twiglet98

Clear starry sky here, risen from 0C to 0.4 in the past hour. It was a glorious sunny afternoon and no sign of a snowflake. My son works in China, where it's -19C now (07.45am), and is heading off for a holiday in the Philippines where it's 30C by day. This is definitely the wrong place for extremes of temperature, but at least I'm nowhere near running out of oil and logs!

Heading to north Exmoor coast for the weekend with a large family party, avoiding the steep A39, having travelled it once before, in summer 20 years ago, just hope the A361 stays clear for us all to get home!, Wouldn't mind a south-west snowfest if we had a week off to enjoy it!

Falling thickly again now and the wind is increasing.

Snowed for 20 minutes, turned to sleet and has stopped. Radar implies a lot should be falling here right now!

Here it comes...

I'm around 50 miles just south east of Peterborough. Nothing fallen here since around 14.50, temp fallen from 0.7° to 0.4° in the last hour and the moon has now disappeared behind clouds. There was light breeze when I took the bins up the drive at midnight, now it's very still. Work tomorrow, but the radar looks good enough to stay up a while!

Nothing falling here, the wind's getting up. Temp rose through the evening to 2.7 at 23.00, now dropped to 2.5. Low last night was -5.2. The gritter went through shortly before 18.00 but it's been steadily warming up since then.

Just had about 90 seconds of snow, 1cm flakes, lying on the cold ground, and now it's stopped. Heavy frost last night, min -3.9C, temp now 0.9C. Sky grey after a beautiful pink sunrise.

No, my mistake, it was 30 January 2003, not 2001. The blizzard meant drifting snow had stopped all cars from getting up the long incline towards home. Only the 4WDs could make it, and by then the depth of snow between the tyre tracks meant it was impossible to turn round in a normal car, even if we weren't bumper to bumper. Eventually some guys who lived the other side of the hill came with shovels and dug out every car that still had its occupants, a lot of cars were abandoned for the night as the nearest pub put people up. I had a Volvo estate then, now I drive a Discovery and the worst snow I've had to get out of was on my drive!

That'll be this year's excitement then! Snow forcing abandonment of cars on the M11 makes the news occasionally, and there was that blizzard in 2001 when the 20 minute school run took five hours, but we really don't get many extremes.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-28713677

I'm not familiar with the badly-affected town of March, further up in the fens. I guess hills aren't a feature there!

http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/News/MORE-FLOODING-PICTURES-Tesco-at-Bar-Hill-reopens-following-roof-collapse-as-images-of-floods-in-Histon-and-Oakington-emerge-and-more-storms-forecast-20140809102135.htm Oakington is the other side of the A14 from the development at Bar Hill. BBC Radio Cambridgeshire and the Cambridge Evening News covered it in detail. BBC Radio 2 mentioned the clean-up operation in Cambridgeshire on its news at lunchtime today. The regional television news mentioned it this evening. It was intense but very localised. We're about 12 miles south of Bar Hill and just got a heavy downpour. Bar Hill, as the name suggests, is built on a hill, bowl-shaped with Tesco at the bottom. The fields around the built-up parts are hard, many have just been cut and the rain just ran off them. Where straw had been left in rows it washed off the fields with the deluge and presumably didn't do the drains much good.

I live about 6 miles west of the M11 junction 12, and work another 5 miles further west. We had very heavy rain on Friday afternoon but no flooding - the warehouse roof leaked where it always leaks, but nothing significant. The dark clouds did indeed look briefly as though they were beginning to form a tornado but it dissipated quickly. BBC Radio Cambridgeshire's reporter in March described their downpour as 'of biblical proportions' as a section of riverbank collapsed, followed by closure of the Tesco store as water was running down the aisles, and the loss of power to 1000 properties. My daughter's friend was here earlier, she works in Royston and lives in Bar Hill. Her house backs onto the Tesco car park, the library and primary school. Her 19 mile journey home took her three hours - she had heard the M11 / A14 was backing up and she diverted through the villages north of here, but was then forced to abandon her car, roll her trousers up and walk home. The Tesco store at Bar Hill has recently been revamped. Part of the roof collapsed. The car park was flooded such that normal cars could not drive out. Some houses on the low-lying part of the development have been flooded. It's fortunate that the school was closed and the area was spared school-run traffic trying to pick the kids up, but the school no longer has a caretaker so it took some time for the extent of its flooding to be assessed. Less fortunate are the families away on holiday who were not able to protect their homes. The local news said 38mm of rain fell in the hour between 16.00 and 17.00. It's dry and still here and 22.8° at the moment, after a glorious day with a refreshing breeze early afternoon.

Aww, two of my bantams have decided to go broody today - too cold, I think, so I'll actively discourage them, though after a few days of having the eggs taken away they tend to go AWOL and come back three weeks later to show off their new family. I do prefer it when you can sex them at hatching - do you just have the one sex-linked? ETS sunny morning, black clouds all afternoon but stayed dry. Hit 5C late morning but oddments of snow still lying in the shade.

Nothing here, tiny bits of sleet blowing about, very wet, gone up to 0.6C. RainToday still shows it right over us for several hours but it won't be the first time it's done this and absolutely nothing has made it to ground.

Yawn... very, VERY light sleet and much too wet to settle. 0.5 C now. RainToday radar looks promising but the number of times this winter that I've sat up half the night contemplating the difference between the radar and the view at the patio lights, I'm not holding my breath. Wonderful pictures from the States, we were in Boston for its 7th deepest recorded snowfall in Jan 2005. Impressive how the city just continued to function, people going about town on skiddoos and xc skis, the weather team on TV used the word 'brutal' in every mention of wind, temp and ppn but nobody seemed to use it as an excuse to stay at home!

Temp -1.5C now. Snow has practically stopped after falling non-stop since before 09.00. I've been here 22 years and never remember a whole day of snowfall. About 7cms lying on the cars and patio, much deeper on the grass. I have a level drive to work in a 4x4, the rest of the family in normal cars all have to cross the only hill around here. One daughter has already planned to work from home, the other might be begging a lift to work if it looks any worse at 07.00!

2.5cm lying here, fine snow has been falling steadily all morning. Temp currently 1.1C

Looks like we'll have people staying here tonight, though by the number of empty bottles in the kitchen, they never intended to drive home!

Snowing steadily now, smallish flakes, about 2cm lying. Temp has gone up to -0.9C. Friends from Newmarket and Stortford here now, neither had anything interesting earlier. BBC Radio Cambs ramping it up all day nonetheless.

Just been reading a poultry-keepers' forum and people in the USA (Idaho) are saying it's -23C. Not sure I'd want that for weeks on end, frozen hosepipes and all, but managing livestock in it takes some imagining. It's -7C here, coldest it's been for about 2 years.

I have learned more than I imagined possible in five days of following this particular series of threads. Whatever I have read on the theory of model outputs, individual interpretation and comparison is incredibly useful. Grateful thanks to all who take the time and trouble to post their thoughts here, and indeed to the mods, it's a brilliant education.

I'm guessing the remote sensor is designed to be out in the worst of extremes!

MEEEEEE...? Well, north of Royston and over the border in Cambridgeshire - I'm in Barrington. I've been driving through damp and misty Surrey, Sussex and Hampshire today and just got home to find postie has delivered the SmartWeather wireless weather station that I ordered from Amazon well before Christmas, when the temperatures were pretty exciting for these parts. Tomorrow I'm going to mount it out in the middle of the garden, which is now more duckpond than lawn (quite literally, I have a lot of birds)!