skifreak

Seems to be getting rather dark in Inverness, something brewing? <_<

From a IMBY perspective / Snowsports perspective the 18z GFS breakdown is very interesting. Strengthening southerly to SW winds coming in ahead of the milder air is the interesting factor, because it will blow potentially large quantities of snow of the Cairngorm Plateau and Southern aspects over the mountain into the Lee aspects to the North ie, into the Ski Area! As it starts to get milder this will continue, but snow will start to get wet as it drifts down and the FL on the 27th would stay below or just about the summits, thus this process would continue at the top of the mountain, coupled with driving heavy wet snow which would also blow down the mountain filling gullies that form the main ski runs with a layer of wetter snow that would bind the dry drifted snow from earlier. Possibly sleet or rain for a time at all but the highest levels, before colder air digs in again and hey presto a fantastic base!! Obviously too far out for such detail, but such an event with a period of very marginal very wet heavy snow on howling SW gales is what happened on the evening of Hogmanay 2000 and set up what was to turn out to be the Classic 2001 season. Obviously one storm can't make a whole season, but getting the base down into the streams and gullies is more than half the battle. There's already a promising base in the most difficult to fill places and such an outcome would really set things up nicely to build from during Jan. I know the days after Christmas will if they were to remain the same as the 18z get much gnashing of teeth, wailing and slitting of wrists, but I think I'd welcome it!

http://www.winterhighland.info/cams/aviemore/aviemorevideo.php Looks very cute at the moment!

The Loch Morlich and lower ski area and mid-station weather station on CairnGorm are on this page, with links to wind/temp graphs over the past 48hrs, plus tabular data as well: http://www.winterhighland.info/snowreports/index.php?resort=cg Summit AWS (Meto):http://www.weatheronline.co.uk/weather/maps/city?&IP=86.176.133.233&3&PRG=detail&TIME=std&LANG=en&WMO=03065&ART=temperatur&LEVEL=140 Summit AWS (HW Uni): http://www.phy.hw.ac.uk/resrev/weather.htm (not real time atm) Temp is starting to climb a bit having bottomed out at -10.5c on the lower slopes, maybe some cloud coming in meaning the snow showers might make it to the Cairngorms overnight? <_<

Temps plummeting in the Central Highlands, already down to -10c at mid-mountain on CairnGorm, -11 on the Summit (and double digit below is quite rare on the summit). The lowest Dec temperature from 1990 to 1995 was -9.6c. Lower down at Loch Morlich it's nudging towards -9c, bit nippy for those camping at Glenmore!!

A sprinkling in Aviemore this morning: Cold rain just now in Inverness, but the temperature is def on the way backdown.

With regards snow and the A9, it's wind that is more of an issue than actual snow volume usually. Drumocther esp is a bit of a barren moonscape, the wind can howl through there causing complete white-outs. However it's unusual for the A9 to be closed for any length of time, in sustained wintry weather the road is usually kept open over Drumochter with convoys operating behind ploughs during daylight hours. The road is often closed overnight in such conditions, but sustained closure for more than a day is very very rare.

-27.2 has been achieved several times, it's almost as if this is the floor of how low we can go. If we get the snow on the ground in the Highlands then get an anticyclone coming over I think we could get below -20c. Awful lot of ifs, buts and maybes between now and that potential stage though!

I don't want the 63/64 (God forbid) analogue to come off, nor the 2002/03 one, but the 2002/03 one might not be so bad if the weather events happened in a different order this time round! IE settled high spells comes after snow, not drastic thaws!! I think we could be in for a bit of a frustrating Scottish Ski Season with possibly more snow than average, but SW thaws when they set in being severe. As ever from the ski perspective it's not just about the type of weather we get, it's more often or not about the order in which we get it that makes or breaks a Scottish Ski Season and there can be surprisingly little between epic seasons and woeful seasons in terms of synoptics. A very detailed, well explained and thoroughly researched forecast. I like the overall headline message, just hope we don't get certain analogue years showing up!

If you hardwire the WS2300 you don't need batteries in the sensors (or the console), but it's a good idea to put them in the console, so if there is a power outage the console will still record and display weather data. AFAIK having batteries in the thermo-hygro sensor will reduce the drain on the console batteries if power fails even when hard wired in. Sorry can't help you on a UV sensor or the weather display software, as the WS2350 I have is running with the open source Open2300 suite of applications with a Linux PC. The Linux PC also runs a couple of webcams: All done with free open source apps, drivers and some small shell/php scripts to tie it all together.

I have a WS3600 and a WS2350. The main difference is the touch screen and that the WS3600 displays indoor and outdoor temperature at the same time, where as on the WS2350 you have to toggle the display mode by pressing the display button. Both are pretty robust, the WS3600 has survived 2 winters halfway up CairnGorm and the WS2350 one winter, spring and summer at Loch Morlich by Glenmore at 1100ft. You can see a data feed from both at www.winterhighland.info/cairngorm (though the one on the mountain has developed a problem and is not currently reporting outside data, this is thought to be flat batteries. The wind speeds recorded by this station are not reported on-line as the anemometer is unduly sheltered by CairnGorm standards and the fact it's operating in wireless mode, the prime purpose of this station was to record temperature info). It partly depends what you want to do with the weather station, but to get the anything like decent representation of wind speeds you need to wire the thermo-hygro sensor to the console. The difference is sampling every 120seconds to more frequent than 8 seconds. Even on a really wild night in Inverness when testing this setup I struggled to record a windspeed over 20mph, while wired in 20mph was recorded as max gust on a day with not much more than a breeze! If I was buying an other of these stations it would be a WS2350 everytime and I have recently taken delivery of a second WS2350, which along with a second weather station will be going on CairnGorm in the autumn. A lower slope and middle slope weather station will replace the WS3600 at the mid-station with two separate feeds, one at 2300ft and the second at 2800ft. My main reason for favouring the WS2300 is the open source linux based application suite 'open2300' which provides a variety of tools for a PC to interact with the weather station and it is far more flexible than the heavyweather software. Unlike weather display which requires heavyweather to run to collect the data, open2300 communicates directly with the station. There is a version open3600 for the WS3600, but it's not as well developed or complete and the WS23*0 series is much more common. One issue with these particular models is that they have no real concept of mean and gust wind speeds, just point speeds. I am developing a PHP script atm to interface with open2300 to use the minmax scripts to automatically keep resetting the max wind speed counter, thus providing a gust speed for the last few minutes. It also uses the history function, max speed and min speed along with frequent sampling of the weather stations current wind speed to calculate a Mean Wind Speed. If I get this all working as hoped, I'd happily offer it to anyone who wants to play around with it. Sorry, this has probably become an essay without answering your original question!

Sitting outside, overcast but bright and just a shade of 23c here in Inverness. Feels warm and muggy, quite gusty at times.

Somewhere a bit East did indeed have a good show and a silly total of rain last night between 10pm and mid-night. A96 was closed most of the night while the mess was cleared up. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/highla...nds/8155276.stm

4 strikes in about 30 seconds, still seems to be quite a gap between lightning and thunder.

Some prolonged deep, but quite distant rumbles, only faintest of flashes of lightning visible at this low point in the centre of Inverness, damn miss my old house in this weather where I looked across almost the whole place! Sky is very ominous looking and it seems to moving from the direction the thunder seems to be coming from, so maybe closing in - but it could just be echoing off buildings!

a few rumbles around Inverness just now! Four days in a row!!

Desktops shutdown and disconnected. On laptop on WiFi now. Heavy rain now as well as the rumbling, still a patch of blue sky just about overhead though, very black to the South through NW, less dark to NE but some towering clouds. Basically the weather appears to be closing in on the city centre here in Inverness in all sides. Wow! Cloud to Cloud fork over the SW sector of the city, very bright and <2 seconds to the LOUD thunder! Raining hard but not like yesterday, that was completely nuts for a bit. Also there's an EasyJet plane circling overhead, one already got hit this week coming in over the Cairngorms.

Definite though quite distant rumbling. Think I'm going to go and sit in the wooden gazebo thingy (though the big tree in the garden behind it worries me)!

I was having a shower, was like WTF is that noise... opened the window and it was RAIN!!

Any news on this? Have searched the Meto site to no avail.

Where about in Inverness are you. I'm too central thus low down to see very much in any direction, looks as if we've just had a tease here with the most intense action narrowly missing. Did see one spectacular bolt go to ground in the vauge direction of the Castle! Where I used to live had a full city wide view which was great for this kind of weather. Latest cell sounds to be getting more distant, but another installment perhaps on the way already! Pain in the rear for watching the tennis though, TV kept going off !

Just posted a bit on this in the winter review thread, guess it would have been more appropriate here. From the Winterhighland AWS at 2500ft on CairnGorm Mountain: Average April Temperature: 5.3c Max Temperature: 14.5c Low temperature: -2.7c Only 3 air frosts recorded, one of those just scraping below 0c for a couple of hours with a low of -0.6c. No Ice Days or indeed days where the average was below freezing, compared to 18 days with an average below 0c last April. This April was 3.5c warmer than last April and of course Easter was late this year! :o

Just to revisit this thread as an update on April weather on CairnGorm (at 2500ft) there were just 3 air frosts recorded, the first on the 8th as mentioned only dipped to -0.6c. The was a further frost on the 18th and then the 22nd, there were no ice days and not even a single day with an average below 0c. That contrasts to last April which had 18 days where the daily average was below 0c. The monthly average temperature for April 2009 was 3.5c higher than April 2009.

Glad you found it interesting. The number of air frosts at the mid-station doubled last night, maybe their like the number 22 bus and 2 or 3 will now come along on the trot - we shall see. There was a temperature inversion though so I believe no air frost at the Summit. So thanks to it being so dry and generally not much wind, despite the mild air CairnGorm didn't run out of snow and will close due to lack of skiers rather than snow. Still plenty enough for fun in the Ptarmigan Bowl: http://www.winterhighland.info/pix/display...&height=455 Sorry, can't embed the image, the forum doesn't seem to not like the dynamic style url when used in image tags. This has been a season off two halves and what's quite unusual is that when this happens, it's usually the other way around with either dry or mild winter, then big snow falls giving a classic late season through spring.

A very strange winter for the Scottish Mountains, but commercially successful for the Ski Areas, esp CairnGorm and despite lack of spring snow in the East for Glenshee, the snow was there in early and mid Feb when it matters most. A very good start to the ski season on Friday 31st October at the Lecht and 1st Novmeber at CairnGorm. Generally a good first half to the season esp in the East, with Snowmageddon in the central Highlands early Feb with a mind boggling fall of snow early one morning that shut the A9 down completely between Aviemore and Inverness (unheard off) and scenes I don't recall seeing of large numbers of trees simply snapped in half littering the A9 at Daviot and Moy Moor. That weekend in early February people were easily tree skiing to Loch Morlich at CairnGorm, but the much rarer holy grail of Scottish Skiing was also notched up, Summit to Car park riding at Nevis Range, almost 3700ft of vertical descent to a base just a whisker over 300ft on the West Coast. Indeed on CairnGorm at the outset of the first spell of half-term hols in Feb things were getting close to the 2001 snow levels, but the base wasn't as well consolidated and the all over snow cover that made virtually the whole mountain skiable on CairnGorm (good while it lasted) meant that much snow had fallen without much wind, something of a mixed blessing or even a curse to some as it gives a general cover rather than the focused large build up that normally occurs in the natural gullies and snow fields and fenced ski runs (and is better able to withstand thaws). However winter has been noticeable only by it's absence since mid-Feb. This means the season has not been so good commercially in the West where due to a mix of climate and terrain the season gets going later than the Eastern areas, but last longer into spring. That the all over cover on CairnGorm didn't drift into the gullies and snow fields before the thaw set in undoubtedly means the season will end markedly earlier than had that snow been concentrated into such areas. Indeed when this was typed Nevis Range and CairnGorm Mountain both expect Sun 19th April to be the final day of the 2009 Ski Season and Glencoe would be very lucky to get in another weekend after that given the current model output. The Lack of winter since mid Feb is clearly exemplified by one hideous fact in the temperature stats from 2500ft on CairnGorm Mountain this April. So far this month the temperature has not once dropped to -1c, the only air frost recorded was for a few brief hours on the 8th when the air temperature managed to struggle down to -0.6c. If the latest GFS output is anywhere near the mark that could well stand as the only April air frost recorded on CairnGorm at mid-mountain level this year, that would be truly