A cold start to the working week with frost, ice and wintry flurries

[Netweather forecasts]

A cold start to the working week with frost, ice, fog and a few wintry flurries. There will be a scattering of sleet and snow showers heading west today and tonight. Dry and chilly for most.

Read the full update here

[Jo Farrow]

It's worth checking out Weather ON and Off on the netweather radar to get a clearer picture of where the heavier precipitation is. Some of the pink is just radar noise, reflections off the thicker cloud cover. There are issues with trying to receive data from rain/sleet and snow so (as usual) the radaar imagery needs some interpretation.

Where the brighter colours are on the usual radar image, you are more likely to be seeing falling snow and it's easier to see the lines, the streamers running NE to SW.

 

"Bright band Radar echoes from both raindrops and snowflakes are calibrated to give correct intensities on the rainfall display. But at the level where the temperature is near 0° C, melting snowflakes with large, wet, reflective surfaces give strong echoes. These produce a false band of heavier rain, or bright band, on the radar picture. The Radarnet processing system makes a correction to the data to try to account for this enhancement. "MO