trickydicky

Still snowing here though very lightly. Temp 0.3 and it’s definitely not as crisp as before. Got about 3 inches that I’d like to keep hold of, so to speak. When do the cold uppers return?

Slowly starting to fill in here now, it having been snowing for getting on 4 hours. It’s almost like they spray the grass with something here to stop the snow settling. Everything else is completely covered and the temperature has remained below freezing. Hopefully we can get a good covering to allow some low temperatures over the next couple of nights.

It’s interesting that this morning’s video forecast from the Met Office is still saying ‘some uncertainty over where the heaviest snow will be’. So it is essentially impossible to forecast snow in any kind of detail, which puts those 10 day snow accumulation chart’s into some context.

Enjoying the usual Eden Valley ‘its snowing but only just’ snow this morning. Having said that it has started to come down a bit heavier in the last 10 minutes. So it’s probably about to stop.

That event in December was weird. I went for a walk in Patterdale that Saturday. The streamer ended literally at the south western end of Patterdale. And Patterdale isn’t usually a place you think of as having different parts as its so small. There was snow in Penrith but by Watermillock it was rain and the fields were green. There was no snow until coming into Glenridding and there wasn’t much until the White Lion, after which it was quite deep. You couldn’t really see down towards Brothers Water and cars were coming from that way with thick snow on the roof. It stayed below freezing all day in the Eden Valley but presumably some sort of localised fohn effect caused the middle third of Ullswater to be in a mild sector.

I shall lower my expectations accordingly. Re Tuesday I’d expect snow in places like Shap, Greystoke, Matterdale etc. Penrith will probably get a wet covering, and places prone to heavy precipitation in the Lake District. Maybe some of the same places that got hit hardest in early December. Here I suspect it will be light and as such quick to turn to rain. I’d be surprised to get anything significant from it. A covering in order to try and set some low minima in the clear nights that follow would be the ideal outcome.

To be honest all I want out of this cold spell is a snowy breakdown. A proper snowy breakdown. Full on hoying it down with snow for a few hours before the mild arrives. I can’t remember when we last had one. Ice days and very cold nights are, relatively speaking, ten a penny round here. As is light snow that doesn’t really amount to anything. I want at least a proper rough few hours of strong wind and heavy snow. It is, no doubt, too much to ask.

Not only that, but that’s probably the reason our much less cold but still cold for us cold spell has been scuppered. It’ll send the jet into overdrive.

Kind of similar to that ‘if a tree falls in a forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound…?’ If you receive snow from a Cheshire gap streamer are you in the north west of England?

Plus all those lot in the South East will sell there 2 up 2 down for about £5million and retire up here anyway. They win in the end.

Forgive a noob post a minute. What has struck me recently is that low pressure that is more or less stuck over the Isle of Lewis. If you look through the Weather History thread on here you can see that we used to get genuine cold spells - the type we’d chew our arms off for now - a few times a decade, and a lot of them seemed to start with low pressure diving down into Europe and cold air being dragged west. That cold air is there now. Its cold in European Russia and Scandinavia. But the low pressure just sits there, totally unmoved by our desires. Why, are the mountains in Scotland significantly higher than they were 150 years ago?!

If you were born around 1820 and lucky enough to see it out all the way through to 1900 (which presumably would have been against the odds in those days) you would have experienced a hell of a lot of interesting winters!

There are some amusing posts on here at times. Posts that use very strident language but end up completely contradicting themselves. Everyone on here, more or less, is an amateur meteorologist. Even that is probably an exaggeration for most people, like me. They are just folk that are interested in the weather and want to know if it’s going to snow next week. To expect them to understand the ‘broad brush’, the ‘macro scale’ and a whole wagon full of 3 letter acronyms is potentially asking a little much. On top of that you also need to remember that, even if you do understand them, there’s no point in using them to forecast the weather where you live, because where you live is small. And, even if you understand that part, you have to remember that there is always another macroscale, broadbrush 3 letter acronym (probably in Asia) that overrides them anyway. And all that should have been anticipated.

Our climate is famously supposed to be very unpredictable. But I think certain aspects of it are becoming increasingly predictable. Like a cold, dry frosty start to December followed by a very mild Christmas and start to January. Northern blocking in March/April and a long dry spell in May. Then a heatwave at some point in early summer. I also think, and this is just my perception and not backed up by any research or science, that the south of England has got more mild than further north. As in, we have all seen an increase in temperatures but it has been more marked ‘down south’. Like I wouldn’t say this autumn has been all that mild up here, and December started pretty chilly. But other than one week of frost it seems to have been relentlessly mild in the south. I also agree with those saying that the winter cold weather hobby thing is becoming increasingly pointless. I look on here pretty much out of habit.

Interesting that even then cold winters were seen as old fashioned.

January 1984 was famously cold and snowy in the north was it not?

More frosted scenes here this morning. Currently -6. The fog has lifted and there is some high cloud. There seems to be some showers in the west and temperatures have risen to -1 or so across most of Cumbria. Hopefully I’ll see something white that isnt frost today.

-3 in the Eden Valley fog. That might be as warm as it gets today.

I don’t think there is any snow at Shap beyond a very slight dusting. Come to think of it the weather station isn’t at Shap either, its in front if Wet Sleddale Reservoir.

Yeah the angle seems to be perfect. Shame they don’t have a bit more oomph. Presumably its quite heavy on the other side of the Pennines

Settling now. Quite heavy teeny tiny flakes

The lightest of light light light snow here. So light I’m not convinced its even reaching the ground.

December 2015 was hideous in every way. I hope there isn’t one like it again my lifetime. I lived in Cockermouth and worked in Penrith at the time. I became a world leader in handling a front wheel drive saloon car through surface water. Things that stand out in my mind, and include the November as well to be fair, aside from the endless, relentless rain and flooding are the constant darkness and low cloud, the A66 where it climbs from Threlkeld to Scales being essentially a river, the weirdness of it being 15/16c at night in December, that day time mins and maxes were generally around a degree apart and didn’t necessarily correspond to daylight and cycling outside in shorts and being too hot. It holds various records relating to warmth and wetness and definitely deserves the record of being the strangest month of all time.

I would say the same for mid October, or more or less all of October. Though its slowly turning into an extension of summer. At least now you can get a decent frost and some snow on the tops.

Considering the winters of the period were famously rubbish the Novembers 87 and 88 both produced pretty snowy RAC rallies.