Thundery wintry showers

Thus, I'm going to go back to what I thought earlier - there's still potentially a bit of leeway for the low to track a little further south than the ECM is suggesting without it resulting in most of us staying largely dry. Nonetheless, the north of the region could still do with it not going any further south.

Sorry, I made a mistake: I posted the Wednesday precipitation charts from the ECMWF (which is interesting, as they're implying that the south-east of of the region in particular could see some snow tomorrow evening, which wasn't showing before!). As Northern Sky suggested the ECM does have precipitation mainly stalling to the west/south during the day on Thursday, but the early hours of Friday look likely to deliver widespread snowfall even with the ECM's southerly low extent.

I've just seen the Wetterzentrale version of the ECM 12Z precipitation outputs and I've changed my mind - any further south than the ECM is showing and a large area of the region may stay dry. So the ECM is really at the southern limit of the range of possibilities for delivering a significant snow event for this region.

From the point of view of getting a significant snow event, no, as this would increase the chances of a snow to rain event especially in the south of the region. But at the same time, if it goes much further south than tonight's ECM is showing, it would increase the chances of it staying largely dry particularly in the north of the region. I reckon our region is pretty much in the sweet spot (with the exception of North Sea coastal areas, which will get a warming onshore wind) on the latest set of runs.

The ECM 12Z precipitation charts suggest that there's potentially a fair amount of margin for Lincolnshire with the system tracking further south - as I noted before the -5C 850hPa line barely makes it as far north as Lincolnshire, and yet it has substantial precipitation (predominantly snow) penetrating to the north of Leeds. It does look like Yorkshire, particularly North Yorkshire, has potential to largely miss out if it tracks much further south though. The other models have it further north than the ECM 12Z which probably means more snow for North Yorkshire but more marginal at low levels for Lincolnshire. But if the weather follows one of the outcomes shown by ECM, UKMO or GFS (a big "if", admittedly), a fair slice of this region looks set for a significant snow event in each case. I expect the Met Office to revise the main warning area a bit further south either tonight or tomorrow. I've just seen my first falling snow of the season in Lincoln - just the odd flake here and there, and I had to turn the torch on on my mobile phone to see it, but definitely snow! I probably also slept through a bit at 4-5am judging by the radar and the report of snow from RAF Waddington.

I've been thinking similarly to many other members on here, the current model outputs are pretty ideal for producing a significant frontal snow event here in Lincoln, but ironically (given that this morning the issue was that they kept placing the low too far north, resulting mainly in rain), now my bigger concern is that if they place it much further south, it could end up mainly dry here with the bulk of the precipitation to the south! It shows how marginal these frontal events often are, but it's looking increasingly likely that a slice of England may see a significant snow event from this. Tonight's ECM 12Z is continuing the southward trend, placing it a bit further south even than the 00Z did, with the -5C 850hPa line barely making it as far as Lincolnshire. It'll be interesting to see the ECM 12Z precipitation charts as they should illustrate how much chance there is of the region (by which I mean Yorkshire as well as Lincolnshire) still getting a fair amount of precipitation with further southward corrections. I agree with the east coast members that the east coast of England is unlikely to see any advance on rain/sleet from this, though. I lived on the coast of Tyne & Wear for years and the coastal strip normally got its biggest snow events from showers off the North Sea, either via a northerly or via a particularly cold easterly or north-easterly which could overcome the coastal warming effects of the onshore wind. These sort of marginal frontal events with winds from the south-eastern quarter of the compass tended to bring rain/sleet near the coast with snow inland.

I still haven't seen a flake of sleet or snow falling in Lincoln yet this season, although it looks like I may have slept through a bit of sleet and/or snow between 4 and 5am, as a narrow band of precipitation moved through and nearby RAF Waddington reported snow and a drop in temperature from 2C to 1C. Nothing exciting, but even seeing something falling would be cause for celebration after what's gone so far. Looking somewhat interesting for this area of the UK on Thursday. Most of yesterday's runs and this morning's GFS and UKMO 00Z runs had the depression pushing northwards resulting mostly in rain and maybe just a bit of leading edge snow, but the ECMWF 00Z run had the low further south, potentially resulting in a substantial snow event due to being on the northern flank of the system and being sheltered from the warming effects of the North Sea by the Lincolnshire Wolds. Today's GFS 06Z and 12Z have moved closer to the ECM 00Z, putting it somewhere in between, making it rather marginal but with a fair chance of at least some of it falling as snow.

In the case of the UK I think it started around 1988-1990. 1988 on its own wasn't remarkable, but by 1990 we'd had three mild winters in a row and both 1989 and 1990 had been warm for much of the year. I don't think the early to mid-1970s were as convincing, as although they did contain a run of mild winters and 1975 and 1976 had hot summers, there were quite a few cold springs, summers and autumns in that period. Globally, the current warming trend started off rather earlier, I reckon it set in around 1980. Global temperatures were at or near record high levels through late 1979 and 1980, and then moved into uncharted territory in 1981. The upward trend through the 1980s as well as the 1990s becomes clear if you remove El Nino-related variability.

When I saw the topic of topsy turvy months the first example that immediately sprung to my mind was April 1981. A warm first half, then exceptionally cold northerlies and north-easterlies in the last third with widespread snow around the 24th-26th. I think of 1994 as having had a rather topsy turvy spring and autumn. In most parts of the country, there was a warm March, an average April and a cool May, and then in the autumn a cold September and average to fairly cool October were followed by a record breaking warm November. In some regions March had a higher mean minimum temperature than April, and November's mean minimum temperature was quite widely above that of October.

I'm going to take an "England E and NE" centric perspective here, and vote for the following: January 2014 February 2011 March 1996 April 1993 May 1991 June 1987 July 2000 August 2008 September 2001 October 2020 November 2011 December 2002 In the Met Office England E and NE sunshine series, this year would have a mean temperature of 8.88C, which is very close to the average for 1981-2010. With 955.9mm of precipitation it would be rather wet but not record breaking (2012 had 1043.4mm). But the variable that really stands out is sunshine. This year would produce only 977.8 hours of sunshine, easily beating the record low of 1186.3 set in 1954. This year would also be largely snowless apart from the frontal snow event on 11/12 March 1996, which wasn't enough to save it from ranking as easily my worst March because of how relentlessly dull and raw it was in north-east England.

Sorry, I keep forgetting to do this until the first day of the month! 5.7C and 32.7mm please.

I'm wondering if you might be confusing the storm on the 25th with the subsequent secondary low on the night of the 27th/28th. Heavy snow fell widely on the NW flank of that second system, and on the morning of the 28th, snow depths included 13cm at Leeming (North Yorkshire), 8cm at Durham and 7cm at Hazelrigg near Lancaster. The system on the 25th did indeed bring a spell of heavy snow to parts of the north, but at low levels it generally turned to rain, initiating a thaw in Scotland (where a coldish polar maritime westerly on the 24th had delivered a widespread snow cover).

As with many others, 2010 takes my top spot by a fair margin. I remember I actually welcomed the temporary thaw around midmonth as it removed the snow before it turned icy and gave the country a chance to get moving again, and it added a bit of variety to the month. Then I spent the Christmas period in Cleadon in South Tyneside with my parents, where it was snowy again from the 19th-25th and at times phenomentally cold. Despite being just 2 miles inland, at my weather station I recorded a max of -3.3C on the 20th and a min of -9.9C the following night. I didn't mind so much that I fell just short of -10C, because it fell to -10.3C early on the 3rd. Unlike in south-eastern Britain, in Tyneside the month was also generally sunny until the 25th. Second and third spots are trickier but I'm inclined to err on the side of Decembers that had white Christmasses. Thus, second is probably 2009 because of its memorable cold spell in the second half and its varied first half and its above average sunshine. Third is probably 1995 because of how near-perfect I found the Christmas period in Cleadon (we had a white Christmas by every possible definition, as a succession of snow showers clung to that strip of the coast on Christmas morning). It was a very fitting end to what remains my favourite year for weather. But my inclusion of Dec '95 is somewhat Christmas-centric, because I remember the first two-thirds of that month being mainly cold and cloudy with raw easterlies and not much snow. 2022 doesn't even come close for me. Here in Lincoln the month was remarkable for the fact that I didn't see any sleet or snow falling despite how cold and frosty the first half was, but that just meant that towards the end of the cold spell I wasn't unhappy to see it go.

Amazingly, here in Lincoln I am still yet to see sleet or snow falling so far this 2022/23 season. There normally is a mild/wet, cold/dry association with UK winter weather to some extent (away from coastal parts of the north-east), but it's been particularly extreme this winter so far.

5.5C and 78.5mm please.

I'm going to be up in Knaresborough for Christmas. I'm not too disappointed to see this cold spell go, but I'd certainly like to see a white Christmas. It looks on a knife edge at the moment - the ECMWF and UKMO has the cold air staying too far north, while the GFS has it spreading south to cover most or all of the region by Christmas Day. Normally I would back ECMWF/UKMO over GFS, so to me the chances are receding, but there's still a chance.

Yeah, I think on this occasion the Met Office warnings were pretty good. Things like freezing rain are often a "hit and miss" thing and some places in the warning area might well have got nothing serious, giving the impression locally that they were over the top, but it's clear from some of the posts in here that some areas have had freezing rain and lethal conditions out and about, especially on foot, as a result. I got nothing but rain, but then again Lincoln was just to the south-east of the amber and yellow warning areas.

It's official: I went through the entire cold spell in Lincoln without seeing any sleet or snow. It's not that unusual to have snowless cold spells in itself, but to manage it in a cold spell characterised by low pressure and frequent northerly winds is quite a feat in this part of the country. Rain here so far with the temperature rising from 1.2C as the rain arrived to 1.6C now. I wasn't really expecting snow from this breakdown as we got some less cold air come in from the south-west yesterday prior to the big breakdown.

I originally came from the Tyne and Wear coast, where they're sheltered from south-westerlies, but when I think about it, even there, in each of those three months, the sunniest spells were generally the frosty ones. I remember finding Christmas 1994 disappointing because we had plenty of sunshine and night frosts in the week leading up to Christmas and then Christmas Day was mild and grey. Similarly in January 1999 I remember the northerly snap in the second week being very sunny, and in February 2000 the sunniest days tended to be fairly mild by day but with night frosts. The same was also true in January 2007 (plenty of sunshine in the cold last week) and January 2012 (sunny frosty spell midmonth). It would appear that most Decembers and Januarys that were statistically mild and sunny overall were sunniest during cold frosty interludes, and lacked sustained spells of mild and sunny weather. It's more common to get mild sunny weather in February, but when we get a February 2019 type setup in November, December or January we often get a sunny day or two followed by persistent low cloud (this happened recently in the second week of November 2022).

Mild dry sunny weather is pretty rare in December and January, but it's quite common for changeable westerly regimes with a high frequency of sunshine-and-showers days from returning polar maritime air masses to be mild and wet but also sunny, especially in eastern parts of the UK. I can think of quite a few examples from my youth - December 1994, January 1999, February 2000 for example. The mild sunny Christmas Day in 1987 was also associated with a returning polar maritime air mass.

A white Christmas is looking a possibility on the latest ECMWF run: All subject to change of course, but with a pretty cold Arctic air mass pushing south, there would almost certainly be snow on the northern flank of the frontal boundary between the two air masses.

I've sometimes flagged this up myself. Sometimes if ground temperatures are high, the snow has to be heavy for it to settle (I remember good examples of this in Leeds on 12 March 2006, and in Exeter on 18 March 2018, when snow took a while to start settling on most surfaces despite air temperatures below freezing), but if it is heavy enough, it will settle. The "wet ground" theory has a bit of substance behind it in that it can suggest that ground temperatures are relatively warm, but not always - sometimes the ground can be wet with ground temperatures near freezing, in which case snow will usually settle readily if the air temperature is low enough. Showers are coming close to Lincoln but the Netweather precip type radar (which I find pretty reliable) is suggesting rain and sleet. It seems that south of Durham a pool of warmer air has developed, probably assisted by warming from the North Sea, which is turning showers at low levels to sleet rather than snow.

Showers just to the NE of Lincoln now - so near but yet so far, as the saying goes!

Good luck, hope you get better soon. I also picked up Covid-19, felt off late Monday and Tuesday, tested positive yesterday evening and am somewhat ill today. Good to see South Shields getting something, I'm aware that South Shields has often missed out because of marginality in recent snow events. I can see snow showers tantalisingly just off the coast there though!

Yes, I think some earlier runs had a straight northerly or NNE'ly for the region but as we've got nearer the time a ridge of high pressure has been picked up east of Lincolnshire which is tending to switch the winds in Yorkshire as well as Lincolnshire to a NNW'ly, which means mainly coastal showers. Like some others I have a chance of seeing out the entire cold spell without seeing any snow falling or even sleet, though the GFS precipitation outputs point to is a slight chance of some snow showers coming inland as far as Lincoln between tomorrow and Friday. Just a slight chance though. UKV has the showers very much confined to coasts except for coming a little way inland to the North York Moors.