Scotland Regional Discussion

[blitzen]

A'noon! Achieved 0.0oC overnight which resulted in a beautiful, frosty,crisp sunny morning and day. Currently 1.5oC and falling, with decreasing dewpoint of 1.2oC. Barometer starting to fall rapidly now tho' at 1009mbs, which will be that low working its way up the country I suppose.

Will I or won't I have a peep into the model thread I wonder? Nah, I don't think I could cope. Will wait until there are a few sane comments to mull over. Gawd, thank goodness this week is over. It has left me sitting on a chair with my mouth open and my arms dangling by my sides!

[LomondSnowstorm]

Using sebastian's chart and also from my own thickness calculations, that UKMO has thickness at around 526dm for eastern Scotland and uppers around -7C (ish), which is just on the cusp of being perfect. Note also that the Ridging into Greenland on that run looks pretty strong and that the flow backs right the way back to the very cold pool sitting over central Russia, so it'd take a lot to dislodge it.

[Hairy Celt]

Went for a decent walk locally this afternoon as it clouded over. Camera stayed in the pocket till we got back to here - looking across to Avoch. And the sky was this colour!

[edo]

Using sebastian's chart and also from my own thickness calculations, that UKMO has thickness at around 526dm for eastern Scotland and uppers around -7C (ish), which is just on the cusp of being perfect. Note also that the Ridging into Greenland on that run looks pretty strong and that the flow backs right the way back to the very cold pool sitting over central Russia, so it'd take a lot to dislodge it.

Great stuff LS saved me another trip one step beyond.....went in there at 8am this morning and thought we were going to get 10c maxes next week.....are we looking at a more NNE flow?

Blitzen sounds like you been sitting in an electric chair #dangeroushobby

Went for a decent walk locally this afternoon as it clouded over. Camera stayed in the pocket till we got back to here - looking across to Avoch. And the sky was this colour!

Wow you are not half producing on the pics front this weekend....magnificent sky

Edited November 24, 2012 by edodfc

[Hairy Celt]

Was about to get my hands dirty in the MT but dinner's ready so off to scoff some curry instead. Much more satisfying and as Ed says, we have LS to keep us up to speed! Certainly looks like it's gonna stay cold for a long while although there doesn't seem to be much ppn around this week - in Scotland anyway...

[LomondSnowstorm]

Was about to get my hands dirty in the MT but dinner's ready so off to scoff some curry instead. Much more satisfying and as Ed says, we have LS to keep us up to speed! Certainly looks like it's gonna stay cold for a long while although there doesn't seem to be much ppn around this week - in Scotland anyway...

Sounds about right for next week's weather. The model thread is fine if you know who's posts to listen to: some people get a wee bit overexcited and read the wrong thing into the charts. Looks like it's still game on:

Wednesday could be interesting for the highlands too:

[edo]

Always the chance of unforeseen convective precipitation....as long as cold is here I'm happy to keep looking for where and when the snow may/will come

[LomondSnowstorm]

ECM looks like it could give a major snowfest somewhere:

-8C uppers over northern Scotland

Uppers around -6C for most but with such low heights, slack flow and it not being a direct easterly there would be real potential in this setup for many.

Uppers still around -5C/-6C, very cold ahead of frontal precipitation.

I'll see what the wundermap with snowfall charts for the ECM has to say...

http://www.wunderground.com/wundermap/

Sadly it only goes up to +180, up to that point mostly snowfall around the Aberdeenshire coast (though caveats about models failing to show up precipitation in these setups), temperatures though maxing out at around 2C, ice day right across the highlands at +174 hours.

Edited November 24, 2012 by LomondSnowstorm

[LomondSnowstorm]

Let me see if I can send you the direct link of these charts:

this is the uppers in more detail at T+180: very clear trough feature in the North Sea with a slight warm sector:

http://wxug.us/udn8

Precipitation associated with it out in the North Sea:

http://wxug.us/udnb

It will of course turn out quite differently but it's unusual to see such features showing up this far out.

edit: you'll have to roll it forward to +180 from there.

Edited November 24, 2012 by LomondSnowstorm

[blitzen]

Blitzen sounds like you been sitting in an electric chair #dangeroushobby

At 4pm this afternoon I would happily have settled for a guillotine! Had to laugh though when I caught up with the pup as he just sat and looked at me with a poinsettia sticking out of his mouth surround by a totally trashed table centrepiece!

Wow you are not half producing on the pics front this weekend....magnificent sky

Ditto HC...Beautiful, just beautiful!

Edited November 24, 2012 by Blitzen

[Kelly]

I've finally found the right forum for me! Weather for the next week looking promising

Would love to see a repeat of 2009-2010 Winter, wonder if anyone could tell me why we had such prolonged cold and how likely this would be to happen again?

Having trouble uploading a pic, how can I get it small enough?!

[Big Innes Madori]

Based on that forecast, a 4WD is not going to be much good. You need to get yourself one of these:

Ahh!

SS Rolls oot the ST 2012

Aye that Bad Boy should do the trick SS

Big Impressed Innes

[Big Innes Madori]

I've finally found the right forum for me! Weather for the next week looking promising

Would love to see a repeat of 2009-2010 Winter, wonder if anyone could tell me why we had such prolonged cold and how likely this would be to happen again?

Having trouble uploading a pic, how can I get it small enough?!

Welcome Kelly,

A wee word of advice

The MT is like one of these

Read what our Kilted weather experts post in here

Big Innes

[LomondSnowstorm]

I've finally found the right forum for me! Weather for the next week looking promising

Would love to see a repeat of 2009-2010 Winter, wonder if anyone could tell me why we had such prolonged cold and how likely this would be to happen again?

Having trouble uploading a pic, how can I get it small enough?!

Hi Kelly, great to have another newcomer to the thread for this winter.

There were 2 key elements to that winter: a very weak polar vortex and a Greenland high. The polar vortex is a large upper air cyclone situated near the north pole and pretty much all the very cold upper air needed for snowy setups is situated within it. Normally it sits over the polar regions, particularly towards Greenland, and when this happens we end up with bog standard mild westerlies with a lot of rain:

However, through a combination of a warm stratosphere possibly linked to solar cycles in December 2009, just like in most of the other coldest winters on record, it was very much fragmented, and a stable high pressure system instead set up over Greenland:

This kind of set up is the holy grail for snow lovers: a Greenland high is very hard to shift and almost always results in a very cold northerly or easterly flow.

It also tends to reload again and again throughout the winter once it's first established, and once you get snow cover on the ground and the cold air embedded at the surface it takes a very mild airmass or very strong coastal winds to shift the cold air. As for this year? It's hard to say, but at the moment all indications for the first week of December at least are for a similar pressure pattern, with the polar vortex similarly weak and high pressure situated towards Greenland:

All of the longer term factors at the moment also seem to favour this kind of pattern repeating itself and potentially the cold lasting through the winter. As for specific snow risk, that's a much harder thing to forecast, and most of it is speculation until about 2 days out when the high resolution models come into play. I would add that if the current models there's likely to be some snow falling around Inverness in the next seven days.

If you open the file in paint and hit on the resize button that should do the trick.

[Northernlights]

Dry day here with sunshine in the morning with high cloud moving in in the afternoon.Maximum of 4c this afternoon and currently 1.5c. Frost lay in the shade all day. A real feel of winter in the air.

Cows and calves in this morning and calves got their pneumonia vaccine rather reluctantly. A photo showing showing how comfy they are tonight.Second one shows the youngest calf and its mother.

[lorenzo]

I've finally found the right forum for me! Weather for the next week looking promising

Would love to see a repeat of 2009-2010 Winter, wonder if anyone could tell me why we had such prolonged cold and how likely this would be to happen again?

Having trouble uploading a pic, how can I get it small enough?!

Welcome to the Scottish Regional Winter madness, you will have a great time here

Are you getting an error message when adding a picture?

[LomondSnowstorm]

Something to watch out for tonight: precipitation is heading northwards and has just passed the border, with dewpoints in Leuchars, Edinburgh and Dundee all between 0C and 1C. Now it's probably too high for the low ground but the NMM had dew points at around 3C down the east coast (once again, take note for future reference, NMM ALWAYS overcooks dewpoints on the east coast, almost without fail) so I'm putting my own yellow warning out for the eastern borders and areas above about 100m in central areas to watch out for some possibly wintryness tonight.

[Scottish-Irish Skier]

Something to watch out for tonight: precipitation is heading northwards and has just passed the border, with dewpoints in Leuchars, Edinburgh and Dundee all between 0C and 1C. Now it's probably too high for the low ground but the NMM had dew points at around 3C down the east coast (once again, take note for future reference, NMM ALWAYS overcooks dewpoints on the east coast, almost without fail) so I'm putting my own yellow warning out for the eastern borders and areas above about 100m in central areas to watch out for some possibly wintryness tonight.

We'll soon see. Fort SS has placed sentries as appropriate.

Currently 0.6 C.

[Kelly]

Hi Kelly, great to have another newcomer to the thread for this winter.

There were 2 key elements to that winter: a very weak polar vortex and a Greenland high. The polar vortex is a large upper air cyclone situated near the north pole and pretty much all the very cold upper air needed for snowy setups is situated within it. Normally it sits over the polar regions, particularly towards Greenland, and when this happens we end up with bog standard mild westerlies with a lot of rain:

However, through a combination of a warm stratosphere possibly linked to solar cycles in December 2009, just like in most of the other coldest winters on record, it was very much fragmented, and a stable high pressure system instead set up over Greenland:

This kind of set up is the holy grail for snow lovers: a Greenland high is very hard to shift and almost always results in a very cold northerly or easterly flow.

It also tends to reload again and again throughout the winter once it's first established, and once you get snow cover on the ground and the cold air embedded at the surface it takes a very mild airmass or very strong coastal winds to shift the cold air. As for this year? It's hard to say, but at the moment all indications for the first week of December at least are for a similar pressure pattern, with the polar vortex similarly weak and high pressure situated towards Greenland:

All of the longer term factors at the moment also seem to favour this kind of pattern repeating itself and potentially the cold lasting through the winter. As for specific snow risk, that's a much harder thing to forecast, and most of it is speculation until about 2 days out when the high resolution models come into play. I would add that if the current models there's likely to be some snow falling around Inverness in the next seven days.

If you open the file in paint and hit on the resize button that should do the trick.

Thanks for that - great explanation. I loved that winter. People talk a lot about winter 10-11 but 09-10 I think was much better (especially for snow)!

Exciting to see how things are panning out.

[Cheggers]

Sorry for the delay people, had a bit of a crisis afternoon with some stuff in our Datacenter.

Zipped file of all the regions cams pages, but will place it in my signature as well.

TrafCams.zip

Cracking pics HC, saw the red sky oot West this evening after a wonder around Palacerigg, but nea camera.

I took this earlier this afternoon while trying not to pull to many hairs oot.

[Hairy Celt]

I've finally found the right forum for me! Weather for the next week looking promising

Would love to see a repeat of 2009-2010 Winter, wonder if anyone could tell me why we had such prolonged cold and how likely this would be to happen again?

Having trouble uploading a pic, how can I get it small enough?!

Hi Kelly, good have another member from round here; mind, this thread can get a bit side-tracked at times which helps with the sanity...

Thing with photos is, as long as you have reasonable broadband, the forum's uploading software will take pretty well whatever you ask it to, then when you add it to a post, it shrinks and compresses the file so it takes less time for folks to download when they click on the thumbnail in your post. So unless your jpgs are many MB, you should be ok. But as LS wrote above, you can use 'Paint' - or any other freeware photo editing package to resize or compress the files yourself. Be good to see your pics!

[Cheggers]

I've finally found the right forum for me! Weather for the next week looking promising

Would love to see a repeat of 2009-2010 Winter, wonder if anyone could tell me why we had such prolonged cold and how likely this would be to happen again?

Having trouble uploading a pic, how can I get it small enough?!

Welcome to oor wee corner of the forum, always great to see new members.

With picture uploads I have found that the size, camera format etc all have a bearing on what gets uploaded. I use a free program from Google called Picasa. The Export function is great. It shrinks the size of your pictures to a standard size, and makes it so much easier to upload.

If you need any more info just message me.

[over_the_rainbow]

Evening all!

Welcome Kelly! Cheers Cheggers for the thumbnail cams - so handy will save me so much time when on snow-watch. Thanks to the LS for the model updates today - I'm struggling to catch up with the MT in between the swathe of emotional sea-sawing posts on there. Lovely pics HC - you make me feel that I really must learn how to take a picture. And NL those baby moos are too cute - but glad they are snug!

Already icy again outside tonight - certainly feels like winters knocking.

P.S if that Snow Trac has a red leather interior with heated seats then I'm having one! I imagine it's a to park, but then I can't park the Renault sensibly to be honest.

[Scottish-Irish Skier]

We'll soon see. Fort SS has placed sentries as appropriate.

Currently 0.6 C.

Report from the front is 1.6 C and pishin doon.

[Cheggers]

P.S if that Snow Trac has a red leather interior with heated seats then I'm having one! I imagine it's a to park, but then I can't park the Renault sensibly to be honest.

With one of them you don't need to know how to park.

Report from the front is 1.6 C and pishin doon.

Dislike. Edited November 24, 2012 by Cheggers