North West Cold Spell Discussion:

[damianslaw]

Not quite as cold a night as I expected, temps at 0 degrees by 10.00am, however, think they have maxed out..haven't checked yet.. will find out this afternoon as I take a visit to central lakes. Tonight is looking a cold one, mins widely between -5 and -7 degrees I expect for much of central and east Cumbria.

[karyo]

Coastal areas may get a wintry mix tomorrow, rather than snow. As I am well inland, I expect snow but I am concerned about the amount of snow - there could be very little.

By Wednesday, the offshore wind (northeast) will ensure that it will be cold enough for snow everywhere, but the snow showers can be very unreliable. Let's hope for more trough generation!

By the way, don't expect any constructive discussion on the model discussion thread, as all the emphasis will be in the southeast!

Karyo

Edited January 3, 2010 by karyo

[lukemc]

Hi,

Looking at the radar I can see a line of snow showers over Yorkshire that seem to be coming in our direction, some appear to be making it across the penninnes is thier a possiblity that we see something today snow wise?

Luke

[Caz1980]

Hi,

Looking at the radar I can see a line of snow showers over Yorkshire that seem to be coming in our direction, some appear to be making it across the penninnes is thier a possiblity that we see something today snow wise?

Luke

I have been watching these since 10am this morning they never seem to make it to here. just fizzle out at my location but yet they are passing to the north of me.

[dodge]

Hi,

Looking at the radar I can see a line of snow showers over Yorkshire that seem to be coming in our direction, some appear to be making it across the penninnes is thier a possiblity that we see something today snow wise?

Luke

Noticed that aswell. According too the rain today radar areas in Leeds and Burnley might be seeing a few flurries at present. Unless it's Anathrop because the sun's still gloriously out here.

Very slight snow melt were the sun has hit the snow, but any snow that's in shadow (which is quite a lot at this time of the year) is still in it's present state from yesterday.

[Osbourne One-Nil]

Tonight is looking a cold one, mins widely between -5 and -7 degrees I expect for much of central and east Cumbria.

Over the past nights, I've recorded -8.4 (last night), -9.6 (Friday night), and -7.4 (Thursday night). Heaven-only knows how deep the ground would be frozen if we didn't have the snow cover.

[HotCuppa]

Noticed that aswell. According too the rain today radar areas in Leeds and Burnley might be seeing a few flurries at present. Unless it's Anathrop because the sun's still gloriously out here.

Very slight snow melt were the sun has hit the snow, but any snow that's in shadow (which is quite a lot at this time of the year) is still in it's present state from yesterday.

Nailed it well there imo with Anathrop...think we could get low enough tonight for some places to hit -10C or more in the exposed higher elevations. Saying that, I live in an odd place, you see even 2/3 miles down the road to south liverpool they usually have pretty much different weather to me, which is likely to be because they are lower down and protected more. I am not that far from the cheshire gap which can play merry havoc with temps and the loss of snow as we all know to well in these parts lol. I am expecting perhaps a colder night than the one we had before xmas which dipped in at -7.1C...heres hoping for some very low temps for it to remain below freezing tomorrow.

[Liam J]

temp -1.6c not much left from solar warming this afternoon, may just get an ice day, car and areas out of direct sun are still frozen solid

[HotCuppa]

-2c now slowly rising 2 hours and it will start to cool.

we are all doomed then with warm air off the sea yet again and rain showers, and yet freezing cold at night iwht ice

our only hope i think is the easterly driving showers over here later in the week. with no influance of westerly air off the sea

Thats why you need to be cautious when using the GFS as your analysis tools 9/10 your going to be in for a disappointing time for whatever your expecting from it. There is still hope naturally that things could change..but like many of said just find a balance between the ecm / meto / jms and the gfs you should be ok. Here is hoping that things will be good for us over the coming days...though i dont advocate the GFS it might be right this time...now that would be a shock lol

The pennines have drained that band of snow...certainly snowing over blackburn at the moment, but thats too far to my north..we'll have to see what shows up on the radar a bit later you never can really tell.

Edited January 3, 2010 by HotCuppa

[V for Very Cold]

finally got back from clearing the paths of the compacted snow and ice. It's bloody treacherous out there with last nights snowfall frozen to ice on top of the ice left from last year. The air is incredibly still - not a breath of wind, but it is bitingly cold - it's not breaking zero here atm. A couple of days of this and any precipitation will def be white stuff

Edited January 3, 2010 by V for Very Cold

[dodge]

I am expecting perhaps a colder night than the one we had before xmas which dipped in at -7.1C...heres hoping for some very low temps for it to remain below freezing tomorrow.

Yep I'm expecting a very cold night tonight, and maybe an ice day tomorrow. I haven't got a weather station, but my vista widget has fluctuated between 0c and 1c today.

So in terms of snowfall the foreseable future for our area is; nothing today, nothing for most of tomorrow, and then maybe something overnight tomorrow into Tuesday if I'm reading it correctly?

finally got back from clearing the paths of the compacted snow and ice. It's bloody treacherous out there with last nights snowfall frozen to ice

Yep, I did most of my clearing in the footfall area's yesterday just after the snowfall while it was still reasonably soft and easier to move, because I just knew what the coming sub zero temperatures would do to it.

Edited January 3, 2010 by dodgeredee

[V for Very Cold]

Yep I'm expecting a very cold night tonight, and maybe an ice day tomorrow. I haven't got a weather station, but my vista widget has fluctuated between 0c and 1c today.

So in terms of snowfall the foreseable future for our area is; nothing today, nothing for most of tomorrow, and then maybe something overnight tomorrow into Tuesday if I'm reading it correctly?

I wouldn;t be surprised if you got a dusting - we're forecast a little snow later on and I've been keeping an eye of the pennines which seem to have plenty of heavy cloud cover bubbling up every so often

[Snow free zone]

So what do we reckon, is it going to snow this week or not :winky: ?

We have just had what i suppose you could call a flurry here, i counted 7 or 8 flakes falling on the back garden. Meto seem fairly sure of snow here Monday night marginal again though i feel.

[LiverBird]

Nailed it well there imo with Anathrop...think we could get low enough tonight for some places to hit -10C or more in the exposed higher elevations. Saying that, I live in an odd place, you see even 2/3 miles down the road to south liverpool they usually have pretty much different weather to me, which is likely to be because they are lower down and protected more. I am not that far from the cheshire gap which can play merry havoc with temps and the loss of snow as we all know to well in these parts lol. I am expecting perhaps a colder night than the one we had before xmas which dipped in at -7.1C...heres hoping for some very low temps for it to remain below freezing tomorrow.

I'm in that place 2/3 miles down the road from you and you're right about our different weather situations. We seem to be the last place to get it even if Hale or Woolton do get a glimpse of it. We always know that even if Liverpool/Halton is forecast snow, it won't necessarily snow here (by the aiport). The aiport seldom closes because it's rarely snowed in so we often help Manchester out!

Today is a beautiful frosty and sunny day but I still hope the snow we're forecast Tueasday/Wednesday does materialise.

[HotCuppa]

people need to be concentrating on the nw SST, they are still too warm..the irish sea is at 7.5C (a slight drop over 2 weeks from 8C), sadly its for all intents the same temp to the nw of scotland until you start hitting greenland (even iceland is relatively warm around its southern coast considering the time of year) it should be colder down to around 5C for us not to be influenced by the irish sea. I feel we are still a couple weeks away from reaching this total..thats if we can keep the temps low enough around our coasts.

[Liam J]

Yep I'm expecting a very cold night tonight, and maybe an ice day tomorrow. I haven't got a weather station, but my vista widget has fluctuated between 0c and 1c today.

So in terms of snowfall the foreseable future for our area is; nothing today, nothing for most of tomorrow, and then maybe something overnight tomorrow into Tuesday if I'm reading it correctly?

Yep, I did most of my clearing in the footfall area's yesterday just after the snowfall while it was still reasonably soft and easier to move, because I just knew what the coming sub zero temperatures would do to it.

yes very cold tonight, my low was -5c @ around 8am today, currently -1.5c expecting that to start dropping in the next hour or so, and -6 or -7c overnight.

there is progged to be a band of ppn move south, depending where you look and listen, there will be snow inland but coasts i fear will see rain/sleet at best as a slight temporary wind shift from the irish sea lifts the temps past marginal even with the other good synoptics...

and that leads me to ask what synoptics do we need to see for snowfall at the coast/lowland areas.. the last decent one here was march 2006, before that dec 2000 and before that feb 1996 when i got stuck at school with a foot of snow level and 4 ft drifts....

i believe the march 2006 event was far more marginal than this weeks set up, as the uppers were -5, but the sea temps are lower then.

it was mentioned yesterday in scotlands cold spell discussion snow on the coast needs 850's of -8 and lower

Edited January 3, 2010 by james12

[Backtrack]

Local forecast said -8c tonight!

[HotCuppa]

yes very cold tonight, my low was -5c @ around 8am today, currently -1.5c expecting that to start dropping in the next hour or so, and -6 or -7c overnight.

there is progged to be a band of ppn move south, depending where you look and listen, there will be snow inland but coasts i fear will see rain/sleet at best as a slight temporary wind shift from the irish sea lifts the temps past marginal even with the other good synoptics...

and that leads me to ask what synoptics do we need to see for snowfall at the coast/lowland areas.. the last decent one here was march 2006, before that dec 2000 and before that feb 1998 when i got stuck at school with a foot of snow level and 4 ft drifts....

i believe the march 2006 event was far more marginal than this weeks set up, as the uppers were -5, but the sea temps are lower then.

it was mentioned yesterday in scotlands cold spell discussion snow on the coast needs 850's of -8 and lower

You raise an excellent question, there are numerous places throughout the region along the coasts and in my perspective the south of the region. It takes a very special set up for us to get more than a couple inches of snow per winter. Truth is since before this christmas we have been relatively snowless for a good long time (I mean dumpings of more than 6inches) the last time I rememberd several feet of the stuff was back in 81/82 where the set up was perfect. Sadly since then we have had to contend with (global warming, if you believe it) which has raised our temps ever so slightly but enough to ensure we are the just about the wrong side or marginal in most setups (20 years ago the whole of merseyside/cheshire) would have got a dumping from the simplest of systems..now we struggle to even get a shower over us.

James the priority definitely from our perspective and id suggest is the same for those on the coasts and lower land, is for temps to really sink low enough to give 3 or 4 ice days. (id also like to see the irish sea and the sea around iceland much cooler than it currently is) and to have a w tracking type system with a nnw (providing sst are cold enough not to modify over such a big distance) airflow..enough for lots of convective snow. Sadly until the UK's temperatures and the north atlantic ocean cools marginal is all we'll be able to muster for the forseeable future imo especially around the west coasts..the east coast is lucky in that it has russia behind it over a tepid sea which provides its moisture thus lots of convective snow..sadly meeting up with the pennines and dispersing rather rapidly with a few showers just about making it to the west side of manchester.

We are certainly living in mad times...thanks to our lovely ancestors who over the last couple hundred years ensured winter is summer and summer is autumn lol

Current Temp : 4.1 °C

DP -1.5 talk about a strange reading lol

Wind Dir: E, since the swing to the east its gotten much warmer.

Edited January 3, 2010 by HotCuppa

[Snow free zone]

I am finding something a bit hard to pick up here. We have posters talking about marginal conditions and the effect of the Irish sea. Now i would not count myself as coastal, but we always seem to be on the border of where the cold air starts to mix with the warmer air coming in from the sea. If the influence of the Irish sea is such a big factor here, why did we get so much snow here before Christmas out of an almost direct W airflow straight off the Irish Sea ? there was even snow on the coast then too. I also thought that the current airmass was alot cooler that that of the pre Christmas spell ? and the sea air would be less of a factor.

We had snow on 4 consecutive nights before Christmas out of warmer air, i'm a bit confused

[Osbourne One-Nil]

Already down to -2.7C here after a high of just -1.6C

[wysiwyg]

I am finding something a bit hard to pick up here. We have posters talking about marginal conditions and the effect of the Irish sea. Now i would not count myself as coastal, but we always seem to be on the border of where the cold air starts to mix with the warmer air coming in from the sea. If the influence of the Irish sea is such a big factor here, why did we get so much snow here before Christmas out of an almost direct W airflow straight off the Irish Sea ? there was even snow on the coast then too. I also thought that the current airmass was alot cooler that that of the pre Christmas spell ? and the sea air would be less of a factor.

We had snow on 4 consecutive nights before Christmas out of warmer air, i'm a bit confused :lol:

I think from HotCuppa's perspective the Irish Sea is a major modifying influence in coastal regions around the NW. However, I still believe that yesterday's marginality was far more to do with warm air advection (WAA) from the warmer, higher pressure air mass to our NW over Greenland. Before christmas the cold air masses that passed from north to south had a lot of kinetic energy associated with them, thus preventing much WAA. Yesterday's troughs were much slacker affairs that tracked close enough to the West to allow significant mixing of warmer air thus increasing the tendancy for the whole event to be the wrong side of marginal for low ground and especially coastal regions.

Other factors that may effect marginality near the coast are i) tidal influences locally modifying the surface wind strength and direction and ii) warm water up-welling caused by rivers such as the Mersey, Ribble etc dumping icy cold meltwater into the sea and causing disturbances in the thermocline further out to sea. Minor influences not seen further inland but critical towards the coast where they make the difference between rain and snow.

[Liam J]

tonight will be very cold, my temp rise has flatlined at -1.3c dp -3c

ice day at last!!

im hoping for that ppn to be intense and snow on monday night, we will be the right side of marginal, dont expect anything and you might be pleasantly surprised. although im not holding my breath

[V for Very Cold]

so we've had the analyis of the outlook for the costal regions - what are ppl's thoughts for the Eastern side of region you know maybe in the foothills of the pennines

just asking like lol

[Osbourne One-Nil]

Well, I always find the my actual weather bears more relation to the forecast for the north-east than the north-west.

I think that's what you wanted to hear!

[Terminal Moraine]

Already down to -2.7C here after a high of just -1.6C

I reckon your min' could be pushing -10c tonight OON. The combination of snow cover, light winds and being in an upland valley, almost perfect for low min'.