Thundery wintry showers

1.2C and looking like wet snow or maybe sleet at South Shields: http://www.southshields-weather.co.uk/Today's_weather.htm

South Shields Weather (Neil Bradshaw's site) is at 1.3C, but the dew point is up at 0.7C, which is consistent with it being sleety. There's still plenty of lying snow on the roofs on his webcam though.

I haven't even seen a snowflake or sleet so far in Lincoln, it's just been bone dry since the easterly and associated rain showers faded out on Tuesday. It's looking increasingly as if the showers midweek won't make it here because by the time the cold shower-producing air gets this far south the wind will be backing north-north-westerly. Some models do suggest there's a chance of the sleet/snow over the SE pushing this far north through tonight, though it looks most likely to stall just to the south. My old hometown of South Shields currently has lying snow from east coast snow showers last night and even a clap of thunder from a cell just off the coast at Sunderland. Probably nothing lying at my earlier homes at Norwich or Exeter though.

I rated it 5/10, but my overall opinion of September and October was positive, and it was November that really dragged the score down. I have good memories of a thundery spell in early September, some fine sunny days early and late in October, and some unusually widespread thunderstorms around 20 October, when I had two consecutive thunder days in Lincoln, and a third day shortly afterwards with frequent lightning to the south. But November was persistently mild, grey and drizzly with just 60-70% of the normal sunshine amount. When we had a shot at another unseasonably warm sunny spell around 11-14 November, in Lincoln I had one warm and sunny afternoon and otherwise saw a lot of persistent stratus, although I'm aware that some other parts of the UK, particularly to the north of high ground, had exceptional temperatures from it.

Some showers are heading towards the Knaresborough area where my parents are, they might wake up to a covering tomorrow. I reckon western parts of the region have a chance of seeing a covering tomorrow morning, especially with the help of a bit of elevation. There's a chance of some showers getting across to Lincoln during the day tomorrow but I don't expect any lying snow here this weekend.

There aren't any observing sites at Lancaster on the Met Office Weather Observations Website but there are a few on Weather Underground. Most sites in the region are recording temperatures within a degree of freezing, generally slightly above freezing at Morecambe and slightly below at Lancaster. I have a suspicion that Lancaster is probably getting ice pellets and maybe the odd flake while a couple of miles to the east is seeing falling and lying snow.

Despite my previous comments, I'm surprised to see the Netweather precipitation type radar showing a sleet/snow boundary to the east of Lancaster that is literally overlaying the M6! Looks like in Cumbria it's generally snow upwards of 5 miles inland though.

I think there's a strong meterological basis for the M6 being a common dividing line in marginal events in north Lancashire because it's right on the western edge of higher ground leading up into the Pennines, so you get the combined effect of being inland and higher up. It also broadly follows the "10" contour for "average days of lying snow per year, 1961-1990" from the Met Office (and, which I found rather depressing, the "5" contour for 1991-2020). It may not be the case in south Lancashire or around Manchester where the M6 goes well to the west of high ground and the snow lying lines on the Met Office average maps.

I see some showers are heading towards Lancaster (where I did my undergraduate degree). I remember that when I was there, it was often a case of sleet/rain at Morecambe, wet snow at Lancaster that didn't settle, and lying snow east of the M6. It won't surprise me if Lancaster just gets rain/sleet this time around though - the light bits of precipitation close to Lancaster are currently showing as rain on the N-W radar.

Precipitation keeps dying out before it gets to Lincoln, with the temperature at the University oscillating between 0.1 and 0.8C. I doubt that I'm missing out on much though, chances are that if it did get here it would rise to around 1.5-2.0C and start sleeting.

The latest GFS chart for 15Z today.

I follow Neil Bradshaw's site at South Shields in these situations and while the surface wind has switched from a westerly to a north-westerly it is still blowing from the land, so it seems unlikely to be the warming effects of the sea at the coast. There is a pool of warmer air (just creeping above -5C at the 850hPa level) moving over the region, so it's more likely to be a lack of elevation issue near the coast.

I read the latest Met update, I think suggesting that accumulations of snow away from northern Scotland will be reserved only for the higher hills is most likely downplaying it a bit too much unless you live around Exeter. The setup looks to me like a slightly less cold version of what we had around 20-24 December 2009, and the December 2009 setup brought lying snow to some coastal areas of north-west England for a time, such as Blackpool and Morecambe. I don't envisage there being a comparably widespread snow cover, though, because in the December 2009 spell, many areas of the UK had already picked up a snow cover from the preceding easterly on 17/18 December. The current easterly is nothing like as cold, so it is probable that most of the UK will enter the cold spell late next week with no snow cover and with relatively warm ground temperatures. Thus, I envisage accumulations of snow at low levels being localised, away from windward coasts and under heavier precipitation associated with troughs, which will be hard to pin down until near the time.

A cold December to round off an otherwise warm year. 3.4C CET and 56.3mm for EWP please.

Although I've never been there, I've long been interested in the New Zealand climate, with its variability and large regional differences despite being a pair of small islands, and I occasionally take a peek to see how the weather is going over there. I also wasn't aware that Crimsone (who I have been involved in many good discussions with in the past) had moved there. I saw this video which indicated that they've recently been having a very active spell of weather with spells of strong westerlies and some thunderstorms mainly for western areas. I was impressed also by the level of detail that it goes into. VIDEO: Windy westerlies with NZ for rest of November WWW.WEATHERWATCH.CO.NZ WeatherWatch.co.nz: New Zealand's Weather Data & Alerts Authority

It feels rather ironic, considering that I've lived in Tyneside, North Yorkshire and Norfolk for significant periods, that since I started recording the weather back in 1993, the deepest level snow that I've measured at my location was 17cm on 1 March 2018, in Exeter of all places. The snow also drifted considerably in the strong easterly wind. There was also an ice storm the following night, which coated the snow cover in a couple of centimetres of ice, which made it very slippery, but the deep snow provided a soft landing. The Met Office put out a rare red weather warning for snow for the South West that day. While the cold spell was well forecast from a long way out, I remember that the big snowfall in Exeter was only picked up relatively close to the time. Exeter was also heavily hit on 18 March, when it snowed almost continuously during daylight hours, and there was a level depth of around 10cm. I lived in Exeter from October 2014 to March 2021 inclusive and only noted six mornings with >50% snow cover there during that period, five of which happened in March 2018. The other one was from a rain to snow event on 31 January 2019.

Thunderstorms didn't make it as far north as Lincoln but I saw a fair amount of lightning to the south at around 7:30-7:50pm.

This is the synoptic chart from ERA-INTERIM, showing a classic south-west snow setup, but the intensity of cold over the south was certainly unusual for late October.

Both in the UK and globally, we've seen two main periods of warming, one from the 1910s through to the 1940s, and another since the 1980s which is still ongoing today. Globally, the current period of warming started in late 1979. 1980 and 1981 were the warmest years on record globally at the time, and, correcting for short-term fluctuations such as El Nino and the winter North Atlantic Oscillation, the warming has been very persistent since then. It wasn't really a step-change, it just gradually became apparent that the warming was going beyond the normal bounds of natural climatic variability. The realisation progressively set in during the globally warm years of 1987-1991 (especially around 1990), and with the globally warm year of 1995, and then the record smashing El Nino of 1997/98. Since then, an apparent "hiatus/pause" in global warming raised hopes that things might be stablising, but this turned out to be a blip and also exacerbated by the lack of global coverage in the rapidly warming Arctic. In the UK, I don't think the latest phase of global warming had much of an effect on the regional climate until 1988-90, but the sense of "this is outside the normal bounds of variability" set in more abruptly. 1988 wasn't outstandingly warm, with a mild winter and several slightly warmer than average months but a cool summer, and while 1989 was a very warm year, it was synoptically unusual - in parts of east and especially north-east England, 1989 was the driest year on record by a sizeable margin. But then with 1990, with its succession of (for that time) record breaking warm/hot spells and joint highest CET value, and record global warmth in 1988 and 1990, many people started realising that things had shifted. A run of hot summers around the mid-1990s, especially 1995, and generally less snow than in previous decades, reinforced this perception.

It looks like it could well have been clear and sunny, with a ridge of high pressure over southern Britain and a polar maritime air mass:

The original post you quoted was suggesting that summers 1996, 2004 and 2005 were quite good in comparison to 2007-2012.

I didn't catch any lightning but heard quite a bit of thunder from an impressive cumulonimbus just to the west of Lincoln.

Looks like a thunderstorm may have passed through Lincoln while I was at ten pin bowling between 6:30 and 8pm. The Met Office ATD only shows three strikes nearby to the south though, so I may not have missed that much.

Lincoln seems to have developed a storm shield through yesterday and today with thunderstorms passing to the west and east, mainly to the west, and not close enough to be able to hear any thunder. I saw some lightning flashes from a Cb cell up towards York yesterday evening, but nothing nearby. There wasn't much of a storm shield here on Sunday and Monday nights though.

For me, it's touch and go as to whether 2022 ends up in the "forgettable" category, but it will require a fair amount of noteworthy weather during the rest of the year to stop it from ending up in that category. Currently the record shattering heatwave of 19 July and the spell of hot sunny weather in the second week of August that reminded me of August 1995 are the only things that are saving it.. I don't recall much noteworthy weather in the winter or spring. Also, it has been a remarkably thunder-free year in Lincoln so far, with just 5 thunder-days so far, and just 1 during the summer quarter. That said, there is still time for that to be addressed - 2 of those thunder-days were yesterday and today!