Scotland Regional Discussion

[Guest]

Currently -2c here and clear sky. Newly dug garden and freshly ploughed fields all benefitting from this mornings frost.

Please help us non-farming/gardening folk and explain why a frost benefits freshly turned soil?

[blitzen]

Hello from the KLM lounge at Amsterdam airport where I'm stuck for the next few hours awaiting my connecti

Morning SS. On your way I see! I'll give you a bit of company!

Agree. Great forecast by LS and hope it works out well for us all here in the east. It has to be said that this year, if nothing else, model watching has been interesting and leaves us all wondering what on earth is going to transpire at the end of it all.

Hope your trip is successful and you manage to glean a little bit of enjoyment out of it. Some sun if nothing else!

[Scottish-Irish Skier]

Morning SS. On your way I see! I'll give you a bit of company!

Agree. Great forecast by LS and hope it works out well for us all here in the east. It has to be said that this year, if nothing else, model watching has been interesting and leaves us all wondering what on earth is going to transpire at the end of it all.

Hope your trip is successful and you manage to glean a little bit of enjoyment out of it. Some sun if nothing else!

At least in the KLM lounge you have free food and drink - makes it bearable! Oh, and of course internet which is more important than food and drink as you can live without these.

Aye, I'll grab a short, sharp dose of vitamin D the morn to see me through the long, dark, kilted nights.

[November13]

Hello from the KLM lounge at Amsterdam airport where I'm stuck for the next few hours awaiting my connection.

Frost the morn. If it was not bad enough getting up at 2.30 am, had then to scrape the car too!

Nice forecast LSS. Largely what my cat is predicting.

Meanwhile, looks like after a milder incursion it's back to more cool to chilly Nov. weather.

Hope this transpires. Not a very exciting start to November so far. This week is standard fair - dull wet and mild!

[Buriedundersnow]

is there anybody on here with knowledge and access to archive data that could awnser a couple of questions for me for things i have spotted

[lorenzo]

Go for it - will try to help out or point you in the right direction, you found your way from the model thread to the regional thread. Welcome aboard !

[Buriedundersnow]

thanks lorenzo

the first thing i wanted to know is if someone could look back the archive to see if there is a coleration between low solar activity and snow cover in scandi giving us a colder winter as last year there was no snow in scandi at this point and we got mild winter but 2010 there was snow cover and we had cold winter and this year they are predicting cold and there snow cover in scandi so does that colerate with other winters with low solar activity.

second point is i have notice that 2010 and this year if it comes off the start wave breaking and heating is forecast to happen soon and will be around the same period as 2010 now i use spaceweather.com to keep an eye on solar activity and i have notice at both points in 2010 and this year a slight spike in solar sunspot activity not so much in 2010 as this year but 2010 was a really low year for solar activity compared to this year but can these spikes be in some way putting extra energy into the strat that is helping for the wave to break and then on for the strat to heat which causes us to develop blocking.

hope that isnt too much to be asking.

[lorenzo]

For the first point, the difference in last Winter from 2010 can be put down to the Polar Vortex setting up home over Greenland. We maintained a very positive Arctic Oscillation signature for much of the core of Winter, the Stratosphere maintained it's cold profile, much of the time put itself in the worst position possible to encourage any Winter synoptics featuring classic Blocking.

Sorry, I cannot comment on the Snow cover specifically for Scandinavia, the Snow and Ice Thread is the best place to find some experts on that. Born From The Void knows his stuff in this area, I don't think the analog from one month alone would give a strong lead.

In relation to Snow Cover overall, a paper by Cohen identified specific feed backs at a stratopsheric level, illustrated in attached chart.

If you go to the Stratosphere thread and have a read through am sure you will pick up more in there.

quote from C.

The direction of the QBO when combined with the level of solar flux has been shown to influence the BDC. When the QBO is in a west phase during solar maximum there are more warming events (increased strength BDC) in the stratosphere as there is during an easterly phase QBO during solar minimum. ( http://strat-www.met...-et-al-2006.pdf )

For Solar input, yes overall this is tracked in analogs and 2010 saw a solar minimum, slowly rising to maximum presently, however a very weak maximum, so therefore this allows us to look at previous years of similar solar activity to get an idea of how the atmosphere may behave.

Hope this is of some help. Snow Advance is good fun to track as it helps support the old adage, once the cold is in place the snow will follow. A decent pool of Siberian / Sceuro cold in place is a good source for a fine Easterly.

[Buriedundersnow]

thanks lorenzo will have a look through they threads

[Northernlights]

Please help us non-farming/gardening folk and explain why a frost benefits freshly turned soil?

The freezing of the moisture held within the soil expands and seperates the soil particles which on thawing leaves cracks for water to drain away and air to penetrate especially in compacted soils( especially after a wet summer with heavy tractors and combines a lot of soils need to be repaired over winter by the frost action) and also particularly clay soil types where the soil particles ly very close together and are slow to drain unless they forced apart by frost..

After a winter of frost when the soil dries out in the spring it is much more friable because of the shattering by frost and it is much easier to create a nice crumbly seed bed to give the spring barley a good start and also the small delicate seeds sown in the garden in the spring.

Edited November 12, 2012 by Northernlights

[NorthernRab]

Woken up to -5. Was it meant to do that?

I know, rather unexpected!

[Guest]

The freezing of the moisture held within the soil expands and seperates the soil particles which on thawing leaves cracks for water to drain away and air to penetrate especially in compacted soils( especially after a wet summer with heavy tractors and combines a lot of soils need to be repaired over winter by the frost action) and also particularly clay soil types where the soil particles ly very close together and are slow to drain unless they forced apart by frost..

After a winter of frost when the soil dries out in the spring it is much more friable because of the shattering by frost and it is much easier to create a nice crumbly seed bed to give the spring barley a good start and also the small delicate seeds sown in the garden in the spring.

Thanks NL

[Guest]

Morning all, grey and now raining @ 4C. Weekend was nondescript to say the least, and tomorrow looking wet and wild.

Weird Rainbow very early this morning before the rain came in, very strange.

It looks like a red rainbow, something to do with sunlight refracting in the atmosphere and all the wavelengths except red are filtered out of the light, hence the purely red rainbow...or something roughly along those lines

Edit: I wasn't too far off, red rainbows were quite common around the time of the volcanic eruptions in Iceland a while back.

http://www.atoptics.co.uk/rainbows/redbow.htm

Edited November 12, 2012 by CatchMyDrift

[A Winter's Tale]

Today was typical of an atlantic influenced November's day with a depression bringing extensive cloud cover all day long aswell as steady, persistent rainfall throughout the morning and afternoon. The next couple of days are also likely to be wet and overcast and tomorrow should also be a mild day with maximum temperatures possibly as high as 14C in places. A cooler, fresh weekend with some showers with an outside chance of wintry precipitation. GFS 18z FI looks superb with shades of 2010 but at this stage I remain to be convinced but model watching and the weather for the remainder of this month should be interesting.

[Sunny Leith]

hi all, just checking in and good to see familiar faces about already. Hopefully something of interest in the coming winter and looking forward to all the local knowledge kicking in as usual when things get tasty.

[LomondSnowstorm]

Most of the images are hopefully fixed now.

Today was typical of an atlantic influenced November's day with a depression bringing extensive cloud cover all day long aswell as steady, persistent rainfall throughout the morning and afternoon. The next couple of days are also likely to be wet and overcast and tomorrow should also be a mild day with maximum temperatures possibly as high as 14C in places. A cooler, fresh weekend with some showers with an outside chance of wintry precipitation. GFS 18z FI looks superb with shades of 2010 but at this stage I remain to be convinced but model watching and the weather for the remainder of this month should be interesting.

It goes a bit mental in FI, but then again with the GFS it's often the case that a pattern will emerge, be dropped and then picked up again at a later date in a slightly altered form. Do not be surprised if we start to see more in the way of charts like that popping up in the reliable timeframe by the end of the month.

[JoeShmoe]

Wouldn't kick this chart out of bed

http://cdn.nwstatic.co.uk/gfsimages/gfs.20121112/18/312/airpressure.png

[blitzen]

Very dreich, dank, mizzly day today. 11.6oc at the moment which hasn't shifted that much from the overnight temp. Still, very pleased with the way the models are progressing at the moment. Most comments are positive (if you can avoid those by TMWOODS! Sheesh, even in cognito he can't help himself from twisting the obvious!

[A Winter's Tale]

Very dreich, dank, mizzly day today. 11.6oc at the moment which hasn't shifted that much from the overnight temp. Still, very pleased with the way the models are progressing at the moment.

Same story here and just about everywhere else. Grey, dull and damp day which made things even darker earlier in the afternoon. Very mild too with maximum temperature of 14C. Tomorrow also looking damp, grey and mild too and after that things are looking changeable but I'm really looking forward to what's yet to come this month as the models are catching attention and should continue to do so - I'm intruiged to see which sort of synoptics evolve in the runs during the coming days and weeks. With a bit of luck we should be in a very good position to start the winter off.

Also, Steve Murr's post in the model thread is worth having a look at.

[LomondSnowstorm]

There has been quite a strong agreement in FI of a dramatic weakening of the PV. I still personally feel we'll have to wait until the start of next month for this to properly kick into gear but I'm not bullish on the timing by any means. For comparison, here's the 12Z ECMWF from today:

and from the exact same run 2 years ago:

and of course what actuallly transpired on that date in 2010:

Now there are some key differences, the biggest and probably most crucial being that, in the case of the ECM tonight certainly, we'd be looking to the archetypal 'Beast from the East' setup rather than the Greenland-Icelandic block, which IMO is a much more volatile block to model, so there will be wobbles, very many wobbles, and in fact it may seem as though the whole idea was a wobble before magically reappearing again 24 hours later, quite possibly with the blocking in a different place (in 2009 again it looked like the 'real deal' was going to be a Scandi high and an easterly until the models downgraded that one almost out of existence but instead had the block retrograde to Greenland), and like GP I think western rather than eastern blocking is the more viable option in the long run, but at this stage it's the bigger picture that's important: all roads lead to high latitude blocking to establish towards the end of the month.

[Sunny Leith]

I swear I saw a couple of doom laden posts in the model thread earlier that were basically writing the winter off already.

memo to self - do NOT go near the model thread if you value your sanity !

[LomondSnowstorm]

I swear I saw a couple of doom laden posts in the model thread earlier that were basically writing the winter off already.

memo to self - do NOT go near the model thread if you value your sanity !

Sanity? You think people who follow the Model Thread in mid November with either genuine hopes or fears about what the weather will be have any sanity left? We're long past that stage of the meteorology disease!

But seriously, I honestly don't know how, every year without fail, we people who not only live and die by every single run of the GFS but who also feel able to extrapolate from a single run of a single computer model the entirety of the winter. I'd hope that all of us on here are sensible enough to try and, not just look at the 'headline' weather forecast by the models but to actually build up a bigger picture using the plethora of more stable indicators out there along with the ensembles because that's really the only way to follow this without completely losing the plot with it all (trust me, there are times when we all lose the will to live when in the thick of a pre-cold spell model watching session).

[Guest]

I swear I saw a couple of doom laden posts in the model thread earlier that were basically writing the winter off already.

memo to self - do NOT go near the model thread if you value your sanity !

Hi by-tor, how are you? I was thinking about you the other day so it's good to see you back.

I wasn't joking the other day when I said it was pantomime season in there with the "winter's over"..."oh no it isn't"..."oh yes it is" type posting going on. It must be a nightmare for absolute newbies on NW, stumbling in there and being faced with that nonsense. It's the same every year though. Hopefully they find the regional threads and a modicum of sanity as trying to pick out the good posts (i.e. non-troll posts) in the MT can be as difficult as trying to work out all the tech weather chat.

[BleakMidwinter]

. It must be a nightmare for absolute newbies on NW, stumbling in there and being faced with that nonsense. It's the same every year though. Hopefully they find the regional threads and a modicum of sanity

Yep, that's what happened to me. Fell down the rabbit-hole into NW, spent a bit of time feeling very timid and nervous and not understanding nine-tenths of what anyone said, and then found the Kilted Thread and haven't really posted anywhere else since, although when feeling brave I read some others (always read Snow and Ice thread, obviously, but they're pretty sane in there too).

Huzzah for the Kilties!

[mardatha]

Enjoying reading about all these fabled lands where there be sea monsters!