AderynCoch

Nice. Can't wait to have the festive background theme back too.

Autumn is over.

Stick you clothes on the radiators, unless they're electric in which case buy one of those indoor lines and put it nearby.

Yay, frost!

Well that wasn't so bad. Some signs and fences strewn across the road and quite a few umbrellas in bins, but nothing major. Still a pretty unpleasant night to be out and about though, with squally cold rain and bombardments of hail.

For what it's worth I can understand the increased media coverage when strong winds hit the SE due to such weather being more infrequent and affecting a larger population, but the Met Office have a duty to treat all parts of the country the same when it comes to issuing warnings. Of course they may just have made a genuine mistake in misforecasting the storm rather than simply ignoring the affected areas. I myself have been caught out by it because I wasn't online yesterday and didn't follow the low's progress. Anyway, I'm about to head into town to meet a friend. I'm going to bring my camera along.

Wind's really picked up here this afternoon. Nothing I haven't seen before though. Last night's fog disappeared pretty quickly!

There was widespread snow across central and northern England on 18th November 2004 as a cold front swept south. Where I was in Sheffield we got about six inches. There was also a good fall of snow in January (can't remember the date) though it melted later in the day. By the way, if you're really using 2004 for deciding to bet a grand on a green Christmas ( ) you should know that northern and western areas also had snow on Christmas Day, even in Liverpool (it's the last time snow fell and settled here on the big day, though we also had lying snow in 2009 and 2010).

I was in sultry Shanghai for two and bit weeks in July that year. A well-timed excursion abroad for sure!

8.3

Nightmare output tonight from my perspective. Seeing those yellows over the UK on the 850hPa charts is making me feel ill.

Yeah, what could be easier than firing a few million super-powerful rockets into the Sun in an attempt to shift the Earth's orbit?

Some peak gusts in northern Germany/Denmark: 108mph - Sankt Peter-Ording 105mph - Glücksburg 105mph - Kiel Lighthouse (just offshore from the city) 97mph - Sønderborg Airport 91mph - Odense 85mph - Roskilde (near Copenhagen) http://www.weatheronline.co.uk/weather/maps/current?LANG=en&UP=0&R=310&TYP=windspitzen&ART=tabelle&LANG=en&DATE=1382986800&KEY=euro&LAND=euro&CONT=euro&SORT=3&SI=mph&CEL=C&UD=0

It depends what you mean by "mild". Certainly "milder than average" isn't the default climate, otherwise it would be called "average". It's certainly been unusually milder than average recently and it would be unusual for it to continue for weeks on end. Thankfully temperatures look like becoming more normal (if still on the mild side).

At least with a proper zonal setup we should be spared a repeat of the dreadful November 2011 with its relentless southerly winds. It also looks as though we're going to get more of a westerly flow in the near future rather than a southwesterly one, so it shouldn't be quite as mild as it has been.

I'm very confident we would have seen -30C at some point had we weather stations covering every field in the Scottish glens. But of course we don't. The thing is, some countries have weather stations in ridiculous uninhabitable spots and these report temperatures which aren't really indicative of inhabited areas. In Italy for instance, a new record low of -49.6C was recorded in February this year in a hollow 2600m above sea level in the Alps. Now the Alpine valleys of northern Italy can get pretty cold in Italy but nowhere near that cold. I just wonder if any of our highest mountains have natural sink areas near their summits (say above 1000m) which are sheltered from wind. If they do, I would imagine -30C or lower would easily be recorded in such places.

Personally I've found this October interesting for its unusual amount of convective/thundery activity in the second half of the month. I don't previously recall there being so much potential for thunderstorms at this time of year. The southwesterly regime has also brought a surprising amount of sunshine to my location; not endless days of clear blue skies by any means but more than I was expecting, and a relief after the oppressively dull start to the month (I don't understand how a sluggish SEerly flow can deliver less sunshine here than a sluggish SWerly flow). That said, I definitely agree that the ongoing dearth of cold has been very disappointing. I don't usually expect frost here until sometime in November (though it's not unusual to get it in October), but I'd expect to see other places at least have a chance of getting one. When somewhere like Alston can't get a frost you know things are grim. We sit and wait...

Looks very bad for the south coast, with the depression moving east into the Channel before turning northeastwards and ploughing inland. This gives the storm the longest track over the sea and the coast the longest exposure to those severe gales. The famous October 1987 storm approached in a similar manner. The depth of the low is forecast to be quite similar to 1987 too (about 970mb) but the heights over Europe look to be a bit higher this time round, meaning a tighter squeeze of the isobars. This would indicate the potential for even stronger winds - whilst I don't think it will be as bad as 1987, and as ever there will be some changes closer to the event, this is clearly a situation which needs to be taken very seriously. I wouldn't be surprised to see gusts in the 100mph ball park in more exposed places like the Needles or Selsey Bill - and 1987 wasn't even the last time this happened in the south, as it happened on 30th October 2000 too. So such extreme weather is perhaps not as rare as is sometimes made out. Anyway, sorry to be such a doom-monger. Maybe it won't be that bad, but that's my reading of the situation and it's always best to overestimate a storm rather than underestimate it.

Seriously though, in situations like these it helps to assume the worst-case scenario will entail. Wind speed is just one factor when it comes to toppling trees in addition to size, species, being in leaf, etc. I'd be very surprised if somewhere didn't suffer damage and disruption from falling objects.

No that's the Midlands. The North is all heather and bracken.

That's what I've been thinking. At the moment we're fine up here in the calm of the eye (as much as extratropical cyclones have eyes), but it wouldn't take a great shift northwards to bring the tightly-packed isobars on the southern side of the centre up here. I do think the south coast is going to have it bad regardless of any northward shift, as they'll be exposed to winds gusting off the Channel.

Had a good thunderstorm about an hour or two ago with some close flashes and big booms. That's the second this month. I don't recall October ever being this stormy before.

That weekend at the end of November was excellent: perennially foggy with temperatures barely scraping zero. I missed out on the early December snowfalls though. Damn you marginality.

Tell me it's heading east...

Had a spell of very heavy rain late this afternoon but I noticed no thunder or lightning despite other members not far away reporting it. Funny how I seem to get thunderstorms when I least expect them (like on Wednesday night) but not when I actually do. Is Round Two still on later tonight?