Jayces

Just to back up what @Surrey said, red warnings (take action) are only given just before or during the event the yellow and amber are there much earlier for people to be aware and be prepared as the descriptions suggest and given out much earlier. I expect amber warnings today or tomorrow at the latest if of course the met think it's warranted.

That's not correct, the tweet is. I live in South Norwood near Croydon and we were under an amber warning on the night of the streamer and it was snowing heavily and persistently for several hours before the red warning was added.

No you will get snow if there are any showers but there is no warning for you as not much is expected. I don't believe anywhere in the UK is going to see sleet let alone rain for at least a week now.

In defense of the media forecasts until the met office puts out any warnings there is no point in causing panic when the details of where and how much aren't nailed down yet. There are some great members on here who know their stuff and can see what will happen based on what the models show and their expertise and experience but we're still talking 5 days away before anything significant happens and that's just too long in weather terms to start putting it in the forecasts I think. The forecast that was just linked further up the thread I think was a fair one and shows what could happen. I expect over the weekend the s word will be mentioned more and more. Agreed with how the met office have handled this but even with all their supercomputers and experts they still can't commit to warnings etc until they are as confident as possible. If I remember rightly the 2010 Thames Streamer had been going for hours before the orange warning was upgraded to red simply because they couldn't predict how much snow was going to fall I expect. I have no doubt though from what I've been reading here that we are in for a memorable end to winter 17/18 :-)

I doubt there will be forecasted snow until the weekend because it can go wrong (with showers anyway) at such short notice. Maybe Sunday they will start mentioning it in the forecasts more.

I would guess because the SSW hasn't actually happened yet so the models are predicting what may or may not happen based on the available data. When there can be for example stark differences in temperatures / precipitation and wind speed for within a few miles of 2 locations imagine how many different outcomes of weather are possible for our small island the further ahead we look? At day 10 the permutations must be huge.

Sleet in Croydon but it's nice to see a burst of snowflakes every now and then ?

Predicting snow at 6 hours can be a challenge let alone 6 days. Pretty much guaranteed the next run will show something different at that time frame.

On that quoted post you are comparing temperatures at 1 AM on Saturday the 13th of January to 1 PM on Saturday the 13th of January so the second chart will have warmer temperatures as it's day time time whereas the first chart is night time. I think this is why @johnholmes is always saying compare like for like 0z to 0z for example to avoid this sort of confusion.

I'm no expert on the models but for every hour past T0 the weather permutations increase exponentially and the what if scenarios become vastly different at day 10 compared to 5 but surely no matter how unlikely we think an outcome is what is modeled is a possibility if all the right blocks fall into place? There are charts in the latest NWP showing what is being discussed, whether they come to fruition is up for debate but we won't know that until T240 gets to T0. We just need to get lucky :-) Yeah it can be frustrating on our little island but at least we get a wide variety of weather.

Although the met office are good, they aren't that good and can't get a forecast wrong for a time period that hasn't happened yet ;-) Only time will tell but various options have been presented over the last few days from mild to cold so we will have to wait and see.

My daughter made a 1 inch snowman

Steve your clock is about 15 minutes fast on your phone

Am I right in thinking now for us (I'm in Croydon) that it's heading East towards us (I think you're on a similar path where you are)?

Radar says snow, window says rain.

So some of us might be looking at a rain / snow / rain / snow event.

Thanks Surrey, hopefully we'll get lucky.

It's strange that the SW quadrant of London is sleet / rain and snow for the rest of London. Can't complain, we were in the sweet spot in 2010!

At least it was nice to see what will hopefully be the first of many days of lying snow this winter however brief it was.

Had some in South Norwood but now it's turned back to rain, was nice to see a dusting though even if it's only going to be brief it seems.

So you're saying I should go upstairs? ?

In their defence I don't think they actually forecast the weather, that's what they pay the Met Office for. I imagine they produce the reports based on what they are given and with a marginal chargeable hourly (it seems) situation such as this it can't be easy.

If the ECM is on the money then it seems we may be in for our first country wide taste of winter. Of course, we've all been here before and we still need between 24 and 48 hours of output before we can get really excited and even then it could still not go completely right.

I think the wind speed for rating the catagory of a hurricane is the speed high up whereas the speed is less lower down where the instruments in the keys are hence they are reporting lower numbers.

We've all seen various models be wrong in a big way as early as T+72 and then fall in line so to suggest as some are doing that the output being shown at T+168 is going to be correct seems ridiculous. I think all we can take from the models at the moment is that it's going to get colder tomorrow and sometime over the next couple of days somewhere may see some snow but what happens beyond that is anybody's guess.