BleakMidwinter

This day last year it took me two hours to dig the car out in Telford, after the snow on Fri 8th plus Sun 10th and we foolishly left it with -12 temps at night... taught me never to leave 27 cm of snow to freeze on a car for days!

Well, not necessarily... Telford is in Shropshire, nearly into Wales, distinctly on the Western side of any midline down the UK - and we got snow last year from Easterlies, courtesy of streamers bringing it so far inland, it reached us! So it might be possible to get snow in the East from a non-Eerly...

IMO, it takes forever for a month to go by if the Atlantic is driving things... like a month of wet Sundays... ...and wet Mondays, wet Tuesdays, wet Wednesdays...!

But... but... won't the salt then melt all the snow and ice...?

Well... it's not that it won't verify in 5 days - all of the runs COULD happen. It's just that some are more probable and others are less probable. Some 5-day runs are less probably than some 10-day runs. That's where I rely on the people in here who can comprehend the patterns and give an indication of which ones are more or less probable. Something forecast at Day 10 can perfectly possibly happen exactly as forecast. It would be unusual (!) but it's perfectly possible. Meanwhile, I really enjoy there being the possibility! I enjoy the excitement with or without snow and cold as a result... ...and after last winter, starting with the first week of December giving us 10 inches of snow in one Friday from that amazing Cheshire Gap NWerly streamer followed two days later by a totally unrelated 6 inches of SWerly snow on the Sunday...!!! We got snow from the Beasterlies too, and even from the bits that technically only affected the East coast, as it turns out the Humber streamers can, if strong enough and heavy enough precip, reach us, bypassing most of the Midlands en route! So far as I'm concerned, ANYTHING is possible for Telford in winter, and I enjoy the excitement of trying to learn more (thankyou everyone who explains what to look at in the piccies you post...)

Just make sure you've got good warm mittens and hat on, while you sit on that fence - it could end up quite chilly, from all I can see!

I've got a Nokia can't-remember-the-number, now 18 years old - but it's the modern one of the household as my chap has a Motorola that turns 20 next year! And yeah, battery charging is a weekly-or-so thing And the phone contract is under £3/month

Haha - well no, it only happens every 30-odd years! It was a very infuriating wait - aged ten, I had snow to my thighs as i waded to school ecstatically - back in 1979 before Goretex, people jsut wore ordinary clothing but more of it, and I remember seeing a man in a three-piece pinstriped suit and bowler hat, with his brown leather briefcase strapped to his back with straps crossing over the front of his chest, and a red woollen knitted muffler, on his way to the office in suburban south Edinburgh - ON SKIS...! And in both 1979 and 2010-11, once the cold got established, so many men changed to wearing their drinking kilts for any journey. both winters I went out with the little wooden sledge looking for people to help, towing them and shopping home and enjoying myself hugely, and you'd be out for 2-3 hours and never see a moving vehicle, but more and more men in kilts and hiking boots. The women never seemed to get the message, though - I'd be in full skirts and petticoats and warm as toast and dead comfy, and they'd be in trousers shivering... there's a reason the kilt is worn so much in Scottish winters, it's fabulous insulation to have yards and yards of wool pleated round you! But Edinburgh really doesn't get much snow. Most winters, out of 35 years I lived there, there'd be an inch or so, two or three times, mostly gone in two days, and most often either none at all while the rest of the region turned white, or else it fell and melted on contact. Sea to North and East, hills to south and west... it's only in a specific ENE convective situation that Edinburgh gets very heavy snow, and that just doesn't happen often! As I say, 2010-11, and 1979-80, and apparently the 1978-79 was even snowier - but then people remembering back skip pretty much to 1963, which was snowy but not outstandingly so for Edinburgh, but mainly the "snow memories" goes straight from 1947 to 1978-80 and then 2010-11, so only a handful of winters out of 60 years...! Anyway, Telford last winter - that was completely amazing... on the Friday (7th Dec?) we got a NWerly "Cheshire Gap streamer" which dumped about ten inches in a single day at 35-40mph, so a serious blizzard (which I dragged my poor chap out into, bless him), and then on the Sunday we got the SWerly, totally unrelated weather system, which somehow penetrated this far up and gave us iirc another six inches - sixteen inches of snow in three days! It went by the Tuesday, though - but wow, it was fabulous! And we did well with the three Beasterlies later on into 2018 too... days and days of snow, lots of sunshine as well.

This always raises a wry smile for me... I lived in Edinburgh then, which has its own totally separate climate. Dozens of times a year the entire UK is bathed in sunshine, except Edinburgh which has one day of sun followed by three days of thick white clammy white 'haar', the old sea-mist... and when the rest of the country has rain, Edinburgh is dry, or vice versa... We didn't have ANY snow in the winter of 2009-10 which saw that famed satellite photo of a white UK - if you look closely, yep, that little green dot was Edinburgh, snowless...! A few flakes fell but landed on sopping wet ground and melted on contact... Meanwhile, Nov 2010, yes, the whole of the UK got snow - but Edinburgh kept on having snow. It snowed every single day for about six weeks. I stopped bothering to measure it at 20 inches! the number of mornings I got up and had 4-6 inches again to shovel or sweep out of the front path and off the birdbath (we got clever after a few days and took to sweeping the birdbath empty at twilight - as it was we had to use the kettle to thaw the ice to re-fill it 2-3 times a day). That was the year everyone sneered when the Army had to be called in to clear the pavements - but it wasn't a bit of snow: it was 8-10 inches of compacted trodden snow built up over weeks and weeks. The buses stopped for huge swathes of the city. The post-boxes were officially sealed up as the Royal Mail was unable to get to them to collect post (although the brilliant Parcels deport near my folks' house kept on delivering...). Amazon, Sainsbury's, Tesco, all stopped accepting online orders for all of Scotland, before Christmas, thanks for that, guys. It genuinely was Snowmageddon - and it had happened my first winter in Edinburgh in 1979-80, aged ten... but the rest of Britain only had the first bit of snow, not the astonishing continuing snow... By the way - if ever you do get six weeks of snow, be prepared for surprisingly low heating bills. Twenty inches of snow on the roof makes a wonderful layer of extra insulation!

First air frost of the season this morning for us in Telford - the cars outside were all quite white with it. Bright blue skies initially, but now the blue is oddly overlain by a thin layer of dark grey - it's odd, as if someone took some bright sky-blue satin and put a sheet of charcoal-grey net over it! Skies to N and NW are building horizontal layers of cloud, but we can still see a clear 15-20 miles easily. Sun still shining as of 10am...

I'm spending October going back and forth weekly to southern Scotland - seen some cracking dawns out of Wolverhampton Station on the Monday mornings! But I'm looking forward to being settled back in the Midlands in November and hope for some really classic November days - you know the ones when it's crisp and cold and a hard white frost, but the sun shines and the world feels fresh and exhilarating...

First day I've had to pull the wide-open window nearly-closed because the room felt cold! And our bedside drinks tasted cold this morning too...

There's a weather station online, a few miles from here, recording 1.52cm of precip thus far today, and still coming down...!

It is siling it down out there - I was out this morning in a dry spell on the hill-path, but then home, a few hours in the kitchen cooking lots of soup and pasta sauce, and now I'm really enjoying the weather because I'm tucked up cosily with Christmas presents to knit and crochet, with the rain chucking it down outside and me happily inside... It started raining steadily about 11am, I think, and hasn't stopped, doesn't look like it will do either! No wind to speak of but that was always forecast, 3-5mph for the main part of daytime today, then it kicks off again for this evening. If your'e out in rush-hour, take care - remember how incredibly stupid some people can be when they have a ton of high-speed metal in conditions that means they can neither see nor stop properly...

Er... this is a typo for the rainfall in the early hours of Sunday, isn't it? ...isn't it?!?!?!

Can I just post to say thanks in advance to all the people who explain the charts to the rest of us so well! I'm not in here year-round, and normally wouldn't be in til the snows are due, but given the current weather I had to come in to see if I can learn something about these complex systems. You lot and your 'translations' are a godsend!

Yes, I've never forgotten being in my folks' house in Edinburgh (1 mile from weather station that recorded it) when the 102mph gust literally ripped a (closed) cast-iron Victorian skylight out of the roof. It buckled the frame, snapped the hinges and pulled the slates off all round, leaving a great big hole in what had been my childhood attic bedroom. We were also quite glad none of us had been in the garden, and that nobody was in the primary school playground beyond, when the bits of cast iron and glass rained down, too... That was 'Hurricane Bawbag' in Dec 2011. Quite some weather we're having this week, though!

Most of the forecast sites have heavy rain for Thursday, but interestingly XC has SWerlies gusting to 40mph on Wednesday and fri, then Thurs in the middle with sudden Eerlies bringing the deluge - real "eye of the storm" stuff! the weekend looks seriously bad for W.Midlands, acc'g XC, with winds gusting to 60mph - but the MetO seems not to be bothered about it at present. It certainly looks like an interesting week of weather coming up!

Dark enough in Telford TF3 about 2:30pm to need to put the lights on - back to bright-overcast out there now, no rain this afternoon... yet! NetWeather currently has TF3 forecast to have 23.4mm of rain in a wee while...! Other sites forecast light showers - will wait and see. I'm still getting the hang of which sites are more reliable for rain in the warmer months. I've got better at understanding the weather patterns for snow round here, but the rest of the year is far beyond me at present so I'm relying on forecast-sites!

Wow, we can smell the wet ground indoors three floors up! you know that smell you get when it rains after a long dry spell? We've had some rain for several days but the ground had big cracks in it, wide enough to shove a pencil down - and now that smell of 'grateful ground' is so strong it's coming in through the windows. STREWTH that was one of the loudest, longest thundercrashes I've heard in the UK - wow!

TF3 has had maybe 2-3 hours of non-rain, and several hours of serious rain, with thunder for maybe 6 hours off and on in the last 12 hours, and currently tons of lightning as well as total deluge! All the great weather wants to come to Telford!

We're in TF3 and it's not stopped here, no sign of sun yet!

We've got the powder blowing in great waves, the height of the lamp-posts, but we also have what's on the ground starting to break up on the tarmac, doing a very odd "crazing" effect of breaking up into little islands, whilst what's on grass and paths remains a thick layer. ETA: the car park one is interesting as the far side is not breaking up - and that is in total shadow all day at this time of year. Where it's breaking up into little islets gets tons of sun when there is any. So I agree with others, this is retained warmth from the last ten days or so. These two pics are taken from the same window - I should have overlapped something but the right-angle corner of fence bottom-right in the car-park one is about eight foot to the left of the top-left corner of the other one!

You know 10cm IS 4" ? 2.5cm = 1" 5cm = 2" 10cm = 4" It's all a bit guesstimate with this drifting snow, though - and in my case my 4" guesstimate is even more of a guess because I'm not leaving this nice cosy bed but guessing from a top-floor window!

About 4-5 inches in Telford TF3, I reckon. And still coming down... I'm getting a dawn train north tomorrow, so if it's basically stopping this morning that works well for me, as they'll have time to get the tracks clear, etc. We may need to move the car up to the level road at the top, though, today Otherwise it'll be ice-skates at dawn tomorrow!