Welcome to another edition of Daily Express weather watch.
As you may know, the tabloid daily devoted to keeping the memory of all-loving Diana alive whilst simultaneously driving a wedge between 'proper' Britons and everyone else, is also partial to a weather story or two.
The worst winter in ONE HUNDRED YEARS!
ONE HUNDRED DAYS OF SNOW!
We are apparently set for a winter worse than the one in 1947 which the Daily Express also calmly reported on.
Apparently oblivious to the fact that times have changed profoundly, the Express point out the reasons the winter caused so much chaos in 1947.
Coal for the power stations could not be transported across the country and was already in short supply after WWII.
Fortunately the historic global conflict's effects on energy supplies we no longer so heavily rely on have waned somewhat.
So where do these long-range weather forecasts (LRF) come from?
The Met Office, generally regarded as the authority on all things meteorological, told us last week: "Its a bit early in the day to be predicting the winter's weather, the Met Office certainly wouldn't put out a forecast for that far ahead."
The Express use Vantage Weather for their LRFs but a quick scan of their website reveals this little gem of information:
If there were lessons to be learned from long range predictions over recent years, one is that VWS's seasonal forecasts are based on searching for trends and patterns in historic data, using many algorithms to create projections, all not necessarily reaching the same outcome. What it doesn't account for is the random element, the element that gave us the fine run of summer weather for instance. In essence, LRF's are overviews only, a guide, but nothing more.
Despite the notorious unreliability of long-term weather forecasts the Express felt confident enough about the forthcoming snowy doom to say: "This period of snow and cold is likely to result in an incomparable scenario to anything we have experienced."
Interestingly, the next sentence directly compared the wintery horror with a scenario that we recently experienced.
It said: "A situation similar to December 2010 is likely to develop - but on a more prolonged scale in terms of overall duration."
All in a fluster and only just managing to use a phone wearing mittens, the HuffPost UK rang the Met Office for their opinion.
A spokesperson said: "There it will be increasingly wintery over the north and north west including Scotland.
"There could be snow on Monday."
Asked if wintery conditions were unusual when coming into winter they said: "No".