from the Great Lakes a few years back, not sure what year but remember it (or something very similar to it) being posted.