Snow of Sunday 15th March 1964

[A Face like Thunder]

The weather of Sunday 15th March 56 years ago was remarkable, even by the standards of the 'little ice age'  which was supposed to be affecting the UK in the 1960s.

In our part of Surrey close to the North Downs, it rained heavily all morning but this turned to heavy snow after lunch which settled to quite a depth by the evening and did not start to melt until the following days. 

Surrey was not the only area of the country to be affected and Philip Eden, in his book 'Great British Weather Disasters', referred to 'extensive snow, deepest in the Midlands and Yorkshire where 25-30cm fell'.  

It would be interesting to know what caused this heavy snowfall in what was supposed to be 'Spring'. And a far cry from the weather 56 years later! 

 

 

[A Face like Thunder]

60 years ago today, and made all the more remarkable by the fact that the snowfall followed 48 hours after the warmest day of the year thus far (57F) and less than 24 hours after the highest minimum temperature (45.9F). Over an inch of precipitation fell that day and whilst much of it might have been rain in Central London, it certainly wasn't in the North Downs area of Surrey as this photo, taken on the morning of 16th March, shows (London stats: Brazell).

[Weather-history]

 A Face like Thunder

 

[LetItSnow!]

All the more notable for coming after an extremely dry winter, the driest ever recorded in fact. An extremely dry year, though oddly it seems March 1964 was a wet one and was the sole very wet month of the entire year.