>Tonight will mark my site’s 40th night below the freezing mark since December 1st and the 4th night in a row below freezing in the current series of subfreezing nights. Although days are mild, nights are chilly with this morning cooling off to 23 degrees after winds let up after 4am. When I left the house this morning at 3.35am the temp outside was 29 with a wind chill at 19 degrees. But as the overnight wore on, the winds let up and temps dropped to 23 degrees producing a hard frost, this morning marks the 39th morning this meteorological winter below freezing.

It’s currently 26 degrees outside under clear skies and a light wind regime and with a light covering of snow I am expecting a low which may take a run at the upper teens by morning if conditions remain the same throughout the night. I am forecasting a low by morning of 19 degrees.

Sunday, January 31st Update

It’s another very beautiful, crisp day with a lovely sunrise to end the month of January. We say goodbye to January here with a low at midnight of 25 degrees and remained at 25 to 26 all night, we stayed milder than I thought again because of clouds rolling in and slicing our chances at low 20s to even upper teens. Even if skies remained clam and clear we may have had a tough time hitting the teens because our air aloft isn’t particularly cold, we have an Atlantic/polar air mass in place not Arctic and in order to get really cold nights we must have Arctic air in place which does two things, it keeps days cold not mild like we’re seeing and also nights tend to fall rapidly after sunset, we aren’t seeing that because the air itself isnt cold enough. Back in late December/early January we saw days remain in the upper 20s and as soon as late afternoon came we rapidly feel through the 20s as radiaional cooling worked at it’s best.

COLDER THAN NORMAL WATER TEMPS ARE FREEZING EASILY DESPITE MILDER WEATHER.
HIGHLANDS TO SEE A FULL 3 MONTH WINTER PERIOD WITHOUT THE SNOW MELTING

I’ve noticed a lot recently that after the cold of Dec/early Jan and the return to warmer temps, the water temperature of reservoirs, lochs, canals and rivers are colder than normal and therefore a night perhaps only just below freezing is freezing the surface literally overnight and this is a clear indicator of bodies of water that are only just below freezing, they’ve not warmed the same way the air has and so reforcing ice on the surface of water is happening easily. I noticed this as I drove my truck past a reservoir in the higher terrain just inland from the seaside town of Largs, Ayrshire. After it was frozen over for about two weeks with below freezing days and nights regularly falling towards -10C or lower, since melting, it only takes one night below freezing for a think ice formation again and this was proven when snow fell and covered the thin reformation of ice.

This is a winter that wants to stay cold even when we have mild air in place. When it’s raining, it’s never all that warm that snow can’t fall… Nights are still falling close to freezing even when it’s well into the 40s during the day and with all the cold across the hemisphere, we see little impulses of cold visit much more frequently than in recent years when we would see few and far between cold periods.

Just this morning it came to mind that in recent winters, we may see a cold period for 3-5 days, most of the time when it snowed, it would be all gone within 24 to 36 hours after it initionally fell. We now have snow cover for once again, albeit light and this is the third day of it remaining unmelted on the ground. Where the sun in shining, sure it’s melted but my point is, this is a winter different to anything I’ve ever seen and for anyone else of a similar age to me. It’s felt as though we’ve seen two or three winters combined into one this year and yet it’s STILL only January. We have another TWO FULL MONTHS of wintery weather potential.

Just yesterday morning I drove northbound from Dumfries back to Glasgow under a stunning full moon and a frosted landscape. I drive through the southern Uplands and into the village of Wanlockhead which at 1,531 feet above sea level, has more snow added to it’s remaining snow piles and drifts which have been a permanent feature of their landscape since at least mid-December. Roads are once again snow covered and icy, off the beaten track, roads are treacherous.

Up north of Glasgow and much of the highland region is still very snowy, it’s snowed everyday for about a week up there and there must be another 6-12 inches fallen, some of the higher peaks have probably added a further 2-4 feet to an increasingly deep snowpack. Their going to see a winter like no other perhaps going back to the 60s when snow lay on the ground from the commencement of December till the end of February or even the end of March. Despite a thaw up there, there’s too much snow to melt in 40-degree air, freezing nights even only slightly below the actual freezing mark, is helping preserve the snowpack but days aren’t warm enough to really begin the melting process as the north and northeast of Scotland is exposed more so than we are here in the more temperate central belt to cold, Scandinavian winds which keep firing up snowshowers across the northwest Highlands, Sutherland, Aberdeenshire and down to Perth and Kinross whilst a milder Atlantic weather pattern is effecting our part of the country. The central Highlands appears to be seperating two distinctly different air masses. Only the highest terrain still has snowcover (Wanlockhead, Dumfries and Galloway and neaby Leadhills, South Lanarkshire) is the only two villages that have snow on the ground.. We here in Lennoxtown are also another remote locale which strangly has snow on the ground. Nowhere surrounding us has snow, not even on top of the Campsies which sits directly to our north and not even a mile away yet they rise several hundred feet higher than the elevation of my house!

It’s going to take a true warming under spring-time sunshine to get rid of all that snow. The problem is we’re likely to see another snowy, cold month in February and some parts of th Highlands, even at lower elevations may see snow in their gardens and at the side of roads till the end of April. Flooding could be a major problem during March, April and May.

Thanks for reading.
-Mark