Scotland Regional Discussion

[Guest]

We need a wee auto-bot to be sitting in the MT thread dishing out a Chewin' the Fat style "good guy, good guy, good guy, Please stop swearing on the family forum".

[Scottish-Irish Skier]

Just back from saudi arabia.

Had about 4 hours dozy sleep in 54 hours and I stink. Long story with funny bits (not at the time) but off tae bed now.

Must say it was welcome to step out of Edinburgh airport into good Scots rain after the heat of the desert.

Shall report later!

Edited November 14, 2012 by scottish skier

[Cheggers]

Bugger, SS Kiltland rumbled.... http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-20316258

[blitzen]

Moaning. The status is quo! 9.1oC. Overnight 8.3oC and still dank, drizzly and miserable! However, still hopeful for the end of the month so it's not all bad. My view of Benarty Hill has gone again this morning!

[Snowlover2]

Oohh blitzen you have the same view as me,or lack of. Very miserable day!!

Edited November 14, 2012 by Snowlover2

[Guest]

Oohh blitzen you have the same view as me,or lack of. Very miserable day!!

Waw, we must be lucky down here near the border as we've got very bright greyness today

11ºC at Charterhall, but that's ten miles away up in the hills. I'm looking forward to (hopefully) moving in January and getting a weather station all of my own

[WhiteXmas]

I'm considering setting up a webcam at the front of my house soon. Would be great for snow watching and it shows on to the main carriageway which used to be the main route from Glasgow to the airport before the motorways

Also it will show right on to Barshaw park so plenty of picturesque scenes to be captured hopefully

Of anyone has any ideas on the best place to get one to link up with the laptop and host on a website please let me know

[November13]

Interesting:

[Guest]

Interesting:

Yep, there should be some fairly hefty snow showers over the weekend at height, cold November rain elsewhere.

[blitzen]

Oohh blitzen you have the same view as me,or lack of. Very miserable day!!

Hello you!

Back to feed the annual addiction then? Miserable day yes, but ever hopeful that something better will transpire this year. Really curious as to what some of these unusual synoptics will produce later in the season. Snowblower unwrapped and ready to roll!(AGAIN!)

Edited November 14, 2012 by Blitzen

[LomondSnowstorm]

+240 hours has changed a bit since yesterday with the idea of a trough over or east of the meridian becoming more dominant with the consequent height rises being towards the mid Atlantic and Greenland:

ECM op slightly different as it really doesn't want to cook that low pressure at all and we end up in a slack no man's land, though again the Polar Vortex looks ready to shift:

The signal from NAEFS shows a similar story: UK-Scandi trough, height rises initially eastern Europe but then the pattern gets shunted a bit further east and the blocking establishes around southern Greenland:

Broadly speaking, we have decent model agreement on the broad picture, it's just a matter of how far east or west everything ends up

[LomondSnowstorm]

Also worth noting that a Scandi trough would tie in well with the December CFS:

The January one is a classic:

[Guest]

Also worth noting that a Scandi trough would tie in well with the December CFS:

The January one is a classic:

That January one could be epic, give that a little shake and it's going to bury some of country in snow.

[Scottish-Irish Skier]

Nice 06Z control...

[Guest]

Nice 06Z control...

Out of interest SS which area ensembles do you use for looking at your local weather, I'm probably missing it but can't see anything which covers this area.

And yes, trending down nicely which is the main thing at the moment.

[blitzen]

Well 12zs are a bit of a dog's dinner to be frank. Don't quite know what to make of it so I won't bother! I think we have to lose that block to the east to allow Europe to cool down a tad too. Bit of a continuing stalemate really. Still no vortex to speak of though which is a good sign (I think)

With all that cold air trapped way up north, look at the effect it is having on north east China.......

http://iceagenow.inf...worst-50-years/

Edited November 14, 2012 by Blitzen

[Guest]

Well 12zs are a bit of a dog's dinner to be frank. Don't quite know what to make of it so I won't bother! I think we have to lose that block to the east to allow Europe to cool down a tad too. Bit of a continuing stalemate really. Still no vortex to speak of though which is a good sign (I think)

With all that cold air trapped way up north, look at the effect it is having on north east China.......

http://iceagenow.inf...worst-50-years/

If we were all dogs then we'd think a dog's dinner was tasty, filling and would leave us contented. But we're not dogs, not sure what my point is with that one

The general consensus from the MT is that nothing much is doing for at least ten days.

[Guest]

Here's something from the archive, this heavy but short lived spell of snow heralded the arrival of the late Nov 2010 cold spell:

[Northernlights]

Nice dry day again with some bright intervels and temperatures into the fifties Farenhight. Good day for hand lifting some neeps. Cows and calves still happy and healthier to be outside and very warm rolling out bedding straw for the bigger cattle in the steading.

Edited November 14, 2012 by Northernlights

[LomondSnowstorm]

If we were all dogs then we'd think a dog's dinner was tasty, filling and would leave us contented. But we're not dogs, not sure what my point is with that one

The general consensus from the MT is that nothing much is doing for at least ten days.

I'm not sure that many people seriously thought it was to be honest, the building blocks have been there for a bit and sometimes the models run with them in FI and other times they don't. Even if we did get a nice synoptic set up the cold pools aren't immediately there to be tapped into, which is another reason why Arctic and not continental is required at this stage in the game, but then none of us have ever really been keen on continental flows anyway. One thing that does give a pause for thought is the stratosphere, which is distinctly unfavourable at this moment in time. We have a lot going for us but at the moment at least this is not something that counts in our favour. The good thing is that it's quite likely that it won't stay that way for the entirety of the winter and we'll get at least a warming of some kind at some point. Zonal westerlies are maybe starting to tone down a little at mid latitudes and, unlikely the failed easterly of last February, the EP flux isn't torpedoing our chances at the moment at least:

[Snowlover2]

Hello you!

Back to feed the annual addiction then? Miserable day yes, but ever hopeful that something better will transpire this year. Really curious as to what some of these unusual synoptics will produce later in the season. Snowblower unwrapped and ready to roll!(AGAIN!)

Haha. Yes,winters coming

[Northern Strath]

Yawn worthy weather of late, nothing worth reporting. More exciting is that we had a Pine Martin in the garden this morning, been a wee while since one has ventured close to the house so it was lovely to see!

As I joined in with the Kilted fun in Oct 2010 I was able to enjoy the arrival of the November cold spell and all the snow filled glory that followed on here! but it meant I never witnessed the previous " if Carlsberg did winter" winter that was 09/10 on here. Was just wondering if any of our resident weather boffins saw it coming? How early did the charts point to it? and what exactly were the ingredients/set-ups that created such a cold,snowy and relentless winter? The worst, many said, in 50 years (or the best if you love the white stuff )

Just a few questions i've always been meaning to ask on here! should help in knowing what to look out for in future too

[LomondSnowstorm]

Yawn worthy weather of late, nothing worth reporting. More exciting is that we had a Pine Martin in the garden this morning, been a wee while since one has ventured close to the house so it was lovely to see!

As I joined in with the Kilted fun in Oct 2010 I was able to enjoy the arrival of the November cold spell and all the snow filled glory that followed on here! but it meant I never witnessed the previous " if Carlsberg did winter" winter that was 09/10 on here. Was just wondering if any of our resident weather boffins saw it coming? How early did the charts point to it? and what exactly were the ingredients/set-ups that created such a cold,snowy and relentless winter? The worst, many said, in 50 years (or the best if you love the white stuff )

Just a few questions i've always been meaning to ask on here! should help in knowing what to look out for in future too

As with most cold spells it was flagged up pretty early, but I think once the momentum starts on the Model Thread everyone starts to believe it.

It's a very good story actually. At the start of December, the models started throwing up some interesting charts (I really wish I could find the threads from around then but they appear to be missing, presumed dead). However, the initial runs, and this is where I noted a parallel to this recent period of model watching, looked very different to what actually transpired - the charts were showing a 'beasterly' from a trans-siberian high if I remember correctly. This ebbed and flowed a bit with the usual ups and downs of model watching but the teleconnections all the while told us that, instead of looking east, we should look to Greenland. I think most of us were aware during that period that something was brewing, there was an almost eerie consistency between the charts in the sense that all of them showed yellows and greens flooding the Arctic, which must've seemed strange to people who've had to endure whole winters without even the hint of a proper cold spell on the cards.

The easterly gradually downgraded to nothing but something more interesting started appearing: retrogression to Greenland. The Greenland high is without doubt the true holy grail of cold weather, delivering an almost 100% success record and being the starting point for the vast majority of the legendary 20th century winters. But even from there getting the cold to us was still not guaranteed, the exact evolution changed around a lot, before finally, at about +168 hours, it settled on the shortwave trigger, which again put everyone's nerves on edge as one night one model would get the trigger low not coming far enough west, another time too far north, and I remember at one point there was a complete meltdown on the model thread when it looked like we'd lost it. But of course the shortwave headed southwest, the floodgates opened, a big chunk of the polar vortex dropped out of the Arctic and landed right on top of us for weeks and the rest is history.

In short, you can usually tell at about +240 hours if it's going to be worth watching, but there's always still that possibility that it'll just go, one of the variables creating the right circumstances can fall away and it just goes overnight, even up to about 4 days out, and it's because such set ups are so rare and hard to produce that they are also the most volatile to model.

The area between 60 and 90 degrees north on this side of the pole is absolutely the most crucial thing to watch initially, but then looking at the exact positioning of the block comes into play. Greenie beats all else, Siberian highs tend to be teases and Iceland-Scandi highs can deliver big time but aren't as stable as Greenland highs.

[Northernlights]

Yawn worthy weather of late, nothing worth reporting. More exciting is that we had a Pine Martin in the garden this morning, been a wee while since one has ventured close to the house so it was lovely to see!

As I joined in with the Kilted fun in Oct 2010 I was able to enjoy the arrival of the November cold spell and all the snow filled glory that followed on here! but it meant I never witnessed the previous " if Carlsberg did winter" winter that was 09/10 on here. Was just wondering if any of our resident weather boffins saw it coming? How early did the charts point to it? and what exactly were the ingredients/set-ups that created such a cold,snowy and relentless winter? The worst, many said, in 50 years (or the best if you love the white stuff )

Just a few questions i've always been meaning to ask on here! should help in knowing what to look out for in future too

Yes an old fashioned 60"s winter when you could make a snowball anytime from the 20th December to the 15th of March somewhere on the farm.

Can recall having to go from Inverness to Aviemore just pre Christmas to pick up my daughter and friend as train had broken down at Aviemore.

Great excuse to drive down the A9 in bright sunshine with deep blue skies and deep powder snow . There were stunning frozen waterfalls everywhere.

A very surreal drive at 60mph plus on a bone dry road with the dust blowing behind us in a winter wonderland landscape with the car thermometer registering -13c in some areas.

[lorenzo]

Decent drop on the ensembles as that low disembarks from Greenland/Iceland and travels on North of the country.

Upper temps and snow risk

Spotted this on the very final frame of the Pub Run last night. GFS behaving like Homeland and serving a Cliffhanger, either that or it fancied a trip down memory lane.. Look familiar.. Needless to say it's not there this morning..

Great model watching. That vortex is certainly getting knocked around a bit , it's trying to recover. Now after the Wave 2 there are tropospheric ridges to give it another attack. Whilst it is cold if not colder than previous years it's having difficulty setting up home. You could argue that there is a trend on the models to bring back blocking whenever they can, possibly linked to anomalous warm SSts.