Arctic Hare
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Posts posted by Arctic Hare
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Have a horrendously poor quality photo from the bus at Kinlet, just north of Bewdley on the way to Bridgnorth. (Turns out I'm not going to Ludlow after all, so no Clee Hill trip.) At least I can now say I've seen lying snow in daylight, even if it did have to wait for meteorological spring!
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3 hours ago, CryoraptorA303 said:
I was under the impression that we were getting quite a string of warm Aprils actually. It's only really 2023 that was dull and mild, and of course 2021 was dry and cold.
Yeah, that's true, *but* it doesn't feel that way when it's gloomy and raining all day. By April the sun is so strong that 15 °C and sunny feels outright warm (out of the wind, at least) whereas 15 °C and raining feels a lot colder. Plus though this doesn't apply to your comment, many people still cite daily CET numbers which effectively equate the importance of daytime maxes and night-time mins, something that just isn't the case for most people's everyday lives.
3 hours ago, CharlieBear9 said:I'd have thought Spring was the quietest time for visitors to Bewdley. It's the only period when there aren't any fishing contests on the river, which draw in hundreds of people a week throughout the rest of the year, if the river's not in flood of course.
It makes a certain amount of difference, but a *lot* of families come to Bewdley from places like Dudley. In the Easter holidays if it's sunny and reasonably warm the town car parks can be chocka by mid-morning, especially on a day like Easter Monday. It definitely isn't quiet when the weather's good, regardless of angling close season or not!
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2 hours ago, markyo said:
My favourite season is a non event....again.
Even though my preferences don't really match yours, I sympathise a lot with that. My own favourite season is spring for its contrasts: traditionally April could see 20+ °C warmth, lying snow, thunderstorms, gales, hail, you name it. Often several of those in the space of one day! Now it seems to be in a rut most of the time, increasingly (or so it feels) a gloomy and wet rut which is disastrous for my own town and its heavily tourism-based economy. Flooding is by far the biggest cause of weather-related stress here, way ahead of cold, heat, wind or even snow.
I really like spring, but maybe I should say "what spring used to be" as days on end of rain just make me endure the season rather than enjoy it. So as I say, I sympathise with your own disappointment about winter.
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5 hours ago, Midlander said:
Worst winter for snow and cold since 2013/14. It was not a snowless winter, thanks to the early December cold spell, which gave settling snow, but given the expectation from many that this would be the best winter since 2012/13, it really was shockingly bad.
Yep, very similar here. The only time I saw snow on the ground was for a brief period overnight in that December spell. Long gone by the morning and never returned. For myself I didn't expect anything much this winter, but I hoped for at least two or three reasonably snowy days. Nothing even close.
And then I get up this morning and it's throwing it down with cold (maybe very slightly sleety, couldn't be bothered to check!) rain at 1.9 °C. Please can we have a run of nice dry 15 °C days now, O Weather Gods? Ta.
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I could actually live with a BFTE as long as it wasn't a super-powered one, since I live towards the west and so there's a fair chance it would be dry!
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The sun is pretty strong by mid-March, though, and that means that when it's out 15 °C feels a lot warmer than it does in December, even though it's more unusual in Dec.
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I may be going to Ludlow on the bus on Saturday, which could be interesting as the A4117 goes up over the side of Titterstone Clee Hill and rises to (from memory) 355m, with views on a good day up almost to the summit (533m). Probably going to be my best chance of seeing snow in daylight this entire winter!
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Not the best day here today. Murky throughout, and nuisance-value rain on and off for most of the time. Not especially mild, not especially cold, not especially windy, not especially anything. A nothing day, really.
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I remember Atlantic 252 Oh joy, cold rain for me then. I'd actually be happy to see some of our more upland posters get some actual snow, but I doubt it's going to be any fun here!
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A fairly decent day for brisk walking today. I walked about eight miles today with a brunch out in the middle, and it was actually fairly pleasant. Agreed that the wind chill was noticeable, but it was nice to be able to walk fastish up the hills without overheating in a coat! Tbh I'm just happy when it's dry - well, mostly dry as there were one or two brief showers. The river is about a metre down now from its peak, and though there's rain in the forecast (I know, what a shocker) it doesn't look *too* bad and so fingers crossed we'll get a longer respite from floods.
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My own attitudes have changed, but not in the same way. I've never been a denier and it's a long, long time since I was a real sceptic about human-induced CC. What's changed, unfortunately, is that I've become gloomier about our (meaning humanity as a whole) ability/willingness to stop things getting not just quite bad but very bad by concerted action quickly enough. I don't think that humanity will go extinct entirely. We're too resourceful as a species for that; we've survived ice ages after all. But that's a small glimmer in a dark thought, since "some humans will survive" is a very different thing from "21st-century civilisation for eight billion people will survive", and I can't convince myself that the latter is true. Micawberism (ie "something will turn up") is a dangerous game to play, and if you lose that bet the penalties can be very severe.
I'm not saying I think this disastrous future is certain. But not so many years ago if someone had put it to me I'd have responded "Don't be silly, that's way over the top." I'm no longer sure I could say that with confidence.
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Fen Wolf I can't recall exactly where, but someone posted recently showing that for the Central England region (which actually includes East Anglia) this was indeed the wettest winter on record, with something like 150 years of data to compare with.
This is actually something that ties into the original subject of this thread. As people who've read me banging on about flooding will know, it's by far the biggest immediate issue facing the town where I live. Although we've had *bigger* floods in the past, I can't remember any winter when we've had *more* significant floods than the one we're just coming to the end of now. And in terms of short-term impact, those have an immediate impact that everyone can see, in a way a week longer of growing season won't unless you're a gardener or farmer.
My point is that I suspect flooding may be a bigger deal for many people in changing their opinions than temperature, since the whole "will we get to X °C rise in global temperature?" thing still feels a bit remote and vague. But if the main road through town is flooded several times a winter, that affects everyone living here, *right now*.
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Wold Topper I think it depends on what it is and how it's expressed, not just in its articularity (is that a word?) but in whether it's actually useful. (Speaking generally here, not meaning you or any other specific person, on NW or not.) There is a point at which alternative opinions are reasonable and should be given a fair hearing, and also a point at which they're just silly. For a non-CC example, anyone still pushing "the Earth is flat!" should not be treated like a serious-minded contributor to a debate on the planet's make-up.
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WYorksWeather I really should have known that, but somehow I did not. Thanks!
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WYorksWeather That's so reminiscent of Sir Humphrey's four-stage approach from Yes Prime Minister:
Stage 1: Nothing is going to happen.
Stage 2: Something may be about to happen, but we should do nothing about it.
Stage 3: Maybe we should do something about it, but there's nothing we can do.
Stage 4: Maybe there was something we could have done... but it's too late now.That dates from something like 35 years ago. The episode in question was about international diplomacy rather than the climate, but it does show how sadly predictable the lack of action has been.
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This whole subject starts to get into levels of infrastructure preparation and investment, which isn't really possible to discuss fully without a lot of politics, and so I'll mostly pass over it. One thing I will say is that (though I imagine it's better now) an Australian great aunt once told me that many houses there were pretty rubbish at dealing with what we would consider a fairly mediocre chilly night, since *their* houses weren't built for *that*.
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Best day for quite some while. Started out cold (min -1.4 °C, hey look an actual air frost!) with freezing fog, but this was rapidly lifting by about 8:30 am. After that, a really pleasant late winter's day with lots of sunshine. Not that warm (max 8.3 °C) but with light winds and plenty of sunshine it felt fine. Reminded me all too sharply of how much I've missed these conditions during all the rain!
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Jubilee Gardens, Bewdley this afternoon. Daffodil beds in full bloom. 23rd February.
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14 minutes ago, Metwatch said:
@Arctic HareAgree completely with wanting an extended dry period, but to accelerate evaportation rates and get things drying up quicker, you'd want to be looking for as much sunshine as possible and more warmth, rather than cool and/or cloudy a lot of the time, but still dry, which would make it take longer for the ground to have water removed via evaporation.
Oh, absolutely. Warm and sunny over Easter is the best possible in any year, but even more so now! But simply in terms of people deciding whether they'll come into town at all, even cool and cloudy would be a large improvement. Yes the ground would still be wet, but that's not a huge issue for tourists in a town. They just don't want to be rained on, or to have trouble reaching the town centre/car parks in the first place!
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Regardless of what farmers may or may not need or want, and I'm not dismissing their importance at all... cold and wet or mild and wet would both be catastrophic for riverside towns like mine. "Don't build on the flood plain, then" is a bit pointless when the riverside buildings here have been around for more than 500 years in some cases! Apart from anything else, Bewdley is a tourist town and so as we move towards Easter it becomes ever more important that people can feel like it's a nice place to visit and to be. If half the roads and car parks are under water, they won't come.
We need an extended period of dry, even average rainfall, and we need it basically right now. Temperature is way less important to those of us in towns.
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Chalk me up as yet another one for July 2019. It was "only" about 36.5 °C in my location, but I'm almost certain that's still the highest I've ever experienced, anywhere.
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The River Severn is above the "top of normal level" er... level for the 786th time (ish) this winter. If the forecast stays as it is and Sunday isn't too bad, we should get away without serious flooding. Says something about the ridiculously wet last eight months that "get away without serious flooding" now feels like a win.
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1 hour ago, WYorksWeather said:
a very long-lasting record, which has withstood numerous attempts including several in the christmas pudding (most notably of course September 2023)
Although of course records are only very long-lasting until one day they aren't. I suspect it will go before 2040, and I may be being a bit conservative with that. The 29.9 °C October record may be a trickier one given that happened on the 1st in an exceptional spell... but then why am I more doubtful about that than about the September record going? I'm not sure I could give a sensible answer that doesn't rely at least a little bit on emotion and hunches.
(Not up to me of course, but that "christmas pudding" auto-replace the site does really has long outlived its usefulness now, surely?)
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A generally good day here, 14.3 °C max and with a fair bit of sunshine. Some annoyingly persistent light rain in the morning which didn't stop until about 9:00. The odd nuisance value shower in the afternoon as well, so a completely dry day still seems a bit of a hen's teeth thing here. But in the sheltered café area (outdoors, but with a marquee-style roof) at the museum was doing a fine trade this afternoon. I stopped off for a coffee myself and it was genuinely pleasant to sit there. Could easily have been April.
The Severn is rushing along at a rate of knots and is almost as brown as during a big flood, but fortunately it's a metre below its banks and so for once we have a bit of breathing space. Agreed with SollyOlly about the wet and mud everywhere, though. Nobody much was walking on the grass in the park, probably to avoid sinking in the marsh!
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Worryingly Wet & Worryingly Sunless
in Spring Weather Discussion
Posted · Edited by Arctic Hare
The title of this thread? Yeah. As someone who for various reasons (which I won't go into here, but nothing I've done wrong!) simply cannot consider the "leave the country and live somewhere else" option all the people suggesting that are pointless to people like me. We need to find ways to deal with this wetness *in the UK*, or much better to have our hopes for an *extended* dry period (not totally rainless, but clearly below average for maybe six months on the trot) come to pass.
Unfortunately the trend over recent years here has been clear to anyone who looks at the river: rainfall events capable of causing significant flooding are getting more and more common. This winter we've had five, the most I can ever remember. The dullness has just made it worse as even when it stops raining nothing dries out. (The saturated ground is a big part of that of course, but so is the lack of sun, especially as days get longer and the sun gets stronger.)
I am lucky enough not to have serious mental conditions made worse by the weather, but in much less severe way the gloomy damp weather going on and on and on, plus the stress of flooding and its knock-on effects to my town and its people, is certainly making me feel more unhappy and down than I normally would over winter. So if there *is* going to be a flip, let's have it. And let's have a big one!