So, my wife was nagging me about getting her 4×4 back on the road for the upcoming winter. Of course, I really did not fancy doing a full top end rebuild, so I decided to try and work out whether I actually needed to. In recent years Scotland has had many mild winters in the last 20 or so years with only 2 years in that time frame where a 4×4 in my location was actually required, the years 2010 and 2018. I had many years ago sifted through raw data from the met myself and noticed a rough trend and I had also read a blog about the quasi-8-year pattern in severe UK winters. The blog was about the Elliot family weather diary. A multi-generational record started in the 1920s by John Elliot and continued by his son Robert after his death in the 1970s. Their log, cross-referenced with Met Office data, identified recurring snow clusters every 7–9 years (Elliot family notes, 1950s–1980s). From this starting point I simply asked Grok, why does Scotland get a bad winter every 8 years or so and why does it sometimes skip to 16 or 32 years.

Answering this question brought me a somewhat surprising answer, a model that could predict it with only 7 drivers and 2 suppressors with 94% skill, The only miss had insufficient driver data and any remaining false positives were taken care of with 5 hyper localised factors. That was it, I had my answer, 2025/2026 would be mild then cold/ localised snow etc but not a massive white out, but close. Needless to say, the 4×4 has not yet been fixed.