skifreak

That raises a further question as to whether that consideration is a matter for SEPA / EA flood warning systems as opposed to weather warnings? At the other end of the warning matrix there is an issue that Red Rain warnings cover where the rain falls, while obviously that rain has impacts until it reaches the coast and is in the sea, but that seems to be regarded as a matter for the flood warning systems rather than weather warnings. I realise there isn't a perfect way of doing this, but there does seem to be some inconsistencies in the current arrangements and in my opinion the over issuance of yellow warnings in winter for light snow, frost, fog etc when it is routine winter weather devalues the warning matrix as people no longer seem to grasp that a yellow warning could be a warning of something really bad coming down the line!

Is there a case for: Yellow - Adverse Weather Amber - Severe Weather Red - Extreme Weather Rather than the current matrix or the rigid Irish criteria for weather warning categories, something more akin to how the Met Office defines heatwaves, with thresholds for each region. These thresholds themselves can thus take account of the extent to whether a weather event is unusual for a given a location and factor in the severity of impacts. At present we actually have what is effectively a 3D matrix represented as a 2D grid, where the X axis showing likelihood has to account for both the likelihood of the given weather event actually occurring and if it does occur the likelihood of the weather event actualling causing the impacts stated for the specified warning area.

But it doesn’t necessarily need to rise by 7°c. If other conditions are favourable tropical cyclones have formed over cooler waters. Hurricane Vince formed over waters around 22-23°c, and made landfall in Spain as a tropical cyclone. Ophelia got pretty close to achieving that in Ireland. Combine the two scenarios and it doesn’t look impossible, and it’s only likely to get more possible as time goes on.

Ophelia got fairly close to making landfall as a tropical cyclone.

Pedantic geek point - but High Speed Trains aka HSTs are being allowed, but give you they are approaching 50years old! As for the class 80x and Voyagers, sea water and rheostatic brakes don’t mix. If Dawlish was electrified the 80x might be OK. Class 380s and 385s don’t die at Saltcoats, the limit is when debris striking trains could do serious damage!

I was supposed to be travelling from Fort William to London on the Sleeper tomorrow (Thursday) evening. Plug was pulled on that service early afternoon. Now on a WHL service towards Queen Street to catch tonight’s Lowlander sleeper from Glasgow, got the last cabin on it which was fortunate! My wheels are in London and I need to be there from lunchtime Friday through the weekend, so decided to bail while the going was good in case any problems develop on the WCML later tomorrow or Friday morning!

Currently trundling up the West Highland Line. Bit of frost on grass when we emerged from the Queen Street tunnel, foggy along the Clyde, but with the height gained through Helensburgh Upper in bright sun sunshine above very low mist at Garelochead. Beautiful autumn day on Loch Lomondside.

Had a look at the further details! Are the Met Office forecasting rain or Armageddon!

Upto 30cm of snowfall could land on the Cairngorm Plateau, before temperatures rise substantially and the heavy precipitation keeps on going. This could aggravate flooding risks in some spots as the transient snowfall is merely storing up water to give 2 days of heavy precipitation going into the watercourses at once!

23°c spread on ensembles by mid October for Fort William! This one caught my eye…

This might be a dumb question... but why do we have a named storm for a yellow weather warning?

Impressive cold front

@Kirkcaldy Weather shared Met Office maps above and on the subject of rainfall, having driven up the Great Glen earlier today, I don't think I've seen Loch Lochy so obviously low before. The River Ness is notably low in Inverness, but I'd say not the lowest I've seen it. However on the drive up the glen I did see something I don't recall seeing before and that is the River Ness entirely below the rim of the Dochgarroch Weir, there is only any flow at all because of opened sluice gates. To rather underline the point, from SEPA: The level of Loch Ness is below the lowest previously recorded. The River Ness at Ness-side has a low of 0.31m which I believe was recorded in 1995, it is currently twice that, but changes to the riverbed will vary the year to year minimum depths for the same amount of water flow, so the Loch Ness figure is probably more insightful to where we are.

There's a particularly deep level of hell reserved for courgettes.

The point about hydrogen ICE cars is not wrong. It is an absurd route to go down for the overwhelming majority of road vehicles, hydrogen ICE or gas turbines will only have a very niche role - possibly hydrogen gas turbines on non electrified train lines potentially. An internal combustion engine running on hydrogen is less efficient than on conventional petrol, if you can get around 20 to 25% efficiency you are doing good. Fuel cells offer better efficiency, but require even more expensive and relatively rare resources than straight EVs. If you had a tidal power farm feeding an electrolysis plant to generate the hydrogen, the turbine to rubber wheel efficiency of a fuel cell hydrogen car is going to be less than 30%. For an internal combustion engine burning hydrogen the figure is going to be around half that, somewhere in the 10 to 15% efficiency from turbine to rubber wheel. Hydrogen will certainly have a role as an energy storage medium and will have some transport uses for sure, but it certainly is not the big solution it is sometimes made out to be. Straight EV's are also far better in an urban environment for air quality, burning hydrogen in an internal combustion engine is still going to produce oxides of nitrogen.

Norway seems to manage just fine. [quote]Electric cars themselves are not that efficient at the moment due to production cost (takes about 30 years of using green produced electric for them to become "green"), while we are using mixed energy sources they are in many ways just as bad as an ICE car. [/quote] This is just nonsense. Even if we were producing 100% of the electricity from fossil fuels, large scale combined cycle thermal power stations are significantly more efficient than individual ice engines. It’s why hydrogen ICE is not going to be the way cars go.

I’ve been following the huge Californian ski season (only from afar sadly). Several resorts near Lake Tahoe are around the 600” mark for the season. I was living there from Dec 2004 to late May 2006 and the 2005 season saw 854” of snowfall recorded at Kirkwood, CA. It’s now a bit ahead of 2005, but it’s struck me how similar this season is here in Scotland to 2005 too. The best description of it was ‘short and sweet’. It had its moments where fairly deep cold allowed decent conditions particularly on CairnGorm with pretty modest snow totals. The season looked as if it was going to take off the first half of March before quickly unravelling again. The last day of snowsports was 28th March with just the Ptarmigan Tow on CairnGorm. A big week of snow appears to have evaporated in the models over the past 36 hours, it has similarities to this stage of 2005. So what’s the big picture drivers or teleconnections to that match this year to 2005?

It's all over the place, I can find snow totals for any of the ski areas ranging from a couple more cm to over 50cm depending on model / ensemble member etc. For Aviemore on the GFS ensembles earlier there was a 30mb spread in surface pressure by Thursday night and an 19.2ºc spread in 850hpa temperatures by Saturday!

Some stupid snow figures for the Northern Cairngorms and North West Sutherland in various overnight model runs. If the alignment is right there will be some impressive convection over the Moray Firth to get the moisture into the flow to slam into the Northern 'Gorms if it is as cold aloft as being suggested. Sadly a trend to the Western areas getting not much in the foreseeable, indeed I'm beginning to think there could be more change of lift served snowsports at Yad Moss or Weardale by this time next week than Glencoe or Nevis Range! If CairnGorm gets a good fall of snow they are going to clean up this season with market share and HIE will be able to blow their own trumpet about how amazing they are and how epicly clever they were to spend upwards of £26million bodging together a funicular railway viaduct ! So is it wrong to hope if it snows a lot on CairnGorm, it snows a stupid amount and buries the bloody funicular out of site so HIE can't be smug!

From a Scottish Skier’s perspective, I’d start the worst year possible as: Jan 1990 Feb 1989 Mar 2012 Apr 2007 Depending on what transpired at the end of the preceding year, that sort of combination would likely equate to seeing the first 4 months of the year with no lift served snowsports in Highland Scotland. Given the 1989/90 season didn’t see any lifts turn to mid Feb (even then a very limited start), a Nov 89 / Dec 89 start to the worst season possible would give a complete season long wipeout. Though I can’t recall anything about those two months, other than there could not have been any significant snow on the mountains. Feb 89 was chosen over Feb 90 because the later did deliver snow in the second half of the month, while Feb 89 delivered biblical rain (and wind if that is a thing) including the flood which took out the Ness [Rail] Viaduct and put the start of the CairnGorm ski road under several feet of the River Spey, greatly diminishing already not great snow cover on the mountains in the process. However, in 68 seasons of commercialised mechanical uplift for snowsports in Scotland a no uplift season has never happened. Even some of the worst seasons have come good somewhere, for some time, 1998 and 2012 I am particularly looking at you! March 2012 was a historic first, the first time not a single ski tow spun for skiers in the entire month of March since commercial uplift begun at Glencoe in February 1956. Having had a CairnGorm season pass in 2012, despair turned into something spectacular with countless days of fresh tracks and epic lines through April and May. From available historical records, the worst season to date remains 1964, Glenshee opened 7 days that winter and following on from 1962/63, it ultimately irrevocably burst the bubble of the newly opened Mar Lodge ski area that was built in the summer of 63 following on from that winter! It did operate the odd day in the 64/65 season, but ultimately the ski tows were dismantled and moved to Glenshee as the now defunct Trainer Tow (used to be beside the Claybokie Poma) and the still existent Cairnwell T-bar.

Apologies to mods for a slight thread hijack - but is an equivalent map available for North America?

Just leaving this here.

It was windy at Glencoe as evidenced by this SAIS photo from earlier! Then it proceeded from windy to just completely stupid judging by the graph!

Extremely grim from the snowsports perspective, it's PLUS 5ºc at the summit of Meall a' Bhuiridh at Glencoe, 9ºc at the base of the Access Chair. The rain radar is biblical and there's already been stupid gusts of wind. Already a 91mph at the summit and 102mph at Tower 2 of the Access Chair (just above the top of the carpark), with the wind speeds set to progressively increase for the next 4-6 hours. When the direction and speeds line up, the wind can either accelerate down the front face of the mountain and/or rip round the subsidiary top of Creag Dubh - sometimes alternating the ferocious gusts by 90º, meaning at the base you get it by it from one direction, then when you think it might be easing only to hear a roar coming from the other direction!

It was however a pretty epic ski season, the Ciste Gully on CairnGorm still nearly full length on 1st July for those prepared to hike up. This seems to be heading towards the winter that never reached the mountains, apart from CairnGorm in Nov/Dec when they weren't interested! Currently in the carpark at Glencoe wide awake because of the thunderous roar of the mountain river.