Sunny Leith
-
Posts
1,084 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Forums
Blogs
Gallery
Events
Learn About Weather and Meteorology
Community guides
Posts posted by Sunny Leith
-
-
I'm philosophical if it happens...even the metoffice get it right sometimes LOL. But I'm not really buying it. Uppers may get a bit higher than we've had this past week , and possible that surface temperatures could be higher than we've had for a few days in these parts . But up to what ... 3 or 4c ? The ground is freezing now. The worst case to me is looking like some mushing of the snow cover that could change it from its current pristine state to a crustier, patchier scene when it re-freezes and the next cold setup takes over.
If I had to place a bet with myself, then I expect to be looking out of my window and still seeing todays white on the ground (on the grass at least, in some form or another) somewhere in my field of vision come Saturday/Sunday. I can guarantee the 6 foot 8 snowman we made will still be there anyway !
BBC seem still to be going for rain on Boxing Day. Surely some chance of snow???
-
Visited the NorthEast England thread about 30 minutes ago. Reports of the event ranging from dissipating/snizzle, to freezing rain, to 5 cms or so of snow. So a good chance for many of us in East/Central areas to land something during the day. And with no negative effect on snow cover whatever happens (Xmas Day itself must be preserved at all costs !)
Eyes to the skys, noses to the radar and good luck !
-
Yup, looks like there could even be a bonus dusting through the central/lanarkshire corridor as well.
This spell is making me nostaglic for the late 70s/early-mid 80.... just lots of cold stuff and crazy little events happening all the time. A real reminder of what winter can be like at these latitudes, even in Scotland.
Looks like quite a few snow showers have clumped together just to the south east of Edinburgh.
-
Either a horrid recording error or the wackiest inversion to end all wacky inversions !
Morning all. Now -7.1C here with cloud building from the east bringing what must surely be snow, given the temperature is way below freezing. Did anyone see Aviemore recording rain and -14C?!
-
Same here in Leith (well its East Embra isn't it). Light powdery stuff falling into minus quite-a-lot degrees centigrade. Positively continental ! Winds are very light so doesn't look like we'll get any unwanted local warming from the estuary
That ticks another 2 boxes here to add to the catalogue of this brilliant cold spell.
- Day 8 of snow falling (consecutive days)
- Snow has attacked us from the East, the North, the West, the South-West. the North (again) and now the South-East.
Don't know how much we'll get from all of this but its just another Xmas-Eve bonus.
Edit: getting heavier...
Blizzards now in East Edinburgh - absoutley belting it down
-
Couldn't help myself, went to the NorthEast England thread... Theres not surprisingly been - and is currently - some snow activity from the band. Some debate as to whether its thinning a little and slowing down. Or not. Worth keeping an eye on anyway...
Yeah, I'm still a little unsure about that band, as the NMM showed the eastern flank of the band tailing off at around 4am towards Denmark, due to another low to the east of us. It's really on a knife-edge, very hard to call, and this is one situation that I would understand the met office getting wrong, at least at this range. Temperatures now on the rise again anyway, up to -6.2C from -6.5C. Tulloch Bridge now -15.2C -anyone think it'll get much lower than that?
LS
-
They changed the report to freezing fog, so yeah, case closed !
The worst forecast is for rain and 4C briefly on Boxing Day and then a return to some frost so if you have 8" of snow then that might get melted down to just the 6" of snow. Don't panic spud_nick89.
:)I think it is drifting freezing fog which by its nature may appear on radar as if it is snow showers moving about. We have gone from some of the thickest fog I have seen here 20 mins ago to just normal bog standard 150m visibility fog at the moment.
-
I'm sure your right CMD. I suppose I expected the radar to tell fog and precip apart but I'm sure snow-like grains can come out of heavy freezing fog.
It must just be the freezing fog getting picked up by the radar as it is some of the thickest fog I have ever seen, and I am only 7 miles from the airport (can hear the planes taking off if the wind is right, or light).
-
Interesting midnight report from Glasgow airport of snow shower at -5c.
Backed up by a couple of small but bright radar echo's to the south of Paisley and Glasgow. Unexpected.
Anyway, carry on !
-
Its amzing how many "showers", "wintry showers" and "wintry mixes" we've had up here this past week courtesy of the met-office and the data they supply to the TV and media outlets.
As you observe, some of this has even been seen to fall as outright snow in some areas
Just a 15?
ITV weather has just shown a "wintery mix" for tomorrow afternoon moving into the south of Scotland. Is that a wintery mix of snow and snow??
-
To concur with LS, at some point in the last 10-20 years (and I can't remember when...maybe its been gradual) ... the metoffice/bbc weather have taken it more and more upon themselves to double up as travel advisors ... "drive carefull out there, roads in yorkshire will be icy in the morning" kind of thing. All good and well I suppose, I can see the sense in them taking some of that role upon themselves...
..but if they're going to do that then the impact of getting their underlying forecast wrong becomes more deeply frustrating. If people get to depend on the MO/Beeb for travel advice as part of the weather forecast, then things can come badly unstuck. My wife drives to Wishaw and back every day. This last week that means driving up and across the mate/Harthill/North Lanarkshire tundra. When she went to bed last night, there was absolutely NO advance indication or warning of this mornings blizzard (and in local terms thats exactly what it was). Luckily it struck here before she would have normally left - and looking at the 6AM whiteout she knew it wasn't going to happen. However if it had come later - with no warning - she could have been 20-30 minutes into her drive , and then put in a very dangerous situation heading out to the mate.
All the met-office had to do, was to be as diligent as many on here ... and you were one of several people here making the forecast that proved to be ultimately spot-on. Consequently I'm basing my advice to her tomorrow on what I can see and interpret from here. Theres more insight, local knowledge and plain common-sense on here, than I'm going to get from the MO/BBC
They have been abysmal. Many people have lost faith with the Met Office around here - 1 warning and 1 advisory for the entire spell, and the warning was issued at 5am today for 2-5cm of snow, when there was already more than that here!! And in spite of the snow depths over 10cms in at least 50% of Scotland, temperatures widely below -5C with airports reporting -11C, freezing fog thick in many places and the increasing threat of more snow showers for eastern areas tomorrow, there is precisely no warning, while parts of England with 4C and rain have a warning. Sometimes I wonder if the Scottish Met Office already exists and we just haven't found out about it yet...
-
I would imagine that a bunch of grapes (for example) would freeze quite rapidly at that temperature
I've just run outside into the 6 inches of snow in my shorts to experience this -11ºC. Coldest temp I've ever been in - 'twas like opening the freezer door :lol: :lol:
-
Its utterly utterly perverse CMD ! It makes no sense to issue warnings for ice tonight as the met-office have currently done for virtually all of England, Wales and Northern Ireland ... and to NOT do exactly the same for Scotland for all the same reasons...
I'm not being the touchy Scot here. I'm being the" straight down the middle this makes no sense" Scot
I would usually defend the Met-O but they have been rubbish this cold spell up here. I am not going to go too deeply into the whole missing out on the 80% chance of heavy snow three warnings on the trot. Then they missed the NE's snow. Tonight with temps into double digits below freezing in the north and east and some of the thickest fog I have ever seen there is no warning?? Visibility here is <100m, there must be a lot of ice out there too, surely??
It was suggested by certain people on the model thread that members who posted amazing charts from FI (which were repeated time after time) were clutching at straws.....not that I'm bitter :lol:
-
Have you got snow cover with that cold FJ ? None too shabby and looks like you're -10c bound or lower !
is it really -11c there its -8.5c here now but still -11c i doubt it..... i wonder how low they can get!
-
I expect it to go up a bit , down a bit, up a bit, down a bit. I wouldn't even be certain thats its the exact temperature over the whole field.... Overall though it'll go more down than up and I'll stick with -12c as a likely overnight minimum.
Little bit of patchy cloud though or a bit more wind could prevent even that (althouh its 100% cloudless looking out over town) And I guess even now the ground under the snow still has some residual autumnal warmth (relative to the snow cover) ... maybe that puts a limit on things just now. I don't know how the thermal dynamics would work TBH !
Pity theres a possible relative warming by the weekend, we rarely get a chance to test what would happen in these situations of night after night severe frost and the minima that could lead to over a few days of cooling and cooling and cooling. I wonder how many days and nights like this (purely sepeculatively..) would we need to have before Embra or Glasgow would post -20c or -25c airport temperatures ?
Live ATC from Edinurgh (22:20) says freezing fog patches at temp of -10 / DP -10c
-
10PM report from Edinburgh now says -11c .. going through the floor. Record there I think is -17c ????
Don't really expect to match or break that ... but its possible they could post the coldest minimum of the last 15 years or so .. think it got to -14c or -15c in the baltic late December 1995 spell (and with a lot less snow cover here at that time).
EDI airport - 9c // DP - 10c
-
And Embra reporting -9c just now.
Should be a no-brainer for forecasters to predict -10c or worse (wouldn't be surprised to see Embra or Glasgow hit -12c)
55 degrees north ... 10cm+ of snow cover ... light winds ... clear skies ... almost 18 hours of darkness...
I think a lot of these predictions are "automated" forecasts ie a real met-person never even gets near the forecast.
why when it's -8c already in Glasgow are all the major weather sites predicting a minimum of -4c?
-
<SARCASM>I'm sure the metoffice are on the case and will either issue warnings during or after any snow event, or more likely just not mention it at all.</SARCASM>
I don't want to sound too sycophantic about NetWeather - and I'm only on here when its snowing LOL - but if I want to know whats likely to happen during this spell at a local level , then I'm going to come here to get the scoop. BBC Scotland/metoffice just haven't done accurate local forecasting up here during this spell.
The snow looks a little more organised than flurries on the latest BBC forecast for SE Scotland tomorrow and lasts for a good few hours, one to look out for I think!
Edit: if anything was to come this way tomorrow (and I'm uncertain... but as last night showed I know nuffink !) then it would be another remarkable feature of this spell. Snow would have fallen here arriving from the E, the N, the SW, the W, the N again ... and then maybe from the SE. Incredible !As well as giving 8 consecutive days with snow falling. Remarkable !
-
In saying that though Snow1975, you are 130 metres ASL so I guess that might be the reason why in this case.. You're probably making up for it in windchill though !
Only -0.3C here at the moment with still some cloud overhead.
-8C at Edinburgh airport!
-
Didn't see Reporting Scot Weather but the 1830 report for the UK had snow shaddows around the SE of scotland tomorrow pm, that was not on earlier forcasts.
Hate to rant, but all the talk of disruption and the councils not being prepared (as they would say) but not a word of the fact NO FORECAST at all!!!
Exactly SP33 ... I'd expect the gritters to pass the buck to the metoffice. They probably act on metoffice advice/warnings. If thats not forthcoming then they're not to blame ... at the end of the day they're truck drivers, not weatherforecasters
-
Not going down the nostalgia route on this cold spell, sufficient to say though from an Embra/Leith perspective, this is the best snow since 1993. The "worst in 20 years" comment is a typical knee-jerk media/political number that gets pulled out of the air ... the public mostly won't question it ... and only us anoraks will quibble ! So I'll let it go.
Whats fascinating to me now is whether the current snow cover can or will survive any weekend (ahem) "warm up". I've seen snow survive it before to a reasonable degree and it'll be very late 70's/early-mid 80's era-ish if it does. The uppers might be warmer by then but ground-level will be well frozen. The windflow flow from the hypothesized low pressure looks to be fairly slack ... hardly a raging south-westerly. We might even have frosts - or some fogging up - and with the best part of 17-18 hours of darkness that'll keep any thaw mostly to the daytime. Doesn't look too wet either. Quite possible we could come out of the weekend with a degraded snow-cover that then freezes up after the (ahem) warm-up is displaced by the next cold setup.
All conjecture of course. But this spell does have the capacity to last for another 10 to 14 days. It would be quite something to then point to the by-then frozen crust of todays lovely powder snow (by then it might form a crusty undercoat to a subsequent snowfall) and say "yeah that stuff is about 3 weeks old". This would be another element in what may mark this spell down as memorable ... not just the fact that its been so widespread ... but the fact that it may have continuity of snow cover over 3 or 4 weeks. That would be remarkable compared to the winters of the past 10-15 years !
-
Scottish metoffce woman pulling her punches even just there on todays forecast at the end of the BBC Scotland news. Just using the generic "showers" (not even the old standby of "wintry showers" LOL) for today and Xmas day. So that covers all eventualities as usual....
Not trusting their minimums for tonight either. If skys clear I'd expect -10 in Embra as well as Glasgow. There is a sheet of high cloud though just now though so time will tell as the day wears on.
-
Massive kudos to all of you on here who called it right for Aberdeen/Angus/Fife/Central/Lothian overnight. Shuggee the precip forcast for 6AM that you posted last night was bang on the money for these parts. Congrats to all. I can scarcely believe that the metoffice are unable to use the tools at their disposal to make local forecasts in this same way. I don't know whether its down to incompetence or their London-centric view of the cold-spell. Either way its inexcusable and just through radar and reporting stations , they should have been able to do a hell of a lot better than they did.
I admit that I didn't call it though LOL ! I crashed on the sofa last night , glanced at the radar at 3AM and saw the big big blob moving southwards down the eastern side. I confess I still expected nothing in Leith ... thinking "snow never gets here this way" and staggered to bed expecting Fife to grab whatever was going . But ... My wife works out Wishaw way and always leaves here early - a bad bad drive these last few days - and when she woke me to the whiteout outside at 6AM, the radar was off the scale in these parts.
Again big congrats and medals to all round here who had the courage to forecast it. The metoffice though ? Bah-bloody-humbug to them !
Well I don't know where to start really. If I could see the radar at midnight meant we would be hit by snow, and the models were predicting it, why were the Meto and BBC in denial - even on the 00h27 News 24 weather there was only talk of showers for 'Aberdeenshire'? Then this morning - 12 to 15cms in the centre of Edinburgh and the 07h55 BBC Breakfast Scottish forecast - sunshine for Edinburgh! And then it snows again for an hour an hour later. Questions need to be asked. Do they not have access to the radar - I might sent them the link to join netweather extra...
Edit: measured level depth in the back garden around 14 to 16 cms at the 6 points I measured. Whether we got more or less snow here because of any "tenament vortex" effect I dunno !
-
Just been down the back garden and made a monster family snowman, the snow is in utterly perfect snowman-making condition before the frost gets it later.
Thought I'd save the metoffice issuing a "be-aware" weather alert so here it is.
Avalanche alert for Leith issued at 1240. Be aware of imminent slab and cornice avalanche danger from tenement roofs as people turn up the heating and put the hot chocolate on. End of forecast.
:)
Scottish Cold Spell Discussion 7
in Spring Weather Discussion
Posted · Edited by by-tor
Now throwing them out fast and furious. Looks like ass-covering for tomorrow so they can clock off at mid-day today and head to the pub
Edit: very very light snow here, adds to the feel of the day if not the snow cover !