skifreak

The rail line is blocked as well between Kildonan and Kinbrace stations, so it's probably somewhere the road and rail line are close together, they are on opposite sides of the river till a bit more than halfway beetween the two stations then the railway crosses the river and runs into Kinbrace on the East side of the River Helmsdale. Traffic reports appear to have lost interest after the short disruption on the A9 was cleared.

Call it Hen.

I'm not talking about old snow - which is always present in August, but new snow falling and lying during August. It's occurred more times during the last 10 years than the previous 50 according to Dr Adam Watson who's been monitoring summer snow patches in the Cairngorms since the late 1940s. Last year was a truly exceptional year for snow patches surviving through the summer, with over 600 still existent in late August. The lower the elevation patches can persist at the almost exponential increase in available terrain.

Some charts suggest mountain snow possible in the Scottish Highlands and falling August snow with new lying snow seems to have suddenly become noticeably more common in recent years.

Heads up that there's a feature on snow patches on Countryfile this Sunday.

Only if it can be towed far North for winter.

Glad I spent a decent chunk of May on the West coast, pretty decent spells of weather and while it was dry here in Inverness, it was frequently cloudy with a cold wind of the Moray Firth! Sunday's charts... well I've seen some chatter online about cross equator jetstream flows and how the jetstreams are far beyond their normal bounds with some rather odd stuff happening with the QBO in a manor that could reduce seasonality. Ugh, our climate is close enough to perpetual autumn as it is.

A couple more bangs from the South of the city, with another white blob on the radar appearing... almost looks as if there is a bit of rotation in this?

Monsoon season has begun in Inverness and there's heavier incoming on the radar!

The tourists and West Highland Way walkers have been completely bamboozled by the ski tourers and snowboarders in the Glencoe Carpark and outside the Cafe at the end of the day the past few days. Instinct might be that the snow would be a disgusting slush puppy, but the Main Basin in particular has been pretty much perfect smooth fast crunchy granular Spring Snow - you know it's proper Spring Snow (or Corn as they call it in California) when the snow gets better to ski on the hotter it gets (or the heavier the rain gets in naff weather)! The reason is the large granular snow crystals allow for rapid draining of meltwater (or rain), this in turn rounds the snow crystals making the surface faster to ski on. the warm wind though melting more snow is also drying the surface of the snowpack - some snow will be getting lost to sublimation too in the dry air. Shame the Main Basin T-bar isn't running, though it if was we'd probably have moguls the size of small cars by now, where as those prepared to hike get perfect smooth snow!

Hoping for some T-shirt skiing on CairnGorm this weekend.

Lecht opening the Snowy Owl Chairlift and Buzzard Poma tomorrow!

Belting it down at Loch Morlich earlier and that's around 1050ft. Going to be some cracking snowsports at Glencoe and CairnGorm for the May Day holiday weekend!

3-4 inches of fresh fell at Glencoe last night with some drifting on the upper mountain, cleared to showers, now bluebird. Stunning mid April conditions!

For the NW Highlands there is a 10ºc difference in 850hpa temperatures at noon on Thursday on the 00z GFS compared to the 12z on Saturday, instead of blizzards and significant snowfall on the hills the freezing level would be well above the tops with heavy driving rain at all levels. Such a turn around in 12 hours suggests it's far from certain what is going to happen, blizzards followed by the high moving swiftly far enough North to give dry calm conditions over Highland Scotland is probably too much to ask for! lol! An observation regards model performance at short range from Lake Tahoe, CA. Yesterday evening PST, the Met Office App was saying Saturday would have a few patchy light showers during most of daylight hours, with only a small chance of precipitation most of the morning after overnight rain cleared. The Weather Channel which I assume is using the GFS, had 100% risk of heavy rain all day for South Lake Tahoe. I was more than sceptical about the Met Office data, but the Met Office App was on the money, rain cleared quickly to give bright and sunny spells mid-morning, few patchy drizzly showers in the afternoon - GFS was way out at this location!

Interesting weather discussion from Hydro Electric Power Distribution: http://news.ssepd.co.uk/news/all-articles/2016/03/ssepds-weather-watch-for-march-2016/

NMM goes a bit bonkers for the West Highland mountains tomorrow, particularly around the Glencoe area. Could have snow coming down at 3-4 inches per hour somewhere in Southern Lochaber late morning into Sunday afternoon if it verifies!

Already had 5 vehicle windows blown in at the carpark at Glencoe.

Someone turned the wind on around 1.30am at Glencoe, had a guest of 103mph at the carpark at 1200ft and 109mph on the Access Chair just before 9am. Not long afterwards blue flashing lights went past, first vehicles blown off the A82!

Latest Met Office update indicates 26 hours of sustained hurricane force winds for the summit of CairnGorm, still looks promising for a big base building storm tonight into the morning with the FL only briefly getting just above the summits according to the MO. However GFS looks like another horrific 12hour+ disastrous thaw as a much wider mild sector comes through lifting the FL way about the summits, MO also looks much worse in that regard for the Western snowsports areas.

A few flashes seen from around Fort William and up on Rannoch Moor, not as wild as pre dawn this morning, but it's certainly having its moments of gustiness! Suspiciously quiet and almost calm outside right at the minute though...

Met Office summit forecast for CairnGorm has a peak on Friday of 133mph and it's usually pretty conservative compared to what the Summit AWS and Funicular tunnel mouth AWS records!

Do you need to pre-register or just turn up on the night? Date in diary - anyone else going along?

It's almost as if we're running 2 months out of sync at the moment, given how cold (and on the hills snowy) spring 2015 was, then finally some more settled conditions coming in during September and October, I walked 7 or 8 miles on Rannoch Moor in a t-shirt at the start of November and December and January so far have been decidedly autumnal on the mountains. There's still potentially 4 months of winter or more left on the Scottish Mountains, so plenty of time for an infuriating snowsports season to turn around, but if you imagined it was just late November, it would all be very seasonal and would have been for the last year!