The real Lomond snowstorm

danm Exactly. Where I live in Scotland it's been around average rainfall. Yet our average for February is 150mm according to the nearest weather station (which is coastal and may actually be a little drier than inland near the hills where I live ). Quite frankly I wish I'd received the amount of rain that many of these areas have received

Around -8C this morning but still no snow this year so far. Beautifully sunny and dry though. Ironically, we did get a few cm of snow at the last cold breakdown on Dec 30th when the forecast was for rain. And tomorrow is another cold breakdown day so perhaps it will be snow again for 24hrs ...

I wouldn't want to interfere with your snowy "entertainment". Besides, I may be snowless here but I'm not too far away snow covered mountains if I want a fix. Though tbh my enthusiasm for actually being out in proper snow has waned over the years. A few unpleasant mountain blizzards and a couple of other mountain "events" which in hindsight were uncomfortably close to very serious has made me much more of a snow wimp than I used to be when I was younger. Even spending two and a half days getting home when the Beast struck in 2018 was more of a PITA than the adventure it would have been.

I was going to comment on the weather but I feel I'm interrupting something so will bow out

Around -6C here this morning but dry, very dry. And very sunny I'm not going to complain about this. Compared to the rain that we get in this part of the world, this is very pleasant. The only issue is the low sun is positively blinding at this time of year (13 degrees above the horizon today at noon). As for the people saying they like the wind and rain, I suggest you spend a year in the West Highlands, NW Wales or Lake District with 3 metres and 250 days of rain in a year. It will make you appreciate your dull winters.

Yes. I'm on the northern edge of the central belt and was supposed to get four or five hours of snow this morning and got virtually nothing (a slight covering barely distinguishable from the frost). We were also supposed to get a second system come down from the north west this evening and give us a few hours of snow. Now that seems to have arrived earlier, gave us a few light rain showers, and the remainder passed over the hills to the north. The met office website was still forecasting snow all morning here at 7am, 8am, 9am even though checking the rainfall radar you could see it travelling well south of here with nothing coming our way. Similarly the evening snow was showing until early afternoon when they changed it to snow falling now which then fell as (very light) rain. I wonder how many schools closed and jobs were postponed because the heavy snow was still being forecast by the met office when people got up in the morning. I realise snow is not easy to forecast but when they are still forecasting heavy precipitation occurring now and in the next few hours and the main precipitation is a hundred miles south it's not really very good nowadays.

No, you're not. Cold, dry and sunny much of the time is great after a pretty poor autumn/early winter where we received seemingly endless rain. This included two weeks in that period where the rainfall totals for EACH week was around 200mm. I'm one of the lucky ones getting snow tomorrow but what happens afterwards concerns me. There's a chance of some rain or sleet after the snow tomorrow followed by a very hard frost the next couple of days. That is probably going to turn the pavements and roads into very hard frozen slush. Last week one neighbour ended up in A&E after a slip and another neighbour ended up getting surgery and some fancy metalwork inserted into a broken leg AND broken wrist after a slip on their door step. I love proper snow but frozen slush and having to wear YakTrax or Kahtoola spikes to get outside I can do without.

I know this is a joke but for info ECMWF HQ is based in Reading.

It's cloudy again this morning though forecast to clear this afternoon so it is looking more like a 20C day today. It is not unusual for the North West corner of the country to have the best weather in Britain for a time in late spring/early summer but this does look like being a longer spell than in recent years. And to back up your comment I have been in Ullapool in late May when the MAXIMUM temperature was 5C.

A mixture of cloudy mornings and sunny afternoons or sunny all day recently. Max temperatures varying from 20C to 24C What was striking was the diurnal range on Saturday especially where it was 5C at 5am and 24C at 4pm. A 19C swing is quite impressive for this part of the world.

I have found mosquitos easier to deal with when I have experienced them abroad as they are larger, noisier and easier to hit. There are 40 species of midges and some are very small. Their wing span is only a couple of millimetres and normal mosquito nets and headgear have too large holes to keep them out. You need to buy the ones specifically designed for them ( I bear the mental scars of that mistake). And they swarm on warm evenings. They REALLY swarm. An acre of land can have 10 million of them. I personally am a horse fly /clegg magnet for an unknown reason, so can sympathise with your experience though. Especially flies that bite through clothing easily and leave you bleeding (they have evolved to bite through cattle skin so a T-shirt is nothing). New Zealand sand flies are also supposed to be deeply unpleasant and similarly painful.

Regarding midgies, they don't like the wind and Scotland is the windiest country in Europe. So, you need to stay high and camp high and most of the time you'll avoid the little blighters. The annoying thing is that every time you get bitten you are helping the female to breed (it's only the females that bite). Vitamin B12 is supposed to reduce the allergic reaction to the bites and I believe brewers yeast used in beer making is the best natural source of that so you can always use the medicinal excuse... On the positive side they have probably stopped a lot of development around some of the most scenic places, especially around loch shores.

It is down to luck and in Scotland and we still get some rain on about 13 days in May, though often that is insignificant. I have also had plenty of hot weather in the summer months on my Scottish hill walking holidays so don't disagree but (using my nearest Met Office station), July gets about 25% more rain than May and August gets about 40% more. May is also significantly sunnier than July and August. Regarding swimming in Cairngorm Lochs I'll raise you and have been swimming in Loch Avon in the Cairngorms in July (over 700m elevation ) though despite the hot weather the Loch was bliddy freezing because it is fed by underground springs. After about ten minutes I was losing all feeling in my legs. In about 75 Scottish hill holidays I have actually had very few weeks which were wash outs. A couple in October (third wettest month) spring to mind but I've also had some spectacular October holidays and one where I had snow at sea level and was waist deep in snow in the mountains for half the week and which then literally melted overnight leaving the ground an absolute quagmire for the second half of the week. Global warming has put paid to that sort of thing in October.

24C, light winds and blue sky all day yesterday. 23C and sunny all day on Monday Some cloud this morning but it was burnt off by 11-am and now we have sunshine and blue sky again. albeit a little cooler, heading towards 21C. And the forecast is for at least another week of this. I've lost count of the number of times I've told visitors to this part of the world to visit in May or June rather than come in rainy August. Even April is drier than July and August though it is obviously cooler. Late May and June is the best balance.

Given the price of houses down south, he might take you up on that. Edit, I see he already has.

I agree. April for me should be a warmer month or at least a sunny month. April is a very dry month here (relatively speaking) and is on average the second driest month of the year just fractionally behind May. And significantly drier than July and August. So we tend to get quite a lot of sunny weather, (around the same as June, July and August), even if it is not particularly warm.

For those who missed out this time, there's always hope.... Snow in late April, more common than you may think | Official blog of the Met Office news team BLOG.METOFFICE.GOV.UK This week many places have seen the type of weather you may usually associate with winter than late April, with wintry showers observed as far south as southern counties... And yes, there was locally at least 5cm of snow laying for around 24 hours in late April 2016 and I'm 20m above sea level.

A radar that looks into the future ? Or maybe it is a forecast that might not be guaranteed to be accurate.

Dry, sunny and -8C this morning. The same as yesterday morning but it was a little warmer at -4C . Despite weather warnings for the stuff that can't be mentioned the forecast is now for dry, cold weather until Saturday morning followed by some sleet. Which is pretty good as plenty of sunshine is forecast and if there is something that we're always deprived of here it is sunshine.

For me it is the very wet months that stand out as horrible. Pretty much the whole of summer 1985 was continuously wet. I believe the wettest since records began in Scotland, though I don't remember the details, just staring out at my window at work day after day hoping for some sunshine which didn't really come. Then there was November, December 2015 and January 2016 where we got over a metre of rain locally in those three months and taking November and December I had three days that it didn't rain during the day (but were still cloudy days). It improved a little in January but we didn't really get any dry weather until the last week of January. February 1997 was another really wet and windy month made worse because I had not long started an assignment with a two hour commute each way, and endless gales and rain along with four hours per day of travel on multiple trains and walking between stations or office meant I was pretty much either wet or about to get wet during the week. Plus I was going out for a run at 05;30 in the morning several days a week which didn't help matters.

The lights barely use any energy, especially if you have Energy Saving or LED bulbs. My gas boiler uses about 10kw per hour (rated at 18kw) and my energy saving light bulbs are typically 12 watts each. So a light bulb uses about a thousand times less energy than my efficient A rated central heating boiler.

Regarding the nights drawing out, where I'm located the earliest sunset was the 14th December. Though the days are still getting shorter because the sunrise continues to get later until the 28th December, I have already started getting later evenings albeit only by a few seconds at this stage. By Christmas I will have gained a few minutes in the evening.

It rained for 29 days out of the 31 days in October here. And November improved but was still a typical Scottish November with a lot of rain. Everything was saturated and the rivers and Lochs were beginning to break their banks. Now we have had some deep freeze with minus double digits and several consecutive ice days. I do wonder what that will have done to the saturated ground around buildings and pipes in some places as the roads have had some pretty big pot holes. appearing Anyway, this cold spell has had some bright sunny days which is very nice at this time of year (even if the sun is only 11 degrees above the horizon at noon).

Yes, and I'm happy with cold weather. My previous post was more regarding the extreme cold that some like. I've no problem with frosty mornings and normal UK cold weather for longer periods. And the odd shorter spell of "extreme cold "

I like cold weather in winter though what I really crave year round is dry weather with some blue sky, which is understandable really given the amount of rain we get in this area. So I like cold,however I do think many of the cold enthusiasts on this forum who claim to want extreme cold would rapidly get fed up of it. When you get (for example) two or three weeks of ice days with minus double digit temperatures overnight, then snow does get compacted into an ice rink. And below -10C the grit doesn't do much if you're commuting by car. Winter tyres help but not if most other people have summer tyres. And doing anything outside becomes difficult because the pavements become ice rinks and taking off your gloves for a minute gives you the hot aches. Then external drain pipes on older properties start to freeze from the bottom up with potentially unpleasant results when you flush. As do external (and sometimes internal) gas boiler condensate pipes. Being without heating for several days when it is minus 15C overnight and the gas engineers are overwhelmed is not nice. Spending 20 minutes trying to get your car windows clear every morning rapidly changes from a novelty to a pain and as the days go on gets harder. Plus the chances of a problem with the car (battery usually) increases. And de-icer and concentrated screenwash becomes more valuable than toilet paper during the pandemic with queues forming outside when deliveries are due. Supermarkets get less frequent deliveries as their lorries get held up. Public services have more people sick, injured, unable to get to work etc. And then the thaw comes and the pipes burst... And did I mention the heating bills ? I realise this comes across as negative but in Britain away from areas which regularly experience a proper winter and are prepared for it, extended spells of real cold do after a time lose their appeal and a winter wonderland becomes an unpleasant experience. I'm still hoping for snow at Christmas though