pureasthedriven

DOWNGRADE!

Everton, Burnley, Sheff Utd, Palace. 9 points min required. Feb will define our season.

In the battle of the the ‘crap apps’ my iPhone app beat the MetO app hands down during the snow day a fortnight ago. Currently phone app shows the snow transition as midnight for Gatwick (MetO 4am).

No real elevation then. Be interesting to see if anything notable reaches the Horley swamp.

What part of Reigate?

And the winner is the iPhone. Light snow in Horley, as per.

It’s an App Off! MetO shows nothing for Horley, iPhone has snow 10, 11 and 1am. Which of either will be right? for the record, I don’t put any faith in these. But the phone app showed today’s snow last Saturday. Quite good for trends.

Thanks. 2/3 hours of snow in Gatwick this morning. Up and out and great fun. Thaw set in this afternoon but first time my little ones really remember snow (last time three years ago). Such a rarity. Such a gift. Let’s hope Feb delivers. I stopped model watching for the winter a fortnight ago. Too stressful. Checked my phone app on Thursday, wondered if it would be right. It was.

But where are you, sir?

Horley is invariably crap for snow and this has happened in just the last five mins. So I would’ve thought any decent elevation around here and it’ll be a fun couple of hours or so. IMG_2821.MOV

Actually more like graupel/hail. Whatever it is it’s rapidly settling, so Reigate Hill should be fun for a bit.

Lovely - where are you though? Locations don’t show in the phone.

Light snow just started in Horley, Gatwick.

Desperate stuff. And more to come.

Wet ‘snow’ in Horley Gatwick. I have 10p flakes. But I can also hear the raindrops...

Give or take then. Makes me feel a little better about all your great stuff in the MOD thread now, now I now you’re not getting any either In the nicest way, of course...

Are you a fellow Gatwickeer, Chiono?

That chart has changed since I posted the above!

Liking the lower heights over N.Italy, too.

I like this post (despite being a resident next to Gatwick - I don’t even get my planes any more! ??). Here’s a thing though. A good run for the ‘south’ usually means an absolute belter for the ‘north’, given what that set up would entail.

To be fair, it’s a hobby for most and at least there are some spending lots of time sticking their head above the parapet to give detailed forecasts. That said, even the very knowledgeable posters haven’t been able to provide anything more accurate than what’s on offer from the BBC or, to be honest, my iPhone app in terms of a ten day trend! The models have been mostly consistently wrong when calling proper cold (as in for week+ forecasting) and Exeter has changed tune more times than Boris. That’s four consecutive MetO updates that have basically flipped. So no one has been accurate unless they’re just prepared to stick to one or two days, like most BBC TV forecasts - and a trained chimp can do that. I’m sure some forecasters can claim some success - but in terms of how the broad scale pattern has been modelled since mid-Dec? Wrong, wrong and thrice wrong. No doubt someone from northern climes will say ‘we’ve had four snow events already and it’s only mid-Jan’. But we don’t live in the north. And it used to snow in the south. Much is made of 2018 but before that it was 2013. Give or take a few slushy days, I can only recall three cold and reasonably snowy spells in the last 7 years and two of those were in 2013! Says it all. It’s gutting and an inescapable fact that winter in the UK - especially down here - simply isn’t what it used to be. Only recently the MetO said that in thirty odd years, snow could be basically ‘extinct’ in southern Britain. They just might be right...

Weeks of this to come. Weeks.

And a soaking wet aberration at that...

Yep apologies - was model related, just a very old one!

My point being... As a rule, and especially in my location (albeit this is not about IMBY) to get falling and dare I say settling snow, the cold needs to be ‘notable’ - significantly below average. Not exceptional, but notable. 0-2c with precipitation and low dew points is unusual (increasingly so) and of note. What the other poster says about the ‘comparable’ 1940 chart is where I was headed. Synoptics very similar, markedly less cold. It took less to deliver snow historically than it does today, no question.