moffatross

The River Annan at Brydekirk is still rising, and is only 6 cm short of its height record from November 2009. SEPA Water Levels - Annan @ Brydekirk

The SEPA river level gauge a mile or two downstream from Moffat had the Upper Annan at 97% of its highest ever recorded level (December 2015) a wee while ago. Textbook orographic enhancement throughout this rainfall event, with the rain radar here on netweather looking exactly like a topographic map !

Yes it does. The nearest (and perhaps only freely available) equivalent to XC Weather that uses the ECM instead of GFS is yr.no e.g. Yr - Moffat - Weather forecast WWW.YR.NO Todays weather forecast, by the hour and long term. See the forecast as a table or graph.

I enjoyed a few hours on skis up in the hills above Moffat today. Snow cover is pretty good on some aspects, with some enormous drifts, but it's stripped and/or icy on others. Admiring the drumlins in the glacial landscape of the Upper Talla Glen ... High above Loch Skeen ...

It's cloudy now and intermittently pishing down with cold rain in Moffat, but in a break about an hour ago, the warmth from the sunlight falling on my hands, neck and face reminded me that Spring is just around the corner.

There's a wee dead-end road in Leadhills that goes up to the railway line that runs to Wanlockhead. It's the last remaining operational part of a narrow gauge line that carried the ores away, and the route of the track can be seen running alongside the road all the way down to Elvanfoot where it linked with a siding at what's now the West Coast mainline. The off grid, solar storage hill camera I'm referring to is the one on Lowther Hill itself at around 720 m ASL, one which we installed a couple of years earlier than the Hopetoun Arms one, pretty much straight after we built the ski tow engine hut.

It's a great pub and Rab & Rachel are lovely. On the camera, this one is hardwired to the internet and powered over ethernet but the one on the hill is solar powered and uses an antenna pointed at Sanquhar so as to overcome the RF interference from the radar dome. I really can't imagine a location at which winterhighland's Alan couldn't get a webcam working one way or another. He's a genius with them

It's already turned to snow in the higher roads further west. I'll always have a soft spot for this webcam Alan from winterhighland did all the networking but I drilled the holes through the walls of the hotel, ran the cabling and fitted the camera to just under the upstairs eaves.

The Met Office have just issued a yellow weather warning for snow above 200 m ASL across a large part of the upland Highlands area and a good chunk of the Southern Uplands. The Euro 4 is modelling impressive new snow accumulations over the mountains between now and tomorrow night.

I love that Tesco in Peebles. I used to do some work in there and although it's the smallest Tesco you can ever imagine, it's a great shop and the staff and management are really nice people. I did a photography job at the newly opened Broughton stores last year too, and was v. impressed by the collective village initiative. It's an excellent shop now, and has a better selection of goodies than it ever had before.

I was thinking of you when I saw that area map and that you might be wise to nip up to Broughton for your 'snowed in' rations. The A701 can get a wee bit 'drifty' !

There was a lot of rain last night in Moffat, but since 6 am, each passing shower has been getting wintrier. It's settling readily just now.

I'm no expert, but that's my understanding of it too. When you see snow falling on puddles or wet grass and it kinda does nothing for ages but then all of a sudden everything goes white, that's the point at which wet bulb temperatures are approached freezing. Locally, the ground level air mass can be cooled enough by heavy precipitation for wet bulb temperatures to change, but in showery, windy, mobile conditions, wet bulbs are mostly determined by the overall air mass and therefore those wet bulb temperatures are harder to shift downwards.

Looking at the suite of model output, tomorrow's the day when wet bulb temperatures become conducive to snow accumulating. They're at their maximum overnight tonight, particularly through the Central Belt, so anything that accumulates today will met away, but as of 6 am, it's looking good everywhere.

Aye, and I'm hoping we're off the hook for the time being too, but maybe a wee bit too early. The Met Office forecast has the wind peaking around 6 pm, but so far it's pretty standard wind and rain stuff for Moffat i.e. it's like the fire brigade are outside our hoose and are hosing the windows, but not like they're trying to remove the roof at the same time!!