On Sunday January 10 most of us woke up to dripping icicles and thawing paths. Just a degree or two difference from the Saturday, but the slow thaw had begun. The Met Office advisory though was for heavy snow arriving from the south later that day and giving further accumulations of up to 20mm/8 inches, more locally, for the Pennines, with the risk of accumulations elsewhere. Strengthening winds were expected to cause drifting. The day before I'd had a briefing from the duty forecaster at the Weather Centre in London while I was preparing my Saturday evening broadcast and his message was that the Pennines could be particularly badly affected, especially from drifting. Overnight, there had been similar advisories for Essex, Hertfordshire and other southern counties... but they hadn't got anywhere near the totals expected. That morning when I dialled into our conference with the Weather Centre, a colleague from down south wanted to know what explanation she should give viewers. The Chief Forecaster, we were told, was also puzzled. The same system had brought very heavy snow for France and across the continent just hours before. Does everyone remember the set up? It was a warm front snaking right the way from France eastwards to the Baltics, so blown to us on a southeasterly. When I saw it my first thought was that it looked very similar to the set up in the first week of December 2008, not long after I started, when the Met Office flashed for heavy snow across the North East and Cumbria, brought in on a southeasterly, after heavy snow in northern France and the Channel Islands. Again, the air when it arrived was just a degree or so warmer and it fell as sleet. We'd had heavy snow showers from a north-easterly earlier that week, just like the set up that brought us most of the snow this year. Through that morning the flash warning was still in place. At lunchtime I rang the duty forecaster in London to ask if he thought we could downgrade the warning. The system was just not producing the snowfall totals further south. He had just spoken to the Chief in Exeter and the warning was removed. The thaw had begun. And although the winds were picking up, clearly, thawing snow doesn't drift. P.S. Earlier in this thread doubt was thrown on the -20C forecast - we got it, east and west of the Pennines, albeit from enthusiasts with weather stations and not from Met Office. Official, as you know, -19C. Also - doubt on heavy snow shower forecast from the Thursday before Christmas... erm, well we all know how that one turned out :unsure: