Satsigs 2009-10

[Methuselah]

Here we go again, folks:

Autumn's here, winter's a'coming, and the usual suspects are dusting-off their hedgehogs...And S-F is late!

So, if you've had any 'no', are expecting any 'retroguessing', 'leasterlies' or 'burification' - this is the thread!

[butler_son]

Here we go again, folks:

Autumn's here, winter's a'coming, and the usual suspects are dusting-off their hedgehogs...And S-F is late! :unsure:

So, if you've had any 'no', are expecting any 'retroguessing', 'leasterlies' or 'burification' - this is the thread! :blink:

You. Absolute. Beauty!

[Ben_Cambs]

What a name! :unsure:

[Nick F]

Blizzards over Telford when everywhere else in the Midlands it's raining; excitement over a possible (though unlikely) Thames Snow Streamer; Snowless Abingdon ... looking forward to the reports.

[Methuselah]

Any more runs like the 06Z, and there'll be a 'Rampede'??

[Sleet30031972]

Snow this week for Scotland and northern fells.

Sleet for the southern pennines.

We are shortly to be plunged into a WINTER MAELSTROM ICE BOUND HELL the likes of which we have not seen for a generation.

Mark my words. You heard it here first. Buy up tinned good now!

[LomondSnowstorm]

This thread definitely needs to be resurrected in light of the amazing charts (which, in a few days, may turn, leaving many people to wallow in a suicidal state for days on end).

I think all the snow rampers like myself need to get a big ramp out of their system and better do it here than fill the model output discussion with insane talk of 6 feet of snow!

So here goes....

A massive easterly is going to bring snow and freezing maximums to all parts, with all world leaders snowed in at the Copenhagen Summit and a northeasterly reload coinciding nicely with the xmas/new year period. After that, a mild spell around the third, then easterly winds all the way until March, leaving all schools in Britain closed and perfect skiing/sledging weather when the snow stops!!

[Magadan]

Snow this week for Scotland and northern fells.

Sleet for the southern pennines.

We are shortly to be plunged into a WINTER MAELSTROM ICE BOUND HELL the likes of which we have not seen for a generation.

Mark my words. You heard it here first. Buy up tinned good now!

LOL at the terminology! That would be bliss for a snow-loving ice man like me... My wife can't even sleep in the same room as me, because I have to be cold all the time and she's the total opposite.

[Methuselah]

We really do need Stratos Ferric back, IMO; he was the originator of this thread, not me.

What's more, I cannot do his thread real justice...Come-on SF???

[The Enforcer]

If you take winter very seriously, and if your very existence hangs by an icicle attached however tenuously to prospects for snow - you know who you are - then I suggest you desist from reading this thread NOW. You have been warned.

As a light hearted nod in the direction of winter / wanter / wonter, I thought I might venture to bring the SATSIGs team back out of summer hibernation. I can't remember who we had last year, though I'm fairly sure WIB was our W London agent, Enforcer was there simply because it never snows in Abingdon, and I recall that OON and John lived at opposite ends of the "mysterious zone of sound northern thinking" which, equally mysteriously, wended it's way through, erm, Steeton - I'm sitting back pulling a surprised / shocked face as I type; you'll just have to imagine it as smiley-world.com hasn't reached that level of sophistication yet it seems. TM was in this zone as well, but for reasons not related to the PIT it by-passed Sheffield. TWS even moved so that he could LIVE in the zone.m Others may wish to follow suit.

SATSIGs' mission is to try to moderate, reasonably, AND LIGHT-HEARTEDLY, the wanter forcasts / hopecasts. Just to help the naive reader judge

Anyway, assuming there aren't too many yelps of protest from, say, the south coast, resulting in this thread being locked, and always accepting the constraints of time which now that I no longer have a public sector client are far more severe, this thread may periodically lurch back up the charts - usually, I find, when there's blue on GFS encroaching from points between 10:30 and 04:00.

I didn't keep the Sod All The Science It's Gonna snow scale last year, but here it is.

There are various types of ramp, and the SATSIGs scale is used to issue a RAMP ALERT when ramping is ongoing. Occasionally predictions for potential ramping might be made. Periodically we issue maps to show the overall state of ramping, and, if time permits (it won't) maps showing ramp forecasts.

There are three basic types of ramp. Wildly speculative far away ramps which wouldn't appear on the map of the possible even if the same stretched right to the boundary of Possibleshire, which is a very very long way away, trust me - e.g. "we're in for a right old fashioned dumping in 23 days' time". Er, right... Bounds of plausibility ramps; when the models are showing potential but it's still just over the rainbow: these tend to be characterised by arguments that start of sane before the writer starts to surf their own self-generated wave of froth. E.g. "GFS has been showing this for seven days now, and although it's coming and going it's a definite feature and it's starting to look as if, so long as HP builds here, ice grows up there, Mercury goes retrograde and Rotherham beat Bradford, we might get the mother and father of all old-fashioned dumpings and I'm going to be shovelling my way out of thehouse and calling in air-sea rescue to drop supplies". Then there's the near time stuff; the characteristics here vary - the basic thing here is that cold weather is now looking very likely, and the ramp is not so much 'if' as 'what'. Typical examples from last year were a post suggesting that what was a wedy tendril of NW'ly flow would produce "at least a foot tonight". There is a variant of the ramp thatapplies to measured depth of snow as well, but snowflation is the stuff of another thread, unless we're bored / irritated.

Anyway, a rough guide toi ramp dimensions:

1 - SLIGHT RAMP: Early calls for potential cold weather based on highly speculative and usually distant charts. E.g. "looks like we might get some frost later this week". Very weak ramps are usually caveated, and not snowflationary, though they are making slightly desperate grasps - not unusual during long spells of Atlantic dross. ALso applies to slightly inflated extraplation of enuine prospects for snow. E.g. "looks like we might get a covering in London if we're lucky", when clearly the type of luck required would be that of the back-to-back lottery winner, or the person finding themselves waking up alongside Brad / Angelina (or both) in an accidental no clothes type situation. I know it's the stuff of the "National Enquirer" but so is some of the ramping we occasionally get.

2 - MODERATE RAMP: Early calls for moderate extremes of weather, and near-event inflation of prospects. "Could be a big day for you next Wednesday, Dave" or "Looks like I'll be working from home the day after tomorrow" - the latter when all that's shown is a cool HP right over the UK.

3 - HEAVY RAMP: Usually follows a chart that has caused moderate ramping, and can simply be a group effect. Characterised by "my snowdrift is going tobe bigger than your snowdrift" type discussions. Also representtive of the behaviour when distant cold on GFS persists for several runs, and builds. We saw this to great effect several times over the past two years when GFS built things up, and we even had an instance a couple of weeks or so back.

4 - SEVERE RAMP: Either - a plainly daft call for severe weather based on GFS runs that are literally projected in a timescale in which you couldn't even reach Venus (it requires BOTH conditions - i.e. long way out and simply silly scale of assessment of impact) OR a gross exageration of impact of a near-time event. E.g. "I'm expecting to see Polar bears on my lawn next week".

5 - RAMPEDE: Rampedes are dangerous, and even WIB in SATSIG 11 (it's very big) with the anti-rampede ray gun pod will struggle to contai this one. Characterised by lots of inter ramper chatter leading to an inflationary spiral towards, what the uninitiated reader might assume to be, Armageddon. Think four horsemen of the Apocalypse meets Revelations,. It's the cold weather equivalent of the South Sea Bubble and the 1992 run on the pound. Belt up and have fun.

Ramps away...let the ramping begin...

It's as if the big man was in the room.

[Roger J Smith]

I would like to announce the formation of a new organization,

soditall

Snowfall Over-prediction During Intense Arctic Lower Levels

... the aim of Soditall is to alert the public to as much as ten times the expected snowfall so that they can over-react in advance, and then come on Net-weather to complain that it missed them.

Watch for these levels of alert from Soditall:

1 ... Flow turns easterly, despite total absence of cold sourcing, 5-10 cms predicted.

2 ... Flow is greater than 25 knots, thicknesses below 534 dm, possible flakes mixing in with drizzle may be described as "blizzards" but only east of M1.

3 ... Flow exceeds 30 knots, thicknesses touch 528 dm, blizzard alert extended to all of UK and Ireland

4 ... Actual snow event ... comparisons to 1947 obligatory ... do emergency food shopping while shops are still open.

5 ... Actual blizzard ... Soditall goes to level one Ice Age alert.

[noggin]

We really do need Stratos Ferric back, IMO; he was the originator of this thread, not me.

Stratos Ferric, eh?

He is funny, mind.......

[Just Before Dawn]

We are shortly to be plunged into a WINTER MAELSTROM ICE BOUND HELL the likes of which we have not seen for a generation.

The Daily Express called. They want their headline back!

[Methuselah]

I suspect an imminent Rampede!!!

[Just Before Dawn]

There were certainly points over the weekend where the Rampede scenario threatened to raise its head, however the overnight ECM run and ensembles seemed to have settled us down into somewhere between moderate and heavy ramping activity. If the 12z & 18z GFS runs continues the trend, well then all bets are off and we may need to draft in reinforcements....

Edited December 7, 2009 by Just Before Dawn

[LomondSnowstorm]

If the ECM 12Z is good then I fear a rampede tonight with the next ice age predicted for around christmas day.

[Roger J Smith]

Soditall level one for East Anglia Friday ... take all necessary actions.

[Ben_Cambs]

Soditall level one for East Anglia Friday ... take all necessary actions. :D :D

Maybe next week!

[wysiwyg]

Do we have a contigency plan to cope with a breakout of "model wars" ? It would seem that the ECM's reputation is hanging by a thread and I fear if any more rubbish data is fed into this model that the model discussion thread will become a battleground of taunts and jibes and the poor little model just wont be able to cope any more.

As a result of this it will pick up it's ball and sit in the corner sulking. Clearly this would mean that there would be no weather to discuss whatsoever as everybody knows that the models have a) a mind and personality of their own that lets them play nasty tricks on us snow lovers and, b ) the models actually control what the weather is going to do.

In absence of a formal SATSIG or SODITALL policy on offering a telephone helpline for models that are suffering from a terrible loss of confidence due to nasty bullies, I urge everyone to give the poor ECMWF model a break and talk nicely about it for a bit in order to stop it totally throwing its toys out of the pram!!

Edited December 11, 2009 by wysiwyg

[loophole]

As a result of this it will pick up it's ball and sit in the corner sulking. Clearly this would mean that there would be no weather to discuss whatsoever

Am i reading this correctly?

There is a danger of no weather at all next week?

I thought i was going to be putting the finishing touches to my igloo next friday...