There's not much to look forward to, weather-wise. At this point I'd even take a UK high and 'faux' cold. But even that's a distant hope, as the Atlantic takes hold and it's a diet of rain and wind to take us through the rest of the year.
My only solace is that, 3/4 days ago, I was scrambling round looking for value on White Xmas bets (was looking at the 3 Scottish airports, plud Belfact, Leeds and Manchester). Couldn't find any so didn't bother. How glad I am! Saved a wad of cash there.
Originally Posted by: Saint Snow
Agreed.
I've noticed that the daily CC threads have gone very quiet just now, and that just goes to show just how boring and uninteresting, our weather has become these days.
During tomorrow, I will be travelling to the Scottish Borders for a week as per usual to spend Christmas with my family and it's a real shame that all of those interesting charts for that period (one or two of them even had the Scottish Borders actually getting some snow on Christmas Day for a while) have now largely disappeared.
As a result, it now looks increasingly likely that I will be lucky to even see a single air frost whilst I am away. That of course, is nothing unusual in this modern era and there have been many of my recent Christmas trips to the Scottish Borders which have been completely frost-free. However, this would be a massive let-down on this occasion, given the really cold start to this winter which we had.
Given that we had a wet autumn, a lot of people are probably not going to like me saying this, but we could really do with some rain here. Going into the autumn, the east of Scotland was rated as having a severe water shortage risk after all of the dry weather leading up to that.
The autumn was then wet which helped to ease that scenario somewhat, but our rainfall totals here in SE Scotland weren't all that much above average then whereas other parts of the UK were much wetter then. Those wetter parts include NE Scotland which have also been relatively wet fairly recently (at least, according to Richard from Aberdeen). This means that NE Scotland should be fine as regards to avoiding any water shortage risks.
However, that is not the case here in SE Scotland. As with other parts of the UK, we therefore need to getting a lot of rainfall during these winter months in order to top up the reservoirs and ground water levels yet with just over a week left until the end of this month, a total of only around 13 mm of rain has been recorded during this month so far at the botanic gardens in Edinburgh along with not much more than that at Edinburgh Gogarbank.
Given what I have just said about the importance of this winter period for replenishing our water supplies, these are very concerning figures indeed and unless we start to get that much needed rainfall soon, I fear that we are going to be in very serious trouble next spring/summer as regards to possible water shortages with an even worse situation than what we had at the same time this year.
Looking at the latest model output, I'm struggling to see where that deficit is suddenly going to me made up. There has been some forecasts hinting at a wet few days ahead. That has been largely downgraded as we get closer to the time and even if that output was to verify, we are going to need a lot more than a wet few days ahead to get us out of that scenario.
The north of Edinburgh, usually always missing out on snow events which occur not just within the rest of Scotland or the UK, but also within the rest of Edinburgh.