Coldest weather in 30 years marks the start of a series of extreme winters

After enduring the coldest winter for 30 years, you might have been hoping for some respite from the cold weather.

However, scientists are now warning that Britain can expect to endure a series of extreme winters - the like of which have not seen for more than 300 years.

Researchers have found that low solar activity - marked by a decrease in the sun's magnetic field - influences the weather conditions across northern Europe.

The last time the sun showed similar behaviour, between 1650 and 1700, temperatures dropped so low that Londoners were able to skate and hold fairs on the iced-over River Thames.

According to a study published today, we are moving into "an era of low solar activity which is likely to result in UK winter temperatures more like those at the end of the Seventeenth Century."

According to Mike Lockwood, one of the main researchers, the latest winter marks the start of a Maunder minimum - when solar activity falls for a prolonged time.

The sun's magnetic field is thought to influence the jet stream - a fast-moving, high altitude current of air which moves eastwards at 35,000ft over the Atlantic.

During the famously cold winters of the late 1600s the mild westerly winds were blocked and replaced by much colder blasts from the north-east - bringing Arctic conditions with them.

The link between weaker solar activity and cold winters was made after experts found similarities between early weather records and this year's data.

"This year's winter in the UK has been the fourteenth coldest in the last 160 years and yet the global average temperature for the same period has been the fifth highest," said Prof Lockwood, a space physicist at the University of Reading's department of meteorology. "We have discovered that this kind of anomaly is significantly more common when solar activity is low," he added. "Temperatures should not fall as low as they did in 1684 but we can expect an increased number of cold winters."

Experts from Germany, Korea and the UK's Science and Technology Facilities Council also contributed to the paper published in the journal Environmental Research Letters.