memories of 63

I'm about your age SB and also lived in Kent (Edenbridge) when I was younger - a lot younger. I can remember in Primary school that the teacher used to ask us to make Xmas cards on the run up to the end of term and this seemed (rose snow coloured specs ) to coincide with the first snow fall of winter. I know that this isn't a white Xmas but for my memory it seemed that we had more snow in December than recently.

Mods/techies, I think we should have a seasonal feel to this thread. Any chance of a snowy background with Santa making an appearance as we get closer to the day?

Three runs now Look at my sig. I knew it would happen one day. Off to stock up on dried foods and bottles water

I thought that name was banned nuf said

I think they both desrve a Personally I like the first one more

A classic and definitely deserves a :unsure:

OON, I'd much prefer a HUUUGE blower to knock the jet south, precipitate ahigh to our NW, ridging into the GH and encouraging an intense LP to our East. This, coupled with cold pooling over Siberia and higher than average SST's would bring an end to all christmas pudding discussions and blow a hole in the AGW hypothesis.

Could I extend an invitation to all the NW Council Members to act as impartial adjudicators on the entries? At least that way I can have a go :lol: Suggested awards. - a stonker - good to share - off the wall - honourable mention - good effort

To follow on from OON's post a while ago, I've been following the model thread and would like to start a competition. Who can create a grammatically correct sentence containing the most of this winter's cliches? Extra points awarded for using the following christmas pudding Cold Pooling Southerly Jet N'erly plunge Beast from - you all know the rest Just a bit of fun to take our minds off the abysmal models at present, but if the forum organisers want to put up a prize so much the better.

Ah yes SF but the question is are they less mild than recent years? :lol:

I'll go for a nice round 5.0 C and hope for 5 gold rings on Xmas day

Come on then all you clever clogs out there. We need the historic averages to be able to bolster our guesses to within the realms of probability. :blush:

Paul, Sorry, I might be doing something wrong but it's still stuck on 10.55

I've just subscribed to NW extra for the winter and tried to use the 5 min radar - it's stuck at 10.55am. any reason?

Excellent Roger, what about 'a game of two halfs' with play always getting cooler in the second half

I'm impressed, I wouldn't have the courage to step into the lions den like that. If there's safety in numbers I support you all the way. Come on SATSIGS do your worst

WiB talking of which when are you going to join

Roger, Only one thing to say B)

John, Can't disagree with anything you said about Timbo's fore(hope)cast however wrt to medium to long range forecasts being science based........ I understand that there are a mountain of data generated for each model run and very powerful computers are need to crunch the numbers BUT, surely the most relaiable forecasts (up to 5 days in most cases) are produced by human interpretation of the model predictions. This is why most serious members go for the fax charts, where there has been some human input. As there needs to be informed human interpretation of the data, there must be some element of 'gut feel' (also called experience) in generating the fax charts. In my field, very different from meteorology, the development of good semi-solid formulations is still based on the experience of the formulator, even though there are a number of scientific tools and models to call upon. These activities are still referred to as the 'black art' and, for compounding Pharmacists, there's a reference database called secundum artem (loosly translated as following the art). BTW, no disrespect to meteorology, I find it an endlessly fascinating subject - probably due to the element of chaos/catastrophy that contribute to our constantly chaging weather patterns.

Wonder if my 10.6 punt will deserve another honourable mention?

Just dug this out of the archive. Hope it helps. If you take winter very seriously, and if your very existence hangs by an icicle attached however tenuously to prospects for snow - you know who you are - then I suggest you desist from reading this thread NOW. You have been warned. As a light hearted nod in the direction of winter / wanter / wonter, I thought I might venture to bring the SATSIGs team back out of summer hibernation. I can't remember who we had last year, though I'm fairly sure WIB was our W London agent, Enforcer was there simply because it never snows in Abingdon, and I recall that OON and John lived at opposite ends of the "mysterious zone of sound northern thinking" which, equally mysteriously, wended it's way through, erm, Steeton - I'm sitting back pulling a surprised / shocked face as I type; you'll just have to imagine it as smiley-world.com hasn't reached that level of sophistication yet it seems. TM was in this zone as well, but for reasons not related to the PIT it by-passed Sheffield. TWS even moved so that he could LIVE in the zone.m Others may wish to follow suit. SATSIGs' mission is to try to moderate, reasonably, AND LIGHT-HEARTEDLY, the wanter forcasts / hopecasts. Just to help the naive reader judge Anyway, assuming there aren't too many yelps of protest from, say, the south coast, resulting in this thread being locked, and always accepting the constraints of time which now that I no longer have a public sector client are far more severe, this thread may periodically lurch back up the charts - usually, I find, when there's blue on GFS encroaching from points between 10:30 and 04:00. I didn't keep the Sod All The Science It's Gonna snow scale last year, but here it is. There are various types of ramp, and the SATSIGs scale is used to issue a RAMP ALERT when ramping is ongoing. Occasionally predictions for potential ramping might be made. Periodically we issue maps to show the overall state of ramping, and, if time permits (it won't) maps showing ramp forecasts. There are three basic types of ramp. Wildly speculative far away ramps which wouldn't appear on the map of the possible even if the same stretched right to the boundary of Possibleshire, which is a very very long way away, trust me - e.g. "we're in for a right old fashioned dumping in 23 days' time". Er, right... Bounds of plausibility ramps; when the models are showing potential but it's still just over the rainbow: these tend to be characterised by arguments that start of sane before the writer starts to surf their own self-generated wave of froth. E.g. "GFS has been showing this for seven days now, and although it's coming and going it's a definite feature and it's starting to look as if, so long as HP builds here, ice grows up there, Mercury goes retrograde and Rotherham beat Bradford, we might get the mother and father of all old-fashioned dumpings and I'm going to be shovelling my way out of thehouse and calling in air-sea rescue to drop supplies". Then there's the near time stuff; the characteristics here vary - the basic thing here is that cold weather is now looking very likely, and the ramp is not so much 'if' as 'what'. Typical examples from last year were a post suggesting that what was a wedy tendril of NW'ly flow would produce "at least a foot tonight". There is a variant of the ramp thatapplies to measured depth of snow as well, but snowflation is the stuff of another thread, unless we're bored / irritated. Anyway, a rough guide toi ramp dimensions: 1 - SLIGHT RAMP: Early calls for potential cold weather based on highly speculative and usually distant charts. E.g. "looks like we might get some frost later this week". Very weak ramps are usually caveated, and not snowflationary, though they are making slightly desperate grasps - not unusual during long spells of Atlantic dross. ALso applies to slightly inflated extraplation of enuine prospects for snow. E.g. "looks like we might get a covering in London if we're lucky", when clearly the type of luck required would be that of the back-to-back lottery winner, or the person finding themselves waking up alongside Brad / Angelina (or both) in an accidental no clothes type situation. I know it's the stuff of the "National Enquirer" but so is some of the ramping we occasionally get. 2 - MODERATE RAMP: Early calls for moderate extremes of weather, and near-event inflation of prospects. "Could be a big day for you next Wednesday, Dave" or "Looks like I'll be working from home the day after tomorrow" - the latter when all that's shown is a cool HP right over the UK. 3 - HEAVY RAMP: Usually follows a chart that has caused moderate ramping, and can simply be a group effect. Characterised by "my snowdrift is going tobe bigger than your snowdrift" type discussions. Also representtive of the behaviour when distant cold on GFS persists for several runs, and builds. We saw this to great effect several times over the past two years when GFS built things up, and we even had an instance a couple of weeks or so back. 4 - SEVERE RAMP: Either - a plainly daft call for severe weather based on GFS runs that are literally projected in a timescale in which you couldn't even reach Venus (it requires BOTH conditions - i.e. long way out and simply silly scale of assessment of impact) OR a gross exageration of impact of a near-time event. E.g. "I'm expecting to see Polar bears on my lawn next week". 5 - RAMPEDE: Rampedes are dangerous, and even WIB in SATSIG 11 (it's very big) with the anti-rampede ray gun pod will struggle to contai this one. Characterised by lots of inter ramper chatter leading to an inflationary spiral towards, what the uninitiated reader might assume to be, Armageddon. Think four horsemen of the Apocalypse meets Revelations,. It's the cold weather equivalent of the South Sea Bubble and the 1992 run on the pound. Belt up and have fun. Ramps away...let the ramping begin...

It must be Winter now that SATIGS is back I think I posted this comment last year as well

Just heard an interview on the Today programme with Michael Fish discussing the great storm of '87. When do you think he'll be given a rest on this, it's been 20 years for goodness sake.

Looking at the 00z ensembles, I wouldn't like to predict anything after the 6th October :lol:

Is it my imagination but are the number of people entering these competitions increasing as we approach Winter? If so they must all be warm lovers as there's very few going for a below average month!!!