Will I make it on holiday next Thursday?  What’s the snow potential for Birmingham airport?

You won't know until Tuesday evening at the earliest I am afraid. I have the same problem - if I go to Denmark, will I be able to get home next Friday? I use Birmingham airport too.

This is a real test for Meteogroup and the BBC and at the moment they don't look up to it . Don't get me wrong this is an extraordinary period of weather coming up and even the Met Office will struggle but most of the public get their weather from BBC forecasts and at the moment there really poor.

Exceptional ECM 12z Ens - Op bang on the 850 mean IMBY for just about the whole run - slight dip under on the last day of the run. Ens SD spread incredibly tight around the mean through the whole run. The mean 850 at the end of the run? -9c. Wowsers.

UKMO extended special for the north Midlands ish south

 Beautiful agreement 

That's astonishingly close grouping. I wonder if it indicates that the other ensemble members are following the operational run in their development and track of that low?

Love the UK Pac-Man munching it’s way through the Cotswold Snow field.

im flying from there on Thursday too!

Looks like it has the low further north that the ECM and closer to the GFS positioning.

Stunning agreement in the ECM perturbations - even when we are in our classical zonal mode, that level of agreement is never seen. Frankly astonishing and it is hard to fathom how the clustering is so close.

There have been many remarkable charts over the past week, but the story that one tells makes it one of the best.

Once again the ECM means follow the Op very very good indeed . 

Interesting that UKMET is going for a cyclonic end to the week too. So a strong signal from the Big 3. But at a range of t144 to t168 in normal winter Synoptics, we don't get good accuracy. In this very unusual setup, we should expect less accuracy than usual. It is very likely that any lows will be further south at the time.

They're probably worried that the snowflakes wouldn't be able to cope with real snowflakes.

That graph only gives the standard deviation around the mean for the Ens members, so there'll be outliers in the pack not shown on that plot. But the tight grouping around the mean is amazing.

More spread on the ECM SD ens the further S you go, but notice the Op in relation to the mean. A random location in Kent:

Well, you *think* you're flying from there on Thursday...

Some of my friends have queried the bbc app forecasts with me and I advised  them to use the Met Office app, albeit they are all computer generated.

How do you know that? 

They are certainly different, but it is not yet possible to say that they are poor.

Definitely some similarities to that of Feb 1991, esp the blocked set up: 

Uppers of -18@ 850hpa as well:

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If anything this one looks more cold and blocked esp the the east:

Control run for 28th Feb 18

Upper air temps:

The main difference was that this blocking looks a lot greater and this Feb's easterly looks like it will retrogress towards Greenland, so we have a much more extensive blocking feature unlike in 1991 where heights were lower around Greenland/Iceland!? The problem is that it's later in the season by a few weeks!?

It is fair to say this is a lot more blocked and the winds are coming from further east this time from the east of Urals!?: - What would you say? Here with northern hemisphere view:

28 Feb 2018

6th Feb 1991: