BleakMidwinter

Thankyou - I had read references to a second SSW, and hadn't realised it's counted as all-the-one-event if it's closer in time.

With discussion of how the models do or don't cope with specific sets of circumstances, I was wondering how often there have been two, or three, SSW events in a short period? Presumably the models' accuracy is honed on experience, so to speak, so the more common a weather set-up, the more often the models experience it, so the more accurate they get at that specific set-up - or have I got that wrong? I was just wondering how often they've had to try to interpret this kind of SSW+SSW before - anyone able to enlighten me?

Hi and welcome, Andy - I think the only definite thing to be said about the weather for this week coming is "wait and see"...! It's going to be icy and bitterly cold and very windy, those are pretty definite - but the snowfall... the models just are not reliably good at this particular set-up...

Welcome back, Bish! Sorry to hear the reason for your absence - {{hugs}} if you accept 'em, sympathetic handshake if you don't. It might be a tad nippy, I believe. Maybe a little light frost sometime next week in the Solihull area...

Here's what I've just sent my friends: "Right, the weather in the coming week: 1. SNOW: do NOT rely on a forecast saying anything about snow. All the models are known to be rubbish at assessing how far inland this type of snow pushes ('convective snow' formed by very cold air incoming over relatively-warm water), so every snow-forecast at present is real guesswork. The basics are reasonably sure, although even those are liable to change at short notice. a) Mon-Wed: it's incoming from the East, but is likely to form 'streamers' well inland following the landscape in specific areas. It was a 'Cheshire Gap streamer' that gave us our foot of snow in Dec, well inland. There are known Thames streamers (Kent, Sussex), Wash streamers (E Midlands, E.Anglia, parts of NE Greater London), Humber streamers (potentially us in Shropshire)... so "east coast snow" can mean a lot of inland places too. b) Friday: there's a low coming up from the SW. Again, it's not certain by any means (it might even mean heavy rain for Cornwall) but the potential is there for exceptional snow for the West Country, Wales and the West Midlands (yep, we might get it from both directions!) c) quantities: normally the rough estimate is 1mm of precipitation = 1cm of snow. If it's a particularly dry, powdery snow that multiples by about three, so 1mm=3cm. So if a forecast claims your area will get 4cm of snow, don't think airily that it won't affect anything because it could turn out to be 12cm. It's all unknowable til it lands on your head, I'm afraid. 2. COLD: it is going to be cold. Wed-Fri are not expected to go above freezing. It is exceptionally rare for most parts of non-hill, non-rural Britain to have 72 hours of ice-days. The Easterly wind is going to add a wind-chill factor beyond what is normal in British wintry weather. They reckon the wind-chill can take another 5 or 6 degrees off the actual temperature, so if your area is forecast for a balmy tropical -2, be aware it may well feel more like -7 or -8. Winds are forecast to be gusting up to 40-50mph for much of Britain, specially on Friday when the heaviest snow is expected for the biggest part of the island. Snow at 30mph is termed a blizzard, so it's really not going to be much like ordinary snowfall. Whether or not you get any snow in your area, you WILL get very bitter cold for days on end. I hope most of you know this but: open curtains if it's sunny, to get the solar gain to warm a room, but otherwise keep curtains closed in a room you re not in at the moment; close curtains before dusk, ie keep the warmth in; if you only have pretty, fashionable voile panels, then seriously consider fixing blankets up over part or all of the window to prevent heat loss. Put towels or spare clothes along the bottoms of doors to stop draughts, although if you have a gas fire then make sure you do have safe ventilation! If you find it's cold indoors, then to hell with what you look like, get your head and lower legs and hands covered, as it makes a real difference (your grandmother was right!) - wear a woolly hat or a light scarf over your head, wear fingerless gloves (if you don't have any, consider sacrificing an old pair of thick socks: cut the toes off and slide the remaining tub over your wrists and forearms); two pairs of thin socks are warmer than one pair of thick; add another pair of socks and tuck your trouser-legs in to stop draughts going up! If you are on the East of the island, be prepared for almost anything, I'm afraid. If you're in the southern/western part then Friday could hold almost anything. If you can work from home on Friday 2nd March, it would probably be a really good idea to do so. If you have neighbours/ family/ friends who are elderly/ less able/ pregnant/ have small offspring or anything else that may make it more difficult for them to be out and about in bitterly cold weather, do please check whether they want any shopping done, etc." (Yes, you're right, I am a dreadful Mother Hen, fussing round after them all )

You've got it - this is a huge Easterly and it means lots of 'normal' weather stuff doesn't apply. For instance, accumulations - apparently the usual thing is 1mm of precipitation = 1cm of snow - but with this dry powdery stuff that's typical of an Easterly, they reckon 1mm of ppn produces more like 3cm of snow. So a 4cm snow forecast could result in 12cm of snow...

I remember the Great Drought of 1976 as I was born and lived in Essex til I was 10 - but when I moved aged 10 to Edinburgh in 1979, I found nobody up there knew what I was on about as there'd been no drought there... In Essex, I had only seen snow once, a few mm briefly, but I moved up in time for a humdinger of a 79-80 winter with more snow than I could ever have wished for. "Great!" I thought. "So this is what Edinburgh winters are like!" Then I had to wait another 31 years for the next one like that bcause Edinburgh has its own very very weird little microclimate system... But the Big Snow, that was something to have lived through. Started snowing in late Nov 2010 and snowed every day til February. I was first up each morning and had to sweep and salt the paths every single morning, clear another inch or three inches or six inches off the birdbath so I could thaw it with a kettle of boiling water, then brush that out and refill with cold water. I stopped bothering to measure snow at 16 inches or so. It was incredible. I loved it, but a lot of people struggled and that was without deep-freeze temps. It was snowy but not bitterly bitterly cold, iirc. My Mum's hanging basket of dwarf chrysanthemums suffered too. Prettier at night Sorry, it insists on showing you the cornice coming off the scullery roof twice...

I'm meant to be meeting a friend for elevenses on Friday, both of us walking 1-2 miles to reach the cafe... I've suggested we wait til thursday to confirm I know I can do it in any snow, because on Fri 8th Dec I dragged my poor chap on his day off over the hill path to collect some stuff, and coming back we did just fine in total whiteout and the heaviest snow I think i've ever walked in, with a 40+mph northerly in our faces at that. But it's possibly not fair to expect a friend to do that just for a cuppa and a caramel shortbread and my company while we knit It's going to b watch-and-wait and in my case jump up and down getting ridiculously excited

Me too. Mind you, I did let the Old Dears at my Sewing Group know about the Dec 8-10 snowfall, which turned out to be well over a foot in 48 hours, and I only told 'em two days before it started and they knew nothing about any possible snow. Now I've let them know, last Wed, about the extreme cold incoming and heavily emphasised snow impossible to predict in those circs at that timeframe, but be prepared... so if this does come off, I'm probably stuck for years with being asked whether it'll be dry and sunny for Our Jeanie's Party because "you know all about the weather, eh?" :o

Same here! But one of the women from my local Sewing Group lives within blizzard-walking distance and has an old house with a wood-stove, so I've told her if our electric seriously goes off and no gennie-truck, then we'll walk up to stay at hers

I made a batch of crumpets today, and have spent the week systematically stocking up our (very small) freezer with a range of homemade "ready-meals" in single portions, so we can have quick hot meals pinged in the microwave... And I've got my boots dubbined and lots of woolly socks knitted

But quite a few people in here have made the point that this is highly likely to be powdery dry snow which is thought to approximate c.3cm snow to 1mm of precipitation, rather than the usual 1mm ppn=1cm snow In which case, triple everything...?

Ummm... (yes, I know, out in FI )

I wanted to pop in to wave and say hi anyway, but also with a question... If we have 1-2 weeks of severe cold, followed by a colder-than-average rest-of-March, what does that do to UK farming? I don't know enough to know whether soil warms back up again quickly, whether sowing of arable is later than March anyway, whether lambing and other beasts are seriously affected by bitter cold this late on...? I know some of you (!) have serious knowledge of this stuff and I'd be really grateful if you can steer me in the direction of some answers... Enjoy the snaw if you get snaw! (we got a very abnormal 28cm in 48 hours in early Dec here, oops, sorry, didn't mean to bring it with me when I moved south )

Cameron, you should go and look in the Scotland regional thread - I started in there when I lived up in Scotland and imo the Kilted Thread has the most accurate regional people going. You'll get a really good answer in there, specific for your region of Scotland too. Tell 'em I sent you and they might even buy you a pint

It's really uncertain - apparently this kind of snow, convective snow caused by cold air over warmer seas, is a real problem for the models - they forecast it but apparently are notoriously poor at estimating how far inland it goes. For us over in Telfordgrad, I'm expecting nothing much til mid-week. Then we may get an inch to look pretty or we may get a foot or two...! At least our Council has had practice recently at dealing with a foot of snow! So much is uncertain in this - we know we have cold weather arriving, deep cold at the start, and deep deep cold by midweek, but nobody knows whether this will be a 4-5 day event or a 3-week event... Put food out for wildlife, especially please try to keep putting out unfrozen water for them and if you walk past frozen ponds use a stick or stone to smash holes in the ice - and look after neighbours. I really hope we have a dramatic and exciting week out of this, rather than a month of real suffering for some...

The Mon/Tues is only the first wave of deep cold - they reckon about 36 hours later the deep deep deep cold arrives and the Midlands are currently expected to get some snows then, although how much is far from certain...

How much are the modes in agreement about the potential for 2-3 weeks? Because it looks to novice-me like most of the recent stuff has had some kind of suggestion that this is 2-3 weeks, not 4-5 days. I don't suppose you could do one of your summarising things of how many models weakly or strongly suggest 1 week and how many suggest 2 or 3, could you? (And if schools are closed, people are off work in every other job looking after their kids... etc., etc.)

If some of the more dramatic daytime minima forecast actually happen, you could probably get there on foot, if you're any good on ice-skates...

Uncharted charts, eh? Every time I think the next run will be less exciting, it's goes the other way to be even more exciting... And what's even better for me, is that the last few days I have been able to learn SO MUCH more than in the last few years, because people have really been discussing points, posting charts and explaining what the thing is in this chart that backs their theory, or posting a series of charts to show how something develops, or summarising a whole run into percentages for this, that and the other... THANKYOU ALL!

Wooohoo, look what Steve Murr just posted in the Model thread "heavy snow tracking across the midlands to wales !"

I'm smiling as I read that because Jan '87 was my 18th birthday with quite a bit of snow, and me and my pals met up in town in one of the pubs in Edinburgh's Old town, in our pyjamas, with cuddly toys and pillows, obviously, to pile back to mine for a pyjama party... at some point we went outside for a snowball fight, up on a terrace walkway over the road at first-floor level - a few snowballs went astray and hit folk going in the next-door rival pub, who threw them back (as they thought) at the people going in our pub, and... well.. basically in a few minutes there were about sixty people having a snow-riot and then the police turned up with blues and twos, and those of us up on the terrace just quietly went off to another pub, returning just before last orders to collect our pillows and teddy-bears from behind the bar We had to make our own entertainment in them days...

Many thanks... While we're at it - it's ARPEGE - it's possibly the most often mis-spelt word in here Action de Recherche Petite Echelle Grande Echelle - roughly, Research Tool, small scale, large scale. Apege, aprege, arpge, aprage... I think mostly there's an 'a' on the front, but...! Sorry - I know mostly we all know what is meant, but since Seasonality had mentioned ICON's spelling, I couldn't resist the chance to mention ARPEGE's spelling

[removed charts to save filling up the page!] Thankyou so much for this - it REALLY helps novices like me to have the explanation of the range of clusters. It makes it clear that any one cluster is meaningless, but the range of clusters give patterns which are meaningful. I don't think I'd properly understood just how that all worked before, despite several years trying to follow discussion in here! Thankyou!!

Next weekend meaning 24-25th? That's before it starts... the following weekend, who knows. You might be buried under fifteen foot of the stuff or it may all be cold but dry... or raining!