Well, the NAO did help prevent cutters....we only had one single cutter for like a 6 week period starting around New Years. Our biggest problem was we couldn't buy a storm to phase during the January pattern. The airmass was kind of stale but it was still marginally cold enough to support snow. I think ORH had a grand total of 3 days with a high temp over 40F last January despite the month being +3...that's hard to pull off.
We were joking how we really needed Tip's hadley cell gradient during January....but it was nowhere to be found, lol.