in the vale

I have watched over the last couple of months as some real heavyweights have tried to find analogue years for the recent background signals and have struggled. The physics engines that drive all the NWP models are fed by lessons learned from analogues. Therefore they are going to struggle to resolve the likely future conditions as there are fewer examples of how the current starting conditions end up as actual weather. We are seeing this play out on a four-hourly basis in this forum. Each run is held up as true, and then it changes / fails. No surprises. Most models show / have shown a likelihood of cold of some sort - this is like looking at the ensembles - but the route there is changing constantly. Again - no surprises. We are not in uncharted territory, but we are not in familiar territory either, so the models are going to change again and again until we are into the stressful T96 period. In situations like this I don't bother with each run (the last two days show that to be completely futile) but trust in the thoughts of GP, Tamara and others not on NW that we are entering a period where we could get something extraordinary, or we could get drizzle. The opportunity for extraordinary is exciting enough for me.

My December average hit 10.0 today - how rubbish is that?

This day in 2010 I saw a max of -2.4, average of -7.3. Lovely.

Hit 16.1 C here today - winter madness! Warmest Dec temp since I started with my first weather station in 2008.

The detail on the link suggests the alert is due to expected overnight rainfall.

Flood Alert at Oldham, Bolton, Rochdale, Rawtenstall, Haslingden and Ramsbottom - upper Irwell catchment area. http://floodalerts.com/?id=93915

Updated version works now for me on 7.1 - thanks!

OK, good luck.

When I try and launch it the screen goes briefly light blue and then back to the iPhone. Tried restarting phone - same result. I.m on 7.1.

Just been out with the wuffs and there was a brief but heavy snow shower. Checked when I got back and temp was 3.3 with DP 0.8. First flakes here for almost two years.

I think it is worth pointing out the obvious for those who may be missing it. Over the last 2-3 days the models have converged to provide a high degree of confidence in a cold spell over large parts of the UK. That's good, full stop. Which places will see snow and very cold temps has shifted around but where will actually benefit depends on the source of the flow. We have seen NW/N/NE scenarios and the mood of the forum has shifted hugely depending on which direction each run has sourced the upper air from. Some posters (we know who they are) are entirely objective but the vast majority will call a particular set of outputs an upgrade or downgrade based upon where they live - entirely natural. I get excited by N or NW flows but quite unexcited by easterlies a) because there are generally too many factors that need to verify and b) because they don't generally help me (N. Wales) with snow (cold, yes). However, I am excited if John from Norwich gets snow and look at their pictures of it with a smile on my face. My advice is to look at the posters location before reading their words. I have done this here for years and almost always gives you as accurate a picture of what the models are ACTUALLY showing than what their words are saying. Daniel's post above (#331) is a great example of being objective - he lives in London but seems excited by a chart which would give him much less than me. Good for you matey. There is stunning potential in the short, medium and longer term for many of us - but I do understand how each run consumes some posters entirely, only for the same folk to appear again a few hours later saying there has been a major downgrade. We are only human after all! From all models and wider teleconnections, Feb 2015 has the potential to be remembered for a good few years. Potential is all we have right now and I've already banked that and am very content!

The easiest way is to become a Wunderground contributor. Which software are you using on your PC? Weather Display will set you up as a Wunderground weather station and then you can view online, via an app on an iPhone etc. If you need more details, just let me know. You will need to keep a computer connected though, unless you want to go down the IP logger route. I would suggest a cheap, second-hand laptop or bare bones PC to leave connected. For what you need this would be the cheapest option I guess.

Not even a sleety tease here.

Thanks RR - I had assumed there would be something on NW, but will check these links out.

Gents - I have taken some great night shots of lightning over the years (even back in the Ektachrome days) and do still use a bag full of DSLR kit but I have never tried to photograph daylight lighting - wouldn't know where to start. I have had a nosy at the Weather Photography section but can't see a starters / definitive thread - do you know of one? Thanks.

Dave - that price range and that frequency sounds like a big ask, but there will be plenty of folk on here who know tons more about weather stations than I do. I have had a few years experience (good and bad) of running (and fixing, on occasion)my WS2300 and did a lot of research before buying my Davis so if you have any questions I can answer, I will. Looks like a nifty little device!

Reading a little about the Kestrel suggests that Gust is the highest speed recorded over the period you use to take an average speed, which I think is the use of a start / stop button?

The spec sheet for the Kestrel suggests display intervals of 1 second and measurement intervals of 1 second, so I don't know how it displays a higher speed than that measured between two 1-second intervals. Someone who knows that unit better may have an answer. It may be that the gust is the highest wind speed recorded over a longer time period e.g. 30 seconds?

I now have a Davis VP2 to replace my Technoline (LaCrosse 2300 clone).

Weather stations do not records gusts, only wind speed. A gust is then calculated after the event as the highest returned speed over a range of data packets from the sensor. Even if the Maplin one above returns data every 48 seconds, it may be actually recording data more often than that (you will have to dig deep into the specs for this) so when it sends a transmission to the console it may be working gust out from the highest speed recorded over several sets of data. However, the frequency of data sets recorded vs. the frequency of data sets transmitted is very different for different weather stations.

As far as I know (with the ones I have owned anyway) you will miss the gust - the data is a snapshot at the time of transmission, not from the gap in-between. My old one at 7 seconds misses loads of gusts that my new one (2.5) reports - still running them both at the mo, and the anometers are both on the same pole.

Great post Steve. I have been watching the ECM charts closely since about the 25th, and also the local ECM-based surface predictions on yr.no which have showed just how much the small NH variations can alter the local weather forecast. I agree, the ECM has pretty much kept to it's theme on the NH scale, which should be considered a good performance. However, for those folk who seem to believe that UK weather forecasting is a straight-forward science, huge frustrations creep in here when models show what they want to see one day and not the next. At anything more than (on average) 84-108 hours out, the theme is all you can rely on. Once I learned that, the stress disappears and the learning begins.

16 day extra detail showing yesterday evening, plus the following message "Updated using the 18Z Run on Sunday 17th November 01:25:00" which is rather odd as the 18Z hasn't happened yet! Looks like it hasn't updates since yesterday's 18Z.

This is not going well! The locked down browser I am using will not allow the ticket add-in to work! Do you have a bog-standard email address I can use? Thanks!

Thanks. I have requested a password reset, but this will go to an email address I can no longer access! Is there a way of deleting an account, so I can just set up a new one?