Tuesday 20 February 2018

Might Move My Potatoes - Again!

I might just have to consider moving my seed potatoes for a second time since they went into the greenhouse to chit at the beginning of February. We've had a few milder days just recently but that might be about to change.
I've posted several times about the sudden stratospheric warming that took place a week or so ago. It seems like it's now planning to affect our weather. The computerised weather models are now predicting the setting up of a blocking system of high pressure, initially over the country, but then gradually moving north. The exact position of the centre of this high pressure system will have a pretty dramatic effect on our weather.
Image from website http://www.wetterzentrale.de
The chart above shows all the 20 different model runs of the GFS (Global Forecasting System) for the temperatures at 2.0m above ground level. This is the output from the midnight run on 20 February. The whole model runs four times a day at six hourly intervals. Briefly the output shows some solutions give mild temperatures, above 10°C or 50°F whilst one colder solution goes for a temperature of -10°C or 14°F. The thick white line shows the mean value of all the runs. The chart below shows all the predicted variations in temperature for 06:00 on Wednesday, 28 February
Image from website http://www.wetterzentrale.de
This week the daytime temperature is forecast to fall gradually from today's 8°C (45.4°F) down to 0°C (32.0°F) by next Monday, 26 February and it's not forecast to get above freezing for a couple of days. There will be several nights of fairly severe frosts should this forecast turn out to be accurate. You can see that there's good agreement regarding the forecast for just a few days in advance but then there becomes a large variation in temperatures beyond that.

I'll give it a couple of more days before deciding if I need to move my seed potatoes out of the greenhouse and summerhouse to somewhere frost free. As meteorological spring begins at the beginning of March the coldest spell of winter might arrive. 

Posted by Martyn at 10:00

2 comments:

  1. LINDA'S21 February 2018 at 08:13

    Thank you Martin for sharing your post with us so far have not got any seed potatoes at present blessing to you and Sue

    ReplyDelete

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