TG312274

Using crampons in Surrey is certainly a bit surreal. My favourite surreal moment of this winter so far is getting a text from a friend in Horsham saying she'd seen people cross-country skiing!

Oh, I'm the other side of town, just off Lewes Road in Brighton, near the Sainsbury's. It keeps ranging in terms of strength of precipitation but I'd call it heavy right now.

Erm, there's heavy snow outside right now.

Snow just dying off now in Brighton, which is consistent with the Meteox radar as the band that was sticking to the Sussex coast drifts off into the Channel. Hoping for that band currently to the north to come south later this evening.

Rain and sleet in Brighton. Dewpoints way too high. Will things become less marginal on the south coast later?

Unexpected early snow in Brighton! Wasn't expecting any to hit until 9pm but it's already here and a light covering on the garden and patio. Been snowing for approx. an hour or so.

Brighton area is orange on the Met Office warnings map. Looking at the GFS precipitation charts (okay we all know they're a bit dodgy but what the heck) we should get a decent covering tonight, not so sure about East Sussex as a whole though. Meteox.co.uk charts show PPN edging along the south coast to possibly hit Brighton around 9pm. 2C at Shoreham Airport at 1700, but a dewpoint of 0C, and I have a little bit of altitude here as well which should help.

That Friday forecast looks monumental... however at T+120 that's a long way off.

Rain in Brighton, just started in the last couple of minutes. Seems fairly consistent with the MeteoX radar.

-9 reached tonight at Middle Wallop, Hampshire.

I grew up in Farnham, just down the road from Farnborough, and it does get surprisingly cold at night there when the weather conditions are right. -6 at Odiham at 23:30, and down to -8 at Middle Wallop in Hampshire (between Andover and Salisbury).

That's some temperature differential! Temperatures here have gone down from +6 early this afternoon to around -2 now. Brighton and Hove City Council are getting a lot of criticism over their gritting operations, with many pavements still dangerous, and Cityclean, a private contractor, being blamed for not having full grit bins in many areas and the council being blamed for the removal of grit bins. http://charts.netweather.tv/gfsimages/gfs.20091222/12/18/uksnowrisk.png Looks like we might have some rain tomorrow morning coming in from the coast according to that? But temps and dew points are already low so I wonder if it might be a bit of a wintery mix.

A positively tropical 6 Celsius here, rain has now gone, very cloudy outside though. Pavements treacherous.

No further snow today in Brighton but to see a load of snow on the beach was amazing, as was the 3am snowball fight in the local park last night. No melting of snow whatsoever here that I have noticed, which is great given the altitude and the proximity to the sea.

Hi everyone. Some good snowfall in East Sussex tonight. Started snowing about 8pm in Brighton after a few snow showers in the afternoon and snowed heavily for 5 hours. Spontaneous snowball fights breaking out everywhere! I'd estimate 2-3 inches has fallen here and that's pretty near ground level. I've heard conditions in Lewes and the surrounding villages are considerably worse.

Raining in Brighton now.

I have it on very good authority (the Facebook status updates of quite a few of my friends that there's been snow in the last hour or so in the Farnborough/Aldershot/Farnham area.

Slightly off topic (I did look in the Netweather Guides and so on)... but is there a website which shows reports from weather stations for the last 24 hours and current conditions? I used to know one (think it might have been an American site?) but I've forgotten the URL.

I'm in the Hanover district of Brighton (1 mile inland) here and it's still snowing, big flakes.

Current conditions in Farnham: Temperature: -2.7C. Skies: Clear Wind: W'ly, light. Pressure: 1035hPA, rising. Max today: 4.8C. Min today: -4.4C.

Conditions at 2100: Temperature: -3.4C Weather: Clear Pressure: 1033mb, rising. Wind: SE, very light. Max today: 5C. Min today: -5C. Could be looking at another -6C tonight possibly. Very difficult to remember such a run of frosts like this in November.

Hardly mate, according to the newest maps the dark blues have spread around the bottom of Greenland which is crucial. There are also dark blue colours developing around Novaya Zemlya. Cold anomalies also developing around the 45 degree North line at 35 degree West in the mid-Atlantic.

Ice formation above the long-term mean now in Region 5.

Roger that's a pretty amazing post. "To rturn to a more useful point, the research gives me a fairly confident result for high-latitude blocking and retrograde motion which indicates one minor attempt to set up blocking in December and a much more promising window of opportunity after mid-January. Therefore, I think the chances are good that a pattern reversal could take place at just that right moment in time when the Sun is least able to fight back by melting the snow as it managed to do several times in the later blocking episode last winter. And that's the whole key, really, getting the first snow cover to persist long enough to reinforce the second one, and so on. That's the other side of the system that I would need to have much more computer capacity to model, the feedback from the earth's surface into the lower portions of the atmosphere." So the snow cover has to stick around, so there can be some sort of recurring effect to bring further colder conditions?

Thanks, I didn't realise how big the place was, with Nord being 16.6W and Nuuk being 51.8W, it's massive. Apparently the northern tip of the Shetlands (Unst and the lighthouse at Muckle Flugga) is further north than Narsarsuaq. I learnt that from a book about the Lighthouse Family. Not the band, the Stevenson family who put up all the lighthouses in Scotland.