Yarmy

Saturday’s storm looking really severe for the North. When was the last time we had gale force winds direct from a northerly?

It seems the GFS 12z op run is both more and less amplified than the GFS 6z op run. Amazing scenes.

1953, but yes there are similarities. One of the worst natural disasters of the century, yet not all that well remembered (except for around here). North Sea flood of 1953 - Wikipedia EN.WIKIPEDIA.ORG

The ECM 6z is available (in somewhat limited form) here: weather model ecmwf model - united kingdom - surface pressure [base + 72] | weatheronline WWW.WEATHERONLINE.CO.UK Weather for UK, Ireland and the world. Sailing, Marine Weather, Weather maps, radar, satellite, climate, historic weather data, information about meteorology... However, that run only goes out to T90 as far as I recall, so T72 is the latest data you will see there.

Beautiful morning here, if a bit damp. Sky is that deep rich blue that you only really get in winter with the low sun.

Yeah, southwesterly murk in winter is about as welcome as a text message from Tim Paine for me, but each to their own. There’s so little light in the day that I crave clear blue skies.

The real cold is still at least 7 days away on the model output. Assuming it arrives at all, of course.

People just get fixated on individual runs, which is largely pointless after T120 (or even earlier). Following the means for the same runs day to day is more informative (imo, anyway). Yesterday's ECM 0z T240: ...and today's ECM 0z T216: So perhaps a slight move towards a more west-based -NAO (and conversely, a slight move away from a topple). A change to colder/cooler conditions looks likely then, and that's about the most you can say for the time being.

Silly season has begun, it seems.

Looks very similar to last November's update for DJF: Que será será

Sort of...but that's talking about safety in the workplace, whereas Joe Public is more worried about Chernobyl 2. If a wind turbine collapses it's not going to spread radioactive material across the country. Still, modern reactors are much safer, and so I'm pro-Nuclear, but we shouldn't put all our eggs in one basket. Wind, tidal, solar are all worth investing in. And Fusion could be viable by the end of this decade, which would be a complete game-changer.

The Strat thread for Winter 09/10 is here, and might be of interest:

Got down to -2C near me: Marham (Norfolk) last 24 hours weather WWW.METOFFICE.GOV.UK Marham last 24 hours weather including temperature, wind, visibility, humidity and atmospheric pressure Beautiful morning out walking the dog at 7am. Frost, low-level mist, and clear blue skies above. Who couldn't want that?

Is there a list of who has signed up? I see no mention of China, India, or Russia there.

Yes, the UK is doing OK-ish in terms of low-carbon electricity generation with wind-power dominating. Dashboard WWW.MYGRIDGB.CO.UK Disappointing to see a slight rise in 2021, but the 2030 target seems achievable. I suppose you can only look after your own back garden. As for everyone else... Like others have said, I'm not sure how huge international showpiece events with useless non-binding agreements help. Good photo-ops for the politicians though.

"The best year of comparison for the run-up to winter is (don't be alarmed) 1962, when almost all factors that played a role in the weather were the same as they are now. The comparison year that follows is 2010."

Didn't old Joe Laminate Floor used to write these? He always used to go for crazy cold. Those were more entertaining. And wrong, alas.

I'll never understand why there hasn't been an Apollo-style moonshot programme to fund and accelerate Fusion research. Despite the lack of funding, several important milestones have been passed recently, and we are getting ever closer to net energy gain. For example, Major nuclear fusion milestone reached as ‘ignition’ triggered in a lab | Imperial News | Imperial College London WWW.IMPERIAL.AC.UK Ignition is a key process that amplifies the energy output from nuclear fusion and could provide clean energy and answer some huge physics questions. It's a gamble, and it would be expensive, but so was Apollo, and the ROI would be enormous. I'm all for a multi-faceted approach to climate change with renewables, carbon capture etc, but it seems to me that only a truly great technological breakthrough is going to actually provide a real solution. The US spends more annually on dog grooming than it does on Fusion research.

Thanks for this: very interesting. I must confess I was in possession of the received wisdom that a conjectured sudden freshening of the North Atlantic from the Lake Agassiz flood was the instigator of the Younger Dryas period, but it seems that it is somewhat up for debate. The Broecker article referenced is interesting too: http://ocp.ldeo.columbia.edu/res/div/ocp/gs/pubs/broecker_science.pdf "Despite the flies in the flood ointment described above, my money remains on a flood of water stored in Lake Aggasiz.Otherwise, the confluence of dates for the cessation of the Big Stone Moraine overflow, the Moorhead low- stand, and the rise in à18O in the Gulf of Mexico would have to be attributed to coincidence. But our inability to identify the path taken by the flood is disconcerting." A later article from the same author casts further doubt: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Hai-Cheng-2/publication/236943863_Putting_the_Younger_Dryas_cold_event_into_context/links/5cdb682092851c4eaba051fd/Putting-the-Younger-Dryas-cold-event-into-context.pdf Anyway, don't want to derail the thread further.

I don't really pay much attention to these monthly ensemble means at this range, but the problem there - as ever - is the above average pressure in Eastern Europe. How would the cold get here? The November mean is ok though.

Never mind MJO phases, ENSO forecasts or long range ensemble means: the Tesco delivery driver told me, apropos of nothing, that it was going to be the coldest winter in decades as he handed over my comestibles this evening. So there’s that.

Just catching up on the models. UKMO decent in the short term and ECM looking much better in its latter stages. Atrocious today, but some promise going forward. Looking forward to posting about weather rather than COVID.

Had some thunder and lightning just now, to go with last night's.

This is the 'Dark Forest' theory that's the basis for the Three-Body Problem trilogy of Sci-Fi novels by Cixin Liu. Essentially, it's a really, really bad idea to advertise your presence in the universe. We've been doing that inadvertently for about 100 years or so. Anyway, it seems that simple cellular life can spring up reasonably easily, but complex life is much harder to achieve. And intelligent life capable of evolving to reason about the world around it has happened precisely once in the Earth's history, so that would seem to be extremely rare.

Which model and run is that? Can't read it in the image.