in the vale

I now have about 12 years of data from a couple of stations - all received and stored using Weather Display (WD). When looking at current data I often wonder e.g. when was the temperature last this cold / warm? When did we last have this much rain, what were the extremes this day last year? etc. The only way I know to answer those types of question is to trawl through the NOAA monthly reports function which is very time consuming. Does anyone know if someone has developed a simple analysis tool for WD data that allows those sorts of queries to be created / run on the WD dataset?

During the recent cold spell my DP dropped into the negative for a few days - as you'd expect with a cold Easterly. But it has continued to drop and now shows -36.4 with Humidity showing 3%. The temp looks right though and I believe the temp and humidity sensor is a single board in the sensor suite - so is this a broken board? I'm assuming so.

ECM OP vs. its ENS Mean, GFS Op vs. its GEFS Mean. There's a pattern here that we should recognise when obsessing over detail in Ops runs. N. Wales is IMBY and the Ops show a dusting here. Given the ensemble spreads and likelihood of short-term drama occurring in the ACTUAL weather means I'm not stressed. I suspect we'll all be surprised at what actually happens. Seems another 48 hours is required to nail any level of detail. Great fun! If the fun stops. Stop.

Pretty much the last 7 days 00Z 'downgrades' have been reversed by the 12Z runs. Generalisation of course, but....

ECM seems to sometimes go AWOl when it first senses bigger drivers in an unconventional configuration, which the global signals seem primed for. Probably just me, but I see the mess of the ECM 12Z as a positive. It seems confused and stuff is darting all over the shop. It will reconfigure on the 00 or tomorrow's 12 and model convergence from the 5th or 6th Feb may commence. We'll see. M.R.N.

This is the key point for me. I know we're all looking for snow, (ECM = great weekend for me) but, if these bigger pieces of the jigsaw actually fall into place (and there are increasing hints that they might), we could be looking at something quite spectacular. Actual and forecast PV stress is dropping that chunk into our half of the globe and the forecast disturbance of those persistent heights over the Urals could create mayhem here if the die all fall right. Unlikely, but it would be fun.

Half decent covering here in the Vale of Clwyd. Radar shows showers generated off the coast turning to snow over land. Looks set to continue off and on for a while. Higher res GFS & ECM suggest more of the country likely to see some tomorrow.

Same here - was not expecting this, despite potential from models. Temp & DP dropping fast. Most surfaces getting covered, despite being on top of 38.6mm rain since 00Z.

Thanks Paul - all done.

Sorry Paul - having been watching the thread for a NW Radar app for the last year(?) or so, I must have missed this. Is there a guide to installing it as an ios app somewhere you can point me to? It's not on the Apple app store.

3 apps I'd recommend: yr.no (Norwegian, free, and uses ECM data), Dark Sky (£3.99) gives pretty accurate and up-to-date rainfall radar (until Netweather sort an ios app!), and Weatherpro (£0.79) which is from MeteoGroup and is pretty good. These are all for ios, I've no idea about Android apps. You're best using a couple and triangulating - if they all say roughly the same thing you can have higher confidence in what actual weather is likely.

Possibly leaves? I get a few problems this time of year.

Constant lightning/thunder for 120 mins - 34mm of rain since 23:30, pouring through the door. Me and my Mrs are doing 10 minute shifts on the mop.....What fun.

Snow here in the Vale of Clwyd. IMG_2772.MOV

A bit blowy up here today - nothing extraordinary. Rain an issue though.

Brilliant! This takes me back 30 years to decoding weather faxes, pressure charts, sea ice obs, etc. from short wave transmissions using a hardware decoder and HFFAX software. Hours of fun!

Surely cheaper to just set up a Wunderground account, link to your weather software and access via your phone from anywhere?

Already posted

Thanks Paul.

Hi guys/gals, I know it's not that straightforward, given the combination of runs that go to make up the local forecast, but it would be useful to somehow see when it was last updated. It looks like if I hit the '16 Day Extra Detail' button, and it refreshes, that may tell me that the forecast has updated, but it's difficult to be certain how up to date the forecast actually is. Thanks.

Thanks reef - I'll have a look into this when I get some time to spare.

Hi reef, do you have a schematic or pics of your custom FARS setup?

Do you use weather software on your PC or do you use your console as a standalone device? You should be able to retrieve the data if you use a PC, but I have no idea if you don't. Even if you have the optional data logger I doubt the data goes back that far. Sorry.

GFS shows snow for an hour or two this evening for the North - other models vary. Very uncertain where the northern extent is.

I'm glad it's just not me thinking this. Many folk have concluded that the surface effect of the December SSW event is behind us or that the cards fell wrong this time. I do not believe it has really started. The type and length of the event have few analogues so most models have really struggled with the 'work in progress' state of the atmosphere. Signs seem to be emerging that the cold EC46 view a couple of weeks ago may have been correct, albeit delayed like all other models. There'll be valuable learning available from this. Genuinely fascinating times, unique in my utterly unreliable recollection of weather stuff.