AderynCoch

I for one am truly baffled by the lack of warnings for us lot. Even if the low were to track too far north (which I very much doubt it will), how does the south get severe winds and not us? I don't see any other features on the charts, and any shortwaves should be showing themselves by now. Anyway, Friday's storm looks even worse for this region as it stands. A turbulent week coming up.

Early January the peak of the autumn? Have we changed calendars or something?

I was thinking just earlier how it wasn't all that windy, then it suddenly picked up this evening. It must be pretty nasty north of here.

Just wait until Thursday. It's looking pretty nasty for us at the moment. And what happened to General Ourumov?

That's genieus! Sorry, I souq at making puns. Anything to take my mind off the fact that it's snowing in flippin' Egypt and not here.

I've got a feeling this thread could be busier than the model thread itself over the next few days. It's very poor stuff from my perspective, it really is. It's not like recent weeks have been anything to write home about either. I just hope we're not sleepwalking into a December like 1988. Even 2006 brought us a week or so of cold, foggy conditions as the high parked itself over us for a time. All this high wants to do is sit to the south and laugh at us.

I wasn't expecting anything on this side of the country, with the centre of the low far to the east of here. It was like February 1990 all over again, when the same stretch of coast got hit (Towyn was badly affected in particular). Glad I'm not living near the North Sea.

I'm just annoyed by the fact the high just wants to sit to our south and stay there. It simply refuses to align itself in a way that could give us something wintry, whether it be a full-on easterly or just some festive frost and fog. There's been far too much slack westerly grey crap of late with an absence of frost.

The strongest winds may have passed but the highest tidal surges haven't. And nobody is comparing this to what happened in the Philippines.

4.5

Check out this loop from spaceweather.com:

RIP Ison. Has Kohoutek lost its crown of disappointment?

That cold spell in February was practically non-existent here, characterised by not one but two failed battleground attempts which brought nothing but cold rain. There were a few cold sunny days beforehand but it certainly wasn't that cold afterwards despite seemingly everywhere else having snow for ages. A real waste and one of the most disgusting failed cold spells I can remember given its potential. The rest of the winter was pretty uninspiring too, with the only snow being a surprise fall of 1-2cm on 16th December which was gone the next morning. So no repeat of 11/12 for me please.

To be fair, there aren't many autumns you would tell your grandkids about. The only one which springs to mind for me is 2000 with its record-breaking rainfall.

That happened in our school too. The teacher wasn't happy the next day after it transpired that only half the class had turned up the previous day. I lied and said I was sick - amazingly he believed it.

It may have been a factor, but my guess (8.3) was based on a mild outlook which had considerable consensus. I knew there was always a chance of it being colder later on in the month, but even in the short term it was nowhere near as mild as expected (on the colder side of average if anything). Anyway, I'm happy to be as wrong as can be. I hate mild Novembers.

If you think Perth has stupid sunrise/sunset times, try living in the east of Western Australia (WA is vast). I spent a few months in Kununurra, a small town in the far NE corner of the state close to the Northern Territory border, and in early March (which is like early September in the northern hemisphere) it was getting dark at 5:30pm but the sun would be up by 5:30am. Working outdoors (like on a farm or a construction site) you had to start by 6am, because the sun would reach its zenith by 11am. I went there from Darwin where it wasn't getting dark until after 7pm. In fact, looking at that link Gavin posted check out Tuesday's sunrise/sunset times to see where I'm coming from: Darwin = 6:10/18:50 Kununurra = 4:44/17:33 Maybe Kununurra should adopt NT time, which is one and half hours ahead of WA. Or better yet, join the NT. Ultimately WA is very Perthcentric (it was weird seeing loads of news and adverts for a city 2000 miles away).

That's incredible. I had an inkling that the Philippines aren't generally as susceptible to storm surge as some other parts of the world (like much of the Gulf of Mexico shoreline) but I would have thought that a country which experiences powerful typhoons on a pretty regular basis would have some expectation of what such ferocious storms can do with the sea. Storm surge is terribly destructive when it occurs and will kill people in large numbers if there isn't a good evacuation plan in place. As ridiculously strong as Haiyan's winds were, I just wonder how many people were killed by effects from the wind as opposed to the storm surge.

Had a large flash of lightning and big rumble of thunder about 20 minutes ago when a downpour passed over. Some hail too.

That's been posted in the comments section on Jeff Masters' blog. I can't see it because I'm not on Instagram but those who have are apparently gobsmacked by it, with the wind sounding unreal. The images which are coming out of Tacloban City at the moment look like the Mississippi coast after Camille and Katrina. It would have been devastated by a significant storm surge as well as the horribly strong winds.

Sunrise over the Philippines:

Looks like the eye's just about to brush the southeastern tip of Samar. The northern eyewall (containing the strongest winds) will be hammering the south of island at the moment. You can also clearly see how annular the core has become (as alluded to by the JTWC), though I'd hesitate to call the typhoon truly annular until all the outer rainbands disappear. I don't think I've ever seen an annular tropical cyclone make landfall, as they're usually far out to sea (though that might be due to the fact that they're rare beasts anyway).

Sustained 170kt winds! That's about 195mph. Does anyone else think the estimated central pressure of 895mb is probably too high? Sub-900mb typhoons have been rare in the West Pacific in recent years but they used to be much more frequent (not sure why - the use of aircraft reconnaissance perhaps). Certainly with the wind field not being abnormally large I would expect a typhoon supporting winds of this strength to be threatening Tip's record of 870mb.

You should take the road up to Killhope Cross (over 600m) to experience some snow. If it's still there of course. Poor thing.

They may still be corrected further at the end of the month.