Backtrack

Had some real big flakes toward the end of the shower. Another one here at the moment which is hail & sleet

Absolute belter of a snow shower hammering through here. The first real snow of the winter!

Showers of hail and snow passing through. Very windy. Can’t see much in the way of shower activity today, but we’ll see. Off to the zoo anyway, at least if it snows, the penguins will be happy.

Probably gonna be a cold, dull spring then. It seems like we experienced a perpetual autumn, September - the other day. Winter starts now?

3.5C with someone the heaviest, wildest showers of rain and hail that I’ve ever seen, combined with severe gales and squalls. THIS is winter, THIS IS AWESOME! temp has fell from 12C a few hours ago!

This is way worse than storm Eunice. Strong with, torrential driving rain, poor visibility. No amber warning?

Heavy PPN has spawned. But it’s just rain, no sleet like before. Temp is refusing to drop. 3.7C

Yup game over south of Preston. All the energy is to the north. Enjoy guys.

PPN quickly moving through. Angled wrong really, it will have to backbuild, otherwise we won’t be seeing any snow. It’s stopped here already

We have sleet. 3.7C though. PPN isn’t exactly heavy, need evaporative cooling. Gimme my first snow of the winter please. November doesn’t count!

Nothing of the sort here. I even travelled up to the castle. I don’t think we had any gusts over 50mph! Ah mate they were boss, we had thunder, lightning, insane hail! It was incredible. Gusts in the general range of 35-50mph isn’t an amber warning IMO, coastal areas may have seen higher wind speeds, but not inland

Another ‘an amber warning wasn’t needed because the winds weren’t strong enough over the majority of the area in the north west’. I’ve seen what it’s done further south. I wasn’t talking about IMBY, I was talking about in my county, and probably most of the region. London got a red warning because it’s unusual? It’s unusual for Runcorn to get hailstones so large that they almost smashed my wind screen. Was there a warning for that? Met Office are a farce with warnings, that’s widely known. They either don’t issue them when they’re needed, or they are issued and they’re wrong.

So I’ll also comment on yesterday. Here, I don’t even think the ‘storm’ warranted a yellow warning. We had some gusts, sure, but nothing out of the ordinary, we didn’t have any rain away from the morning, and the most destruction it left behind was a few fallen twigs and a tipped over wheelie bin. I also think it was over hyped. London got a red warning for a typical winter storm. Would they issue the same warning for the same winds over Liverpool? Absolutely not. We had some amazing hail showers last night though with large hail and monstrous white out conditions briefly, I love it. The first of the season for that. Covering easily, but melting in between showers.

Rain/sleet will turn to snow on the back edge for a couple of hours as it moves away. Colder air will dig in, evaporative cooling will take place. Higher areas should start to see this transition now.

Red warning for Cornwall. Gonna be some biiiiiiiig waves!

We had a drive up to New Brighton yesterday and avoided all of the rain and hail showers. We tried to have a walk along the Wirral Coastal path, as the tide doesn't come all the way in. Apart from yesterday it was all the way in. I've never seen the Irish Sea so rough, it was amazing. I got some amazing videos and pictures. I've attached one of the pics here. Some real winter weather, me and my little lad enjoyed it (girlfriend hid in the car with the heaters on) lol. The outlook is certainly getting colder towards the middle of Feb, we might actually see some snow.

Squally rain heading through with high winds. Anyone noticed that Raintoday has gone? (www.raintoday.co.uk). The cool animated radar has been removed in place of their weatherpro website. How sad!

No real complaints from me regarding the weather recently. Plenty of sunshine to lift the spirits with cold, frosty mornings. Something that has been lacking in recent winters. The cold just can't seem to hang about during the day though, uppers are too mild and the sun really is starting to regain its' strength now. Climbed Snowdon on Friday last week in my t-shirt. I really can't see any hope on the current models in terms of snow. It just looks like a rinse and repeat scenario, with high pressure reloading itself over and over again. This is the second best type of winter weather at least, as it lifts the gloom and at least we get some sub-zero temps with fog in the evening. I'm honestly not hopeful for any type of meaningful cold spell this winter at all, and the way I look at it, is it a bad thing that we are seeing all of this high pressure now, as opposed to summer? Yeah, I know it isn't the way it works, but in my eyes, we are using up our 'quota' of high pressure for the year, law of averages and everything. Hopefully it doesn't lead to a low pressure dominated summer, that would put the nail in the coffin for our weather in recent years, we are long-overdue a scorcher of a summer. You know something isn't right though when you can climb Mount Snowdon in a t-shirt in January, we even sat and ate our lunch in the sunshine, it was remarkably warm. February rarely delivers, can't see it being any different this year either, it'll probably snow around Easter.

Well, another drab, dull day. Probably the last one until the weekend at least. This winter has just been awful. It started off so prosperous with the snow late November, I really thought we were onto a winner. Instead we've been left with mild, grey, bog standard winter conditions. I think we've had 2 frosts and that's it. All of which happened early evening and then temps rocketed up from advancing fronts. Will we ever get the cold winters back? Is it really too much to ask for, for some frost, fog, crisp sub-zero days? The UK can be a very depressing place at times can't it. I drove to the Peak District last night to collect something from Facebook Marketplace and they were all completely green, bar the odd white blob from where the drifts have been. It's just insanity for January, it really is. 5.5C at the tops at arguably the best situated place in the UK for snow.

And yet the UKV is way out at just T+4. I think this week is more about just checking SAT24 and your own weather station rather than the models. Especially when a super high resolution model such as the UKV can't pin down PPN at this time frame.

Heavy showers of hail, sleet snow here. Covering briefly and melting.

We have been absolutely hammered with hail, sleet and snow showers the past hour or so. Almost crashed on the m62, lanes disappeared in seconds, temp fell from 4C to 0.5C in less than 3 minutes, insane power of the Irish Sea, the same power I was talking about the other day. Shame the trough has moved through now, the end of the good stuff, for at least a time.

Kasim, as much as I admire your enthusiasm, I wish you’d sometimes take peoples advice, especially on your Facebook page. You absolutely do bat an eyelid, the slightest bit of a fall and you’re all over it calling it a blizzard, heavy snow, warning pictures all over it. The uppers/conditions today were never conductive of anything other than a bit of a wintry mix, someone with your knowledge level knows that but I feel you let your excitement dominate over the science. At the end of the day, I’ve seen streamers develop in high winds, I’ve seen streamers develop in very little wind. Today has been perfectly modelled by the higher resolution models, the Met Office I feel just have to cover themselves in case the Irish Sea does decide to wake up. The proximity of the HP certainly doesn’t aid shower development, the flow isn’t unstable enough. I also feel like it’s a bit of a toys out of pram scenario above where you’ve declared winter 2021/2022 over. You know as well as I, that the background signals are still there for something more potent. As someone who lives in Buxton especially, you haven’t seen the last of what this winter has to offer just yet. Chill out, take a seat and just ride with it. What can you do at the end of the day?

Worth noting the ice pellets mixed in. An indicator of marginality. I give it 30-45 minutes before it turns to rain. Ice pellets are always almost certainly a precursor of what’s to follow. Rain.

Snowing! Was worried that temps were a bit too high, but it’s started as snow. Won’t last though.