This graph above is a series of temperatures and anomaly charts for the period between the 1 December 2017, and 31st of March 2018. This is the winter in which the ‘Beast from the east’ (22nd of February to the 5th of March) cold wave occurred. The bar charts display daily ‘composite’ temperatures and anomalies for each of the four nations, England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. What I mean here by ‘composite’, is the aggregated daily maximum and minimum temperatures for all SYNOPSYNOP SYNOP (surface synoptic observations) is a numerical code (called FM-12 by WMO) used for reporting weather observations made by manned and automated weather stations. SYNOP reports are typically mad hourly and consist of groups of numbers (and slashes where data is not available) describing general weather information, such as the temperature, barometric pressure and visibility at a weather station. stations, below 250 M amslAMSL The height Above Mean Sea Level., for each of the four nations. The gantt chart along the bottom shows cold and warm spells, when maximum, minimum or mean anomalies were 3°C above, or 3°C below the LTALTA Long Term Average. This is usually defined as a 30 year period by the WMO. for three days or longer.
The line chart below shows a seven day centred average of daily mean anomalies for each of the four nations. As you can see the lowest anomalies during the cold wave at the end of February occurred in England and Wales, and around 1.6°C lower than those in Scotland, and 1.2°C lower than those in Ireland. The effects of the ‘Mini beast from the East’ which occurred later in March can also be seen.
One similarity I did notice, was the pre-Christmas cold snap that occurred in the third week of December, which rapidly turned into a short Christmas mild spell. This is not too dissimilar to the rapid warming during the cold-warm spell seen we saw this winter [2024/2025] in Scotland.
