Hey guys - just to add to the collection of reports! I went up to Alnmouth and Alnwick yesterday morning (ironically an area not covered by MetO warnings when I set off at 9am-ish!), and there was a very heavy snow shower/period of snow, lasting around 30-45 minutes, around midday, after an earlier snow pellet-style shower right on the beach at Alnmouth, which settled everywhere! Some stunning views out to sea up there, and it did appear that the weather there was coming in off the sea, rather than off the land (A glance at the relevant radar imagery confirmed that once I got back to Durham!)
Around 4-5cm of snow had fallen in Alnwick during that snow shower - we arrived there on a bus (a fun journey in itself from Alnmouth to Alnwick, that one! Lots of spinning wheels and effort needed to get up even small hills, due to the intensity and ready accumulation of the snow on the roads!) around 12:45, as it began to ease. The flakes were absolutely massive though, a spectacular sight
A further very heavy snow shower back in Alnmouth around 2pm as we waited for a train back down to Durham. Fascinating stuff to watch first-hand, as the flakes changed from small pellets, to massive settling flakes, back to pellets and so on! We did notice though that anywhere south of about Morpeth, through to just south of Newcastle, had no apparent snow at all! This tallies with your reports and the radar images - but that was partly what motivated me to post this, so that you guys could get an idea of what had been happening pretty much all around you! Really unlucky not to have seen more snow in Newcastle itself yesterday, I feel!
Then back to Durham by around 3:30. It was snowing pretty heavily at that point, but it was very wet snow, not really settling on roads etc, and certainly quite a lot less on the ground than there had been in Alnmouth and Alnwick (a couple of cms tops at that point). The snow did persist for several hours though, pretty much until bedtime! Lovely to see, and here, about a mile South of the city centre, there is a good 5cm or more lf lying snow, particularly on the grass. It struck me, walking through town this morning, that there was a good inch or so more snow here than down in the city centre, despite the very short distance between the two. There was a further hefty snow shower, quite out of the blue, around 8am today, but other than that it's been dry and sunny for much of the time this morning, with the snow thawing off the trees, but not really melting too much elsewhere.
Hope that report is of use in terms of establishing the picture across at least some of the area!
Cheers