ukpaul

It’s become intolerable. Normally I don’t moan during summer on here (In return hoping that we are left to enjoy the cold in winter) but there are limits. I’m desperately trying to keep the heat out and my portable air conditioner is on overtime (although it can only really manage to get one room cooler). Tough times.

Turned to to rain. Still, pretty impressive for April and we’ll see how long the cover lasts. 2017/18 turned out pretty well for snow here in the end.

Still snowing heavily here after a number of hours (there was a nice covering by 6am, don’t know when it started). No signs of it stopping for another hour or two, everywhere white with a few inches or so. A lovely surprise, looks like Euro4 was on the money for here at least.

The GFS is a poorer outcome for all areas but misses the south and Scotland out regarding the major snow potential, leaving the midlands and the north as a favourable area. The better run for those areas was the 00z which was a much expanded area of instability, such as below. ICON still pretty good for the whole country at various times, though and the UKMO misses everybody!

The fog here is incredible, I can barely see the houses opposite and all the lights I usually see across the valley have disappeared completely. A real old fashioned pea souper! What with snow again this morning it’s been a great week for weather.

Met Office is showing until 3 or 4pm for this part of West Yorkshire.

Three possibilities - 1) we may get the north easterly edge of Storm Emma's main concentration of precipitation clip us around mid morning tomorrow. Looks less likely that it will get further east than the Pennines, if that. 2) the 'tail' of Storm Emma might hit the southern part of our area early on Saturday morning but most models have it petering out before, which would allow for..... 3) continued convective snowfall from the North Sea.into early Sunday, probably less powerful as Storm Emma interacts with it.

It’s been a classic day (two days really). Everywhere covered in inches of snow, including the roads. Icicles on my nearest lamppost glistening in its light. A few major whiteouts during the evening (when I can’t see the lights from across the valley you know there’s major snowfall). I hope that others elsewhere got at least some of this.

Halifax is more Brigg/Scunthorpe. The radar looks as though there may be some sort of streamer setting up! Epic morning so far, virtually non stop and with pulses of near whiteout conditions. Traffic very dodgy, all starting around 8am as the MetOffice suggested.

Correction- the actual knowledgeable posters have been quite non-committal and always issue caveats. There are some idiots who post rubbish like ‘feet of snow’, ‘blizzards across the country’ and such who are a real embarrassment though. More fool anyone who takes them at their word! They are easy to spot because they use words like feel, imagine, gut instinct and such, their meteorological knowledge is way behind their emotional incontinence! Probably a good job this isn’t the models thread!

Rather than start from the point of a preferred outcome, in this situation it’s best to go back to Sherlockian principles. “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.". So, systems always travel west to east, right? Well, not if we have been put in reverse they don’t. Similarly that there is always a southwards movement of such systems as models zero in, well this is already only a two to one bet and, in these circumstances, it’s probably evens. So, all major models show the first low being sent north and west and this looks to be very likely now. GFS then traps the second low in the orbit of the first one, however, and they perform a slow circular dance whilst sending southerlies our way. Not a done deal in this instance because both UKMO and ECM have the next low escaping and being spun out at what may, or may not be a preferred angle. The further south the better but it all depends on how that second low behaves and when (or if) it escapes out to the east.

UKMO 144h 850s, the milder, rainier stuff in the south may turn out to be a 12/24 hour one, this time maintaining excellent 850s north of the M4 at least with the potential to have them dragged down southwards later.

It’s only a short journey to bring them up from Europe via the low pressure circulation. 96h shows them ready to pounce.

Interesting to see GFS and UKMO having the low drift westwards, that keeps lower uppers over more of England and buries Ireland! With GFS starting that from a more northerly position and the UKMO further south it doesn’t appear to give a particularly different outcome. Because of the way the system interacts with or disengages from the jet?

Although we are getting easterly winds it’s probably clearer to talk about movement in a westwards direction (or eastwards) but, yes, your analysis is spot on!