Met Reports (monthly) 1940s: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/archive/monthly-weather-report-1940s http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/archive/monthly-weather-report
I have memories of the bad winter of 1939/40 which these PDF reports confirm. At Ponefract in January 1940,there was 15 inches of snow with 5 foot snow drifts.These winters were particularly hard for the housing we had was double brick exterior walls with no air void...one fire in the sitting room as it was called, which my mother kept roaring all day long in the winter.in the summer it had to be fired for hot water.On the same fire was the cooking range which was composed of a single oven...my mother did her own baking in those days.Autumns gave an abundance of potatoes and the oven came in handy for the roasting of spuds For warming the bed we used to use the hot shelves of the oven wrapped in an old blanket..refractory bricks were also tried. For school it was wellies..on all day and the other point I remember well,the school was over two miles away, we walked and I cannot recollect school closing on account of the weather even when the bad winter of 1946/47 came along.......Nobody had cars..... How times change.
March 1914 - severe flooding - in the Thames Valley: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/media/pdf/k/c/Mar1914.pdf At Camden Square London 4.51 inches - 1 inch greater than any March in the last 42 years. Totland Bay 5.54 inches.
On giving the matter some thought, being cold was the norm in the Forces. I've already mentioned the joys of wintering in Carovilli in Jan '44 but had forgotten to mention the winters of ' 45 & '46 when we discovered the joys of the Bora wind in Trieste. Then there was the worst English winter in living memory which I spent digging trains out of snow drifts in Barnard Castle. It seems that we were always bloody cold ! Ron
Since I first posted in this thread in 12010 I did a bit of research afterwards about the 1941 Rasputisa in the East....and whether it was late....or just long. It turns out it was longer than usual... And in relation to the other posts above about the years 1940-43 in Weatern - and Eastern! - Europe... The years 1940 to 1943 were a La Nina event in the Pacific. And one of the effects of that on the OTHER side of the globe was what we have experienced this year in the UK....AND the U.S.! The Jet Stream moved far further south than normal and stayed there for months each winter - hence the deeper than normal winters, the later than normal Spring Thaws....see the 1940 Norway Campaign... But whereas this year the Polar Vortex came down over the Continental U.S. which the Americans experienced recently - in each of those years it came down over Western Europe! Resulting in similar "Big Freezes"! In 1940 for example, when the Jet Stream was at its furthest south, and the Polar Vortex was down right over Norway - there were significant localized holes in the Ozone Layer in locations in Norway... In 1941, after the normal start of the Rasputitsa - the first "muddy season" in the Spring (it's often forgotten there are TWO in the year) - Eastern Europe experienced a much longer period of cold, wet weather than normal because the Polar Vortex brought down winter storm after winter storm over the Baltic and into Eastern Europe....resulting apart from anything in the River Bug famously bursting its banks and flooding its littorals three times in April, May AND early June 1941.
Rough weather, of course, heavily defined the World War II efforts in the Aleutians, the North Atlantic, and on the Eastern Front. More peculiar and precise were the strange natural events of 1944 and 1945 in every theatre of war. Against Nature’s Odds: Fighting Weather and Natural Disasters during WWII | The National WWII Museum | New Orleans