skifreak

Damn it, no sooner did I post that and the link went down!

A good view on CairnGorm today! Live Cam: As this thread has been renamed to 2008 could the posts in the Scottish Mountain Snow 2008 thread I started in November be moved in here as it's been locked? Image from earlier:

There is some evidence of small glacial presence in the Northern Corries of CairnGorm Mountain as late as the end of the 18th Cent. I'd settle for being able to ski Coire Cas till mid-summers day regularly!

It's more size and thus having the volume and weight of snow for nivation to progress far enough to form glacial ice. Oh to have the situation where we could debate whether it was a snowpatch or a glacier! :huh:

The highest licensed premisses with a full public house licence is the Ptarmigan on CairnGorm Mountain at 3600ft (1097m).

Some stats from the Summit AWS on CairnGorm Mountain:

Should have added to my CairnGorm post that when it was +12c at the mid mountain, the RH was 22% and the Dew Point was -10c. Thus the snow pack has continued to dry and firm up giving firm packed snow with a few icy patches. Did get an email saying "you idiot the snow wont be firm it will be slush with those temps!"...

I'll raise you.... Currently +6c on the Summit of CairnGorm and +12[c] at the middle station at 2500ft. 8P

This photo taken by Jamie from highland-instinct on 1st April 2007 shows just how well cover built up on favoured aspects and indeed how dramatic the difference between different aspects can be. Despite the exceptionally mild winter lack of SKIERS rather than lack of snow ended the season at Nevis Range and Glencoe!

Don't need the EU for that, the UK has proved very adept at that all on its own.

>20c on the Moray Coast/NE Scotland.

Pfff we obviously need an official weather station at both Carrbridge and Alvie if thats the lowest official figure recorded for Strathspey in 2002! Anyway I'm going for -22c.

As for La Nina there is some sort of correlation for the Scottish Mountains at least, the best winters coming with moderate La Nina events, a strong La Nina doesn't seem to swing things in favour of mild or cold, but what relationship there does seem to be is that strong La Nina event winters tend to be one extreme or the other, either good or very poor but rarely average.

The ski tow in the picture isn't looking too good though. Cable still lying strewn around the hill where it fell 9 1/2 months ago.

I have been wondering if road engineers have been brainwashed by AGW hysteria and now believe the snow-free UK hype of the media! Last year Transerv won the maintenance contract for the A9 and Trunk Roads west of it from BEAR Scotland. This summer Transerv has been busy, they seem to love solid armco. They've replaced long streaches of safety fencing that BEAR Scotland put in with Armco barriers, now they've gone up and down the A9 putting in sections of Armco around larger road signs and at the bottom of uphill embankments. In countless locations in Strathspey they have put in Armco in areas notorious for heavy drifting just inches from the carriageway and armco makes very effective snow fences. It seems this has been done with no thought to winter consequences whatsoever, in some cases armco has been put between snowpoles and the carriageway !! There are streaches esp close to the Carrbridge turn-off where the road was raised on a manmade ridge to avoid drifting and they've stuck armco on bits of it!! There and uptowards the Slochd there are sections so close to the road it will probably only take minutes for a drift to form in a squally shower and probably not 15mins to block the road and it only takes one blockage however short for things to get stuck. I can see this causing chaos even in some recent winters, let alone if we get a fairly hard one. In some cases there isn't any space for ploughs to push snow off the carriageway, Transerves shiny new armco's crumple zone ends are going to end up being shoved over by the wave of snow from the ploughs! Expensive cock up me thinks! From opening of the final section of the current A9 to Aviemore, through the 80s and 90s the A9 was never closed due to snow between Inverness and Aviemore, the Highland Council would throw whatever it took to keep the A9 open, even if it was belting it down and visibility down to 10ft at the Slochd. BEAR seemed to park their snowploughs when it started snowing and now transerv have gone one better and engineered in roadblocks in the making. Does the powers that be actually realise it STILL SNOWS IN THIS COUNTRY???

In terms of the Scottish Mountains, winters 1932-33, 42-43 and 63/64 must be well up there. V A Firsoff in his book 'On foot and Ski in the Cairngorms' regularly mentions the snowless winters of 32/33 and 42/43 and refers to the 'attempts at organising winter sports in Scotland along Swizz lines was nipped in the bud by the snowless winter of 1932/33'.

We'll see I'll shortly be putting a WS3600 through its paces halfway up CairnGorm... I'm just off to put in the bulk order for replacement annometers !! Bought this off E-bay (and I don't recommend buying this sort of thing off e-bay) it's caused bother and more bother and would have been installed several weeks ago if it behaved properly. It keeps locking up randomly, so have found a brute force workaround by putting it on a timer switch and cutting the power regularly ! I didn't need the touch screen and now the WS2300 is going for £89. Typical. Don't want to spend much money on it at that stage because want to know we can get the basic system working and I'm primarily interested in wetbulb temperatures. If it comes together I'm thinking of going for Peet Bros Ultimeter 2100 with heated sensors (though it seems we'll have to import the heated sensors directly from Peet Bros). Does anyone on here have any experience of PeetBros weather stations, feed back would be much appreciated (after my E-bay misadventure on the WS3600).

Winterhighland have put a couple of cameras in the Scottish Ski Club Hut on CairnGorm Mountain. Please see: http://www.winterhighland.info/testcam for further info about the cameras. This is still something of an experimental set up just now, so there may be periods of downtime and a need to make changes. Camera Looking SSE up the White Lady ski run: Camera Looking WNW over the Ski Club Hut Balcony: ^We hope the deck will soon be useful for assessing snow falls! http://nwstatic.co.uk/forum/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/ohmy.gif

Fairly close to average temp Jan and Feb with increasingly above average precipitation. If the precipitation happens at the right times I could like the sound of that forecast, it certainly suggests a decent shot at something better than last winter. We managed to ski from late Nov to mid April last year on CairnGorm despite it being such a mild winter, so fingers crossed! Blatant plug: Two new mountain webcams http://www.winterhighland.info/testcam/

A photo from a couple of days ago of Aonach Mor which was posted on Winterhighland, showing it's snow patching hanging in there with a dusting of fresh on the tops. Its about 600k. http://www.winterhighland.info/forum/file.php?2,file=2593 Some more pics and discussion about snow patches from winter 2007 that are still holding out in the Winterhighland forum at http://www.winterhighland.info/forum/read....2,76649,page=10 . Just need that FI blizzards to move from T+300 to T+6hrs !

Slightly off topic, but when was the last sub zero CET month and what was the value?

Need to send someone up with a rake to clean the surface, then get some turns in on some sweet spring snow! :lol:

Couple of photos: http://www.winterhighland.info/2006/pix/pi....php?pix_id=380

I'd settle for constant NW'ly!

Skiing in Ciste Mhearaidh, CairnGorm Mountain, 9th August 2007. :o Apparently the Tourists on the Funicular were like Photo from Highland Instinct more at http://www.highland-instinct.co.uk/gallery...r200607/07aug9/ Now we need to send a group up with rakes to clean up the snow, the dirt sticking to it will be increasing the ablation rate.