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Greetings!I finally got round to starting a blog so here goes....The last thirty six hours have reminded us what this part of the world is famed for - rain on and off, though usually not all that heavy, temperatures moving between 4.9C and 5.6C, and that horrible grey murk surrounding the Howe of Fife, not lowering visibillity enough to make it seem like an actual event but just generally making the view seem much bleaker. These are the days when I feel the suicide rate must be at its highest. But oddly enough, these kind of conditions have been seriously lacking this year. For the majority of the winter, it has either been sunny or clear and pretty cold or snow has been falling. This is a real rarity for myself, brought up in the generally bland, less cold winters of the late 90s with only the Christmas period of 2000 being of any great note. [url="http://www.wetterzentrale.de/pics/archive/ra/2000/Rrea00120001229.gif"]http://www.wetterzentrale.de/pics/archive/ra/2000/Rrea00120001229.gif[/url] Then there was the horrific 06/07, which was the year I realised that TheWeatherOutlook's long range forecast was badly inaccurate. Charts like these have been all too common in winters before 08/09 [url="http://www.wetterzentrale.de/pics/archive/ra/2006/Rrea00120061229.gif"]http://www.wetterzentrale.de/pics/archive/ra/2006/Rrea00120061229.gif[/url] But these last two years have suddenly become very interesting for lovers of cold, crisp weather. While last winter was not particularly brilliant for snowfall (perhaps around the average number of days with snow falling and a little above the average for snow lying), there was a real change in the air, with a cold and dry end to December, a spell of cold zonality which brought a number of near misses on the snowfall front and the early February cold spell, which seemed quite decent at the time, though again there was only one memorable snowfall, and this came from the breakdown [url="http://www.wetterzentrale.de/pics/archive/ra/2009/Rrea00120090212.gif"]http://www.wetterzentrale.de/pics/archive/ra/2009/Rrea00120090212.gif[/url] Some put this down to the much speculated about Hale winter, though like the year when the millenium began, some believed that this winter was in fact the Hale winter. As it transpired, this winter has turned out to be a major surprise to many, who thought perhaps that a month with a CET below 1.5C was pretty much out of reach. And, unless the models perform the biggest turnaround seen in the internet age, it looks likely that some more cold and potentially snowy weather is heading our way in just a couple of days. [url="http://cirrus.netwea...50t850eu.png"]http://cirrus.netwea...50t850eu.png[/url] How much snow is likely is hard to say, nothing hugely significant for most areas of east central initially at least but it does look like some convective showers heading our way on Monday at least [url="http://cirrus.netwea...ukprec.png"]http://cirrus.netwea...ukprec.png[/url] Watch for this to come into NMM timescale (36 hours) as anything further out is unlikely to be all that accurate.LS