There's not much going on regarding gardening at the moment but there may well be something afoot weather wise. Over the weekend storm Deirdre came and went producing for us nothing more than an average winter storm. We’d had a few very cold days leading up to the arrival of Deirdre and all the forecasts were that as Deirdre arrived she would bring some snow. As it turned out that wasn’t the case and we just had a wet and miserable day on Saturday.
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| Temperature & Rainfall Records 13-19 December 2018 |
The weather talk now has moved on to a major event that the weather models are predicting will take place towards the end of the month. The prediction is that a Sudden Stratospheric Warming will occur in the upper levels of the earth’s atmosphere. Current predictions are for this to occur over Christmas Day or Boxing Day.
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| From Gav's Weather Videos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDnC9mW9v2E |
The model view is looking down at the north pole in the centre of the image. Normally the pole would be covered with the purple and blue colours indicating extreme cold. The red colours indicate the Sudden Stratospheric Warming predicted to take place.
If this happens it will take several days or even a couple of weeks before it affects our weather and it’s by no means certain that it will have an effect and exactly what it will be.
The last Sudden Stratospheric Warming occurred at the beginning of last year and more than likely resulted in the Beast From The East which brought us a spell of very cold and snowy weather during late winter and early spring 2018.
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| 02 April 2018 |
Taking place even earlier this time, it’s possible that we could be in for a very cold January, February and possibly even March. I’ve seen comparisons with winter 2010 which turned out to be one of the coldest winters on record.
Of course, this is only a weather model prediction so there’s always a chance, that like the snow forecast for last weekend, it won’t actually happen.
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Even this far out, it is fun to wait and see how the actual weather compares to the forecast.
ReplyDeleteI'm sort of hoping that it's wrong. I can manage without any very cold weather especially snow!
DeleteOh deeear. I do hope the model is exaggerating the effect.
ReplyDelete