Pennine Ten Foot Drifts

Quite heavy here in Huddersfield just now, actually settling slightly

Isn't there a theory that a warmer atmosphere = more moisture held aloft = more cloud, especially at certain latitudes ? Added to that the theory that a warmer Arctic relative to mid-latitudes is affecting the jet stream in summer, i.e. keeping it more active and further south ? Put the two together and it doesn't make for good reading if you're a UK dweller who enjoys sunshine and long hot summers................

Its days like this that remind me what I'm missing since moving down into Huddersfield, been snowing reasonably heavily all morning, but just now turned to sleety rain, all there is to show for it is a cm or so on grass and cars, but just spoke to a friend who still lives up in Scapegoat Hill and they've got 8-10 cms and it's still coming down. Amazing what a difference 150m and an urban environment has.

I think the most recent model output has shifted things a bit further north, and if past experience is to go by once that starts as a trend it usually persists, but still a day or two to go before things start to firm up.

This would be a lovely chart for us if it came off. Unfortunately it's well into FI so chances of it actually happening are close to zero, but hey ho, still nice to look at !

M62 looking interesting at Scammonden

Indeed, keeping an eye on the radar, been OK here so far, a few cms, all surfaces covered including all side roads. If it freezes overnight I'm glad it's Sunday tomorrow so no commute !

Settling on side roads now, helped that ground was pretty much dry before it started. Not sure it'll amount to much though.

Yes I understand that Nick, and there is slight potential for some front edge snow Sunday night into Monday morning: but beyond that the overall pattern has been fairly consistent over the past few days. Now of course that whole pattern might be based on incorrect modelling in the shorter term, but right now as it stands the possibility of developments from where we are now leading to anything significantly cold in the next few weeks seems to be the outside bet.

I've got to admit I'm struggling to understand where people are seeing positives at the moment ? I know there's a lot of 'uncertainty', but twas ever thus in mid to FI model range, and all I'm seeing in any of the models beyond T144 is a generally consistent agreement, and a firming up of a trend which started some days ago i.e. increasingly higher pressure to our south and east, lower pressure across the whole GIN corridor, meaning air sourced predominantly from our west/south west, and an increasingly organised PV over N. Canada - none of which adds up to any real cold for the UK. For example, GFS and ECM at T144: Then further out: If anything the ECM is nearer a Bartlett than anything else in FI !!!: Now I know these are charts from one run, but they pretty much encapsulate the way the models have been developing for a number of days now i.e. a steady backing away from any real pressure rises to our north or east, which is generally speaking a pre-requisite for proper UK cold. Of course the UKMO has been a little different to GFS and ECM recently, but it just seems to be playing catch-up for some reason at the moment, in that it's been following the other two more or less, but always a few days later. So all in all, I must say I really don't see much hope of any cold deep enough to lead to widespread UK snowfall this side of February at the earliest, unfortunately.

It seems to me that now we have an 'exceptional cold spell' in relatively recent memory, ('09/10), I think we're almost in danger of spoiling this upcoming cold spell by over-comparison. I meant to post last night, but a long day at work leading to 'snooze on the couch syndrome' put paid to that. However, whilst any notable country wide cold remains beyond the truly reliable it seems to me that all we can say at this stage is that a build of pressure in the N.Atlantic/Greenland region is looking pretty likely from the middle of next week, with lower pressure over Scandi/Europe, which leads to significantly lower temperatures than we've been used to. But, from what I'm seeing i certainly don't see the kind of country-wide snowfall we had in '09/10 being repeated. The reason I say this is that, taking the 00z ECM as an example, at T120 it shows this: And the GFS 00z at T144: To me these remind me of previous cold spells where precipitation is either fairly limited, or marginal for lowland areas further south than Scotland. And as the GH develops and the troughs fill, coinciding with arrival of genuinely colder temps precipitation starts to die off, leading to ppt charts like this, which we've seen many times in this kind of set up: Now I know that the general rule is 'get the cold in first' etc etc, and that we shouldn't trust the GFS ppt charts, but I disagree to a certain extent in that they certainly give a flavour of likely ppt patterns for a given set-up, and to me right now this set-up suggests a few things: 1. The 'real deal' cold is still beyond the reliable time frame, so there are still ample opportunities for subtle near term changes to have significant consequences for better or worse in terms of the extent and depth of the cold we will end up experiencing 2. If we do get the deep cold, it doesn't look to me, at least as is currently being modelled, that there will be many 'dumpings' associated with it, certainly not for more lowland southern Britain anyway. 3. It certainly doesn't look to me like '09/10 MKII !

Yep, Blackburn game confirmed postponed

Quite a nice squall line over southern England at the moment:

Does that make both October and November record breakers, and by unprecedented margins ?

A couple of things are catching my eye on the latest GFS output: Firstly, the first 'proper' Atlantic storm of the season (at least that will affect a larger swathe of the UK) as we go through Thursday evening and into Friday, firstly affecting primarily North and West Scotland on Thursday night, with gusts potentially topping 80 mph in the most exposed spots: Then transferring to cover a wider swathe of northern Britain on Friday morning, with the strongest winds across northern England, where gusts could top 60 mph on coasts and higher areas: And then a few days later on Sunday a complete change as a ridge of high pressure nudges across most of the UK, which may well make for a very pleasant day indeed for more southerly and easterly areas, with temperatures possibly getting up to 16 or 17 degrees:

After an absolutely stunning day yesterday when there was not a cloud in the sky all day, and it was t-shirt and shorts for a walk across Marsden Moor, today it's thick fog, cool and damp, talk about chalk and cheese...............

Whilst obviously climate change denial in terms of individual free speech is never going to be criminalised, should deliberate mis-information and/or witholding information be a crime ?: http://insideclimatenews.org/news/15092015/Exxons-own-research-confirmed-fossil-fuels-role-in-global-warming

Here we go again..................... http://www.yorkshireeveningpost.co.uk/news/trending/weather-warning-yorkshire-set-for-months-of-snow-1-7511317 Sorry, double post, didn't see Bryan's post above. How do I delete posts ?

No-one's saying the OPI was wrong, just that the fact the OPI was predicting a negative AO, (which as Pete pointed out above is actually just saying that pressure in the Arctic will be above average), in no way justified the somewhat over-excited conclusions people drew from it's index figure last October. In other words, although the Index figure suggested winter 14/15 was more likely to have had a higher than average proportion of negative AO phases, the actual correlation of that probability to it occuring was in fact only somewhere between 55% and 60%, so not the high level of correlation the reaction to last year's OPI figure suggested was the case. Nothing wrong the OPI as such, the error was in the interpretation of it's output................ And just to reiterate, the AO, and the NAO, are not weather phenomena in themselves, they do not cause weather patterns, they are simply methods of describing pressure phases in those areas, so when the AO is negative it simply means pressure in the Arctic is higher than average, and the reason that we get excited by that is because, in winter, favourably placed high pressure in that region often results in cold weather for the UK, (the fabled Greenland high for example).

So, 70% of 83%, if my maths is right the OPI percent correlation with the CET average is 58.1% ? So in fact not much higher than 50/50, and that's to correlate with the CET, not necessarily to give a significantly below average month........... When you actually break down the correlations, the question starts to loom 'what was all the fuss about last year' ??? Perhaps less of a fault with the OPI, and more a fault of peoples tendency to over-excitement when any kind of predictor seems to be suggesting it'll be a cold winter ??? T'was ever thus.........................

Well, they haven't got long now to get the OPI website back up and running.................. https://app.til.it/opi/

I find it hard to understand why some are so fixated by apparent inaccuracies regarding predictions about future events which have in hindsight not always turned out to be 100% correct, which somehow also proves that current data backed evidence is also incorrect ??? Just because a predicition made 5/10/20 years ago hasn't turned out to be spot on does not mean that fact based evidence collected, analysed and published is also fair game to be ignored, does it ? It's like someone predicting your house will burn down in one hour, and you then feeling smug because in the end it took two hours to burn down - your house is still ashes but hey, never mind that, you have the moral/intellectual high ground regarding the accuracy of the prediction, and that's what matters...................

I think regardless of the nuances of the different models, barring a fairly dramatic 'volte face' there is fairly strong and consistent model agreement that there is no solid settled spell, (and certainly no sustained summer heat), on the horizon, and that what we have in store is generally unsettled, general breezy, and predominantly at or below average temperatures, and any pleasant interludes will be just that, transient and scatterred. In other words, proper summer, (at least in terms of what most people would expect 'proper summer' to look like), doesn't look like it's going to arrive this May.

Regular snow showers this morning, covering on grass but otherwise melting as it lands. Definitely nothing to get excited about though.

And in terms of overall performance, just how much 'better' than the GFS model is the ECMWF model anyway ? For example, if the level of data available from the ECMWF had been the same as the GFS, would the Model Output Discussion thread post accuracy, in terms of those posts by the likes of Tamara et al who try and use all available data outputs to produce some kind of mid-range outlook, have been much different ? Personnally I doubt it.