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eddie

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Posts posted by eddie

  1. Just got back from work (which must be well over 200m ASL). It was snowing very hard there and the roads were getting to the point where it was dangerous. The snow was covering the whole road despite of extensive gritting.

    Now I am home (70m ASL) there seems to be a bit of rain mixed in with the snow and the roads are just covered in thin wet slush. There is about 4-5cm of snow on the pavements and grass. Hopefully temperatures will cool down a bit as the night goes on and we won't get wet snow that doesn't accumulate.

    The Met Office are still going for 12 hours of heavy snow from 18:00h in this area if you drill down through their web site to the local forecast so I am quite optimistic.

  2. Just to your west here and the bad news is the 'plume' of heavy stuff (on the meto radar) has now turned 'pink' as it approaches us......s'not for stopping any time soon!!

    It is looking pretty special!

    Thankfully I brought all my hiking gear including water proof trousers and hiking boot to work so I can walk the 4 miles home if it gets too bad to drive.

    For some reason I didn't fancy cycling in this morning.

  3. No falling snow here at the moment and we have about 1-2cm on the ground.

    Looking at the radar and the Met Office 3h forecast for Bradford and Huddersfield I expect more white stuff in about an hour or so.

    No falling snow here at the moment and we have about 1-2cm on the ground.

    Looking at the radar and the Met Office 3h forecast for Bradford and Huddersfield I expect more white stuff in about an hour or so.

    Cancel that. It's snowing heavily again!

  4. one week dosnt maketh a month..i guarantee this jan will end up warmer 1963..and most probably 1997

    Clearly January 2009 isn't going to end up colder than Jan 1963 and that wasn't what I was trying to suggest either. However, this has been a proper cold spell whatever baseline you measure it against.

  5. Hadley is on -0.7C today (Jan 1 - 7). That must be one of the coldest first weeks for a while.

    It's the 22nd coldest first week to January since 1772 and the coldest start to January since 1997 (1st to 7th Jan 1997 was -0.8C).

    In fact the first week of January 1963 was warmer than the first week of January 2009. I certainly didn't expect to be writing that a month ago.

  6. I have looked at the anomaly from the previous 10 year mean for each year since 1700.

    The distribution looks like this:

    post-6529-1230131624_thumb.png

    A fairly normal distribution although skewed slightly towards the warm end as you might expect.

    The standard deviation for the anomaly data set is 0.6C

    70.5% of years fell within the range +- 1 standard deviation from the previous 10 year mean.

    90.2% of years fell within the range +- 1.645 standard deviations from the previous 10 year mean.

    12.3% of years were more than 1 standard deviation colder than the mean.

    17.3% of years were more than 1 standard deviation warmer than the mean.

    4.2% of years were more than 1.645 standard deviations colder than the mean.

    5.5% of years were more than 1.645 standard deviations warmer than the mean.

    If this year comes in at 10C then the rolling mean for the period 1999-2008 will be 10.42C.

    On that basis there is a 70% chance that the Annual CET for 2009 will be in the range of 9.82C-11.02C.

    There is 12.2% chance that the Annual CET for 2009 will be colder than 9.82C.

    There is 17.3% chance that the Annual CET for 2009 will be warmer than 11.02C.

    There is <4.2% chance that the Annual CET for 2009 will be colder than 9.22C.

    There is <5.5% chance that the Annual CET for 2009 will be warmer than 11.62C.

    My actual prediction for 2009 is 10.3C.

    PS - I'm still trying to learn about statistics so if any of you experts out there would like to comment on this I would love to hear your feedback.

  7. You have to remember that there is a financial cost associated with the Met. Office forecasting any kind of unusual weather.

    Councils, gas suppliers and any other organisations that have a financial interest in what the temperature is going to be will make their plans according to what the Met Office say.

    If they said another 1963 was on the way then milions of pounds would be spent preparing.

    On that basis they have to be fairly conservative unless they are very sure that exceptional weather is on the way.

  8. Well, here's my (very) quick analysis.

    This is a chart of the entire CET record, detailing how many months have posted a new high, an how many months have posted a new low CET score. The temperature for each month is compared to the entire cet record, so a June temperature is compared to all subsequent temperatures no matter which month they fall in.

    I have included, uncommented source-code, so that my methods are transparent. There may be bugs in it, as, as I've said this is a quick effort:

    post-5986-1226060720_thumb.png

    cetrecord_source.rtf

    ... and I've been careful not to draw any conclusions ..

    Further ideas - ignore temperatures that fall outside the given range which takes out anomalously cold, and anomalously hot temps which are a freak event, and have no bearing on the subject at hand.

    More records are always broken during the early years of a data set. There are less other months to beat.

    As the data set gets longer, if the climate was stable, the time between records being broken should get longer and longer as each new warmest or coldest month raises the proverbial bar.

    It would be interesting to run the same analysis but with the climate data in reverse, i.e. make 2007 the first year and 1659 the last year and then compare the shape of the two graphs.

  9. How far below average would the remaining 2 and a bit months need to be to get an Annual CET lower than that of 2001? Is it realistically possible?

    The 2001 CET was 9.93C. If October finishes at 10.2C then November and December would both need to be 2C below average for this year to beat 2001.

    It's not impossible but very very unlikely.

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