tonight will be very cold

Earlier it managed to briefly get to a whopping 1'C. We've had a bit of fog and a breeze though, so with wind chill it was bitter. It felt colder to me than it did this time last year when the whole region was doing an impression of antarctica.

Still, we can't complain. My son, who is just turned 3, put me to shame when down the beach earlier in the bitter cold. The sun very briefly poked through the freezing fog, and the lad, very chipper said 'Oh, there' and pointed at the feeble winter sun with a smile on face. All's well as long as the sun is somewhere there

 

Amazing ..Went to bed about midnight and it was about -10c wake up at 7.30am and it is +2c.. still a bit of snow lying around .but I can live with that ..Long may it last,,

Dave

 

we had another -15 here in cambridge last night

 

-10 last night, -16 the night before when my boiler decided to conk out so had a day of freezing indoors as well till emergency boil man came to sort it. Now it's +3 and reasonable outside and boiler working so nice and warm indoors too. Bird seem to be suffering so trying to keep them well fed and watered. Looks mildish for the next week.

 

Our temperature fell like a stone yesterday from
+4C at 15:00 to
-7C at 19:00 but then stabilised and we had
-9C at 01:00 low and it then started rising now
+1C at 10:00 with slight drizzle

The forecast has been wildly inaccurate, which is a larf given how sensationalistic they have been and then they miss the opportunity to predict the actual coldest nights of the year! Forecast was -2C to -5C on Friday night (we got -11C) and -3C to -4C last night (and we got -9C)

 

Thats not sunshine, it's the heat from those ultra hot chilies you grow !

Steve...

 

No, but I do think they should be shot. Plus all the Journo's that spout all the sensational claptrap in order to sell newspapers, and the rest of them trying to cover their behinds ("may be 10 degrees colder in rural areas than towns ..." ... yeah ... that should just about cover it, but its useless information).

-5C forecast and I can leave the conservatory as it won't fall below zero. -10C on the other hand requires emergency measures to put rugs over all tender plants and my baby gas heater in their on full blast to provide just enough heat to keep it at 0C

Costs a fortune to run the met office too ... if they can't get within striking distance then stop offering forecasts that they don't have high levels of confidence in

 

looking at the days ahead, that was winter .... temps will be much warmer from now

 

Kristen, why do you listen to the forecasts???

If you cant put your own slant on them, being that you know your area better than them, I'd just stop listening.

I live outside the town, but not what you would call rural, I pick a mate up in the mornings on the way to work, its less than two miles but generally in a downhill direction.

It can be very snowy where I live and just wet in the town during winter.
On the otherhand it can be above freezing some mornings and a couple of degrees colder where he lives.
Temperatures change wildly depending on weather conditions and local geography, right now places with snow cover will experience lower temps than places without.
Its a very complicated buisness.

 

Because all over the gardening forums folk quote the latest, most extreme, version that some newspaper-selling marketing agent has published from the most extreme forecast they could lay their hands on. Thus I can't avoid them!

I resent the sensationalist that newspapers enduge in. easy ... I don't buy a newspaper. But now it keeps getting quoted at me on forums and its harder to avoid.

I also think that we ought to have better forecasts. If not more accurate (Hey! I know its a tricky subject) then published with ranges of temperatures (based on their degrees of confidence in their math calculations), percentage likihood of rain/snow whatever, and then I can form a view. If they tell me its going to be warmer than -5C I am not preparing for -10C to -15C. And the night after that, when they were broadcasting that it was going to be another cold night, the Met Office's forecast had not changed from the prediction they had made the day before (-4C in the West of region, -3C in the East, we had -9C but all over this area there was plenty of -12C around 01:00am).

I just cannot believe, given all the money that the Met office spends trying to make the forecast, that they can't be more accurate, or if they can't do that that they can't tell me what level of confidence they have.

"On the otherhand it can be above freezing some mornings and a couple of degrees colder where he lives."

Sure, I'm cool with that, but to me the key in your sentence is "a couple of degrees". When I look at Wunderground the whole area for 20 miles, or more, around me is much-of-a-muchness for temperature. There are some that are way off the scale, the owners of those probably have them wrongly set (there was one last night that was +16C - I reckon he'd bought the outdoor sensor indoors for some reason!), but in the main its fairly even.

Here's what Wunderground looked like Sat 11 Feb at 04:00 (if you've not seen this before you can hover over the Date/Time in the toolbar and then a drop-down lets you move back/forwards an hour/day/month/year). Apart from the twit with his weather station reading +16C !! and allowing for the coast being warmer, the temperatures are pretty consistent - like you said, a couple of degrees as you go down into a frost hollow, or whatever. The forecast for West of region was -5C and East (inland, not on the coast) was -2C.

I'll go any take some more Valium now ...

 

"If you cant put your own slant on them, being that you know your area better than them, I'd just stop listening"

Trouble is Pete that I don't think that I can. All I can do is to stay up until midnight and then rush out with a torch covering things up etc. if its significantly different to what I was expecting. But I'm game to take a different route if you/anyone has suggestions. It won't be long until I am starting to worry about whether the Potato tops need protecting, or not ...