Mike Ronanye writes:
Photo from Sky News
Story from UK Telegraph:
UK brought to standstill as five inches of snow falls in an hour
The press still can’t convert between Celsius and Fahrenheit.
The lowest weekend temperature was reported in rural Oxfordshire, where it sank to -21F (-6 C) overnight on Saturday. With gritters and snow ploughs out in force, most major roads remained open, although the going was slow on minor roads and police received a high volume of calls reporting minor accidents.
Assuming that -6C was the actual temperature, +21F was the correct conversion not -21F.
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Ignore the British media – we have amongst the most exaggerating Press in the world. Yes, it’s been cold, but hardly Arctic.
Snowy, icy conditions are not that unusual this time of year in much of the UK, although it rarely gets down to the south-east. I know, because it is my sister’s birthday, and we’ve been snowed in a couple of times. The snow a month ago was very unusual though – a great bit of irony given the Parliament debate on the Climate Change Bill on that day.
As for why light snow often causes such disruption, it’s partly because the temperature is very close to 0 deg C, and so the snow can melt and re-freeze and so can tend to become ice very quickly especially on untreated roads, and partly because most of the drivers on British roads are rubbish at driving in snowy and icy conditions because we don’t get much practice at it.
AndyW, Britain is similar to Ireland – a fantastic climate spoiled by poor weather. 😉
“Widespread” snow in Eastern Australia might be literally correct, but the actual percentage of area where snow fell would be fairly minute.
But watching the BBC my dear Jean Meeus ( BBC World)” Global Warming / Climate Change” was said 26 times in 3 hours of program/publicty. If you can stand the idiotic reporting ( target for those that have a minus IQ ) try you luck, my wife won the last round with 14 in one hour.
Jeff Alberts (21:46:34) :
Downright Dickensonian. Now all we need are some kids walking around in tattered clothing …
I think the word is Dickensian 😉
Please sir, can I have some more [snow?] 🙂
Mike Nicholson (02:01:30) :
Interesting that in the same newspaper only about a month ago, it was predicted by a so called expert that “because of increasingly mild winters”, trees are dropping their leaves later and later and he then predicted that the likelihood was a green Christmas as opposed to a white one !
I wouldn’t deny that winters have been getting milder in the British Isles if I was you…they have! Isn’t winter from December to February? We haven’t reached winter yet, still in autumn/fall.
Ah, they won’t admit it, but the Sun has been caught napping on the job again.
Bruce Foutch (21:54:30) :
“Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic is about to assume the rotating presidency of the European Union in January.”
Wow.
Obama’s advisers better start doing some real good advising or one of the 1st of His pronouncemetns on GW is going to bite him. You don’t want a major stumble getting out of the blocks.
“Mary” (03:58:39)
You said:
Maybe things are just getting back to “normal”. After all, this is what Newsweek told us in 1975.
Interesting item about narwhals trapped in Arctic ice:
“It happens occasionally at Eclipse Sound east of here,” said Allooloo. “But no one in Pond Inlet remembers anything like this happening around here in at least 75 years. This is very new to us.”
Still odd things going on with the UK’s Met Office – who say that the November temp in England is running at 1.1 degrees C above normal! http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcet/cet_info_mean.html
No one here that I know would agree with that.
Interesting how this reading would have appeared in the infamous ‘global temperature’ average-In the South west of the country (and its not a big one) the day temperature was 11C (52F) it was sunny and we have not had a frost yet this year!
tonyB
‘Downright Dickensonian.’
__Bleak House__ features one of the most exciting descriptions of a winter storm in English lit, although such an event, featuring snow mixing with sleet, would be disappointing judged by the standards of one who has spent vrtually all of his winters in the New York metro area.
Another great Dickensian storm, of hurricane-like magnitude, blows in at the end of __David Copperfield__.
Well, it was toward the tail-end of the Little Ice Age that Dickens had his
–floruit–.
I wonder if such fictional weather events can be grounded in actual occurrences in the first half of the nineteenth century. __Weatherwise__, back when it was still worth reading, once featured an article that persuasively argued for a specific storm 0f the 1870’s as the model for a storm in one of the Sherlock Holmes stories.
‘Isn’t winter from December to February?’
Technically correct, of course, but winter weather is not restricted by the calendar, as much of the eastern U.S. has learned over the past week–and even back in October.
Jean Meeus
Well, pour vos Belges, il y’a toujours le soulagement d’un flacon de Chimay.
While interesting, this type of weather is not terribly unusual over history, just the last 20 years or so. The US, Europe and most of Asia will likely have a VERY cold start to the Winter in December but it will be followed by a fairly mild Jan-Feb. for most of those same areas. Overall the winter will average pretty close to normal except for the SE US which should be above normal. People in the US Midwest will probably get the brunt of it this winter.
Don’t forget that the trains still ran on time. It must have been the “right sort of snow”
(You have to live in the UK to understand that. When the trains are stopped by snow the official excuse is that it’s the “wrong sort of snow”)
It was a little bit disappointing down here in west London over the weekend. I was hoping for a nice crisp blanket like you see in the Xmas cards, but all we had was a brief dusting of snow from about 7.30 am on Sunday, which didn’t settle, and turned into drizzle an hour later. Still, rather out of the ordinary for recent years, although “brought to a standstill” is a slight exaggeration. Now turning somewhat milder but maybe we will have another cold snap between now and the end of the year.
However… The real fun tends to start after Xmas and the New Year – looking at some of the harsher winters of the 20th century, the notable periods of prolonged cold which wrought a bit of havoc and did bring things to a standstill, seemed to have been from the end of December and through January and February (when in recent years we normally have had one or two cold snaps anyway, after a relatively mild pre-Xmas period.) The prolonged cold spells happened when we got a persistent “blocking high” over Scandinavia and Russia. Could this happen in early 2009? No way of telling, but it will be interesting to find out, and a good test of our ageing power supply infrastructure, if it does.
Jean Meeus (23:08:56) : Ric’s comment relates to the next sentence:
14 centimetres (5.5ins) of snow fell between Saturday and Sunday. Norfolk and Lincolnshire were the most affected places in England, with up to five centimetres (2.4 ins) falling in just one hour.
Five centimeters is about 2 inches, not 2.4.
1 inch = 2.54 cm, whence 5 cm = 5/2.54 = 1.97 inches.
Hmm. Apart from the conversion error, the -6C temperature report seems implausible. I live four miles from RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire where they recorded the lowest temperatures in the cold spell of 1981, and the temperature at my house emphatically did not go below 0C all weekend. The lowest I noticed was +2.5C. Does anyone know exactly where it is supposed to have got to -6C? It is not a very big county over which to get ~8.5C temperature difference.
Brought to a standstill? Not at all surprising. I was in southern California some years back, driving across interstate 8 near the Mexico border, after a very unusual snowfall. Dry roads, snow on either side. Several folks in front of me panicked and ran off the road. For no reason whatsoever, other than perhaps never having seen snow before. In Chicago it took 20 inches to shut things down. In Colorado, we just go skiing. (“sorry, boss, couldn’t make in in today”)
The difference between
-6C = +21F and
-6C = -21F
is a mere 42 degrees Fahrenheit.
You can’t expect reporters and editors to catch every little unimportant detail in a story.
John M (05:43:09) :
“Mary” (03:58:39)
You said:
“I wouldn’t deny that winters have been getting milder in the British Isles if I was you…”
Maybe things are just getting back to “normal”. After all, this is what Newsweek told us in 1975.
In England, farmers have seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950, with a resultant overall loss in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons annually.
That seems reasonable, according to Defra the average growing season in the 50s was the longest for ~200 years and appears to have dropped by about 2 weeks by ’74, since then it has increased by ~30 days.
http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/statistics/globatmos/gakf19.htm
On the cloud effect and temperatures. I find in Australia the first cloud cover after clear days raises the average by raising the minimum and suppressing the maximum. If the cloud cover persists however, the average T starts trending down with a narrowed gap between min and max.
Nice picture from Oxford.
Very Dickensian!!
Just like Christmas!!
And to think NASA/GISS will not have recorded these cold temperatures.
Tiree, Stornoway, Glasgow Airport and Easkdale Muir as warm as toast.
My part of West Scotland had an 80% chance of snow.
Not a flake! The kids are as mad as hell!
This will be the HOTTEST November on record.
Falling on from the warmest October on record.