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Yorkshire in winter

It is fooking freezing and visibility is one centimetre. 

How can it be like this and yet so close to London?

If you divide the trip from Edinburgh into quarters, York and London are in the same quarter of southernness. So yes, close. I stand by it.

I'm not sure the epochs thing works either; where's more Victorian than Kensington and Chelsea these days.

If Edinburgh is just over 400 miles from London and York is just over 200 miles from both London and Edinburgh, London and York are only just in the same half unless your journey from Edinburgh is first via Dublin.

If you depart Edinburgh at 655 you will be in Doncaster at 957 at kings cross at 1130ish. Applying some moderate rounding, Yorkshire is in the bottom quarter.

Do not brumsplain the east coast to me!

I don't understand why you fail to understand that when you said "close" you didn't mean "close" and when you said "in the same quarter of southernness" you didn't mean that either. I suppose the alternative was simply saying, "oh yes, fair point, I meant in terms of travel time" and that would never do.

Buzz you often put me in mind of the stereotypical "nightmare girlfriend" who gets really bothered about throwaway things. Who the fook cares, feel free to disagree but you're not very nice so I don't see why you expect some sort of permaPMT kid gloves treatment yourself.

Merk, I think it is funny that London is discernably warmer than Yorkshire. Is new York discernably cooler than Atlantic city? (I don't actually know so I'm just going to hope the answer is no).

 

Erm, to be fair it does tend to be you rather than buzz who runs the ‘och, i’m SOOO fat at the moment’ threads in the hope that someone will gainsay you.

Just sayin’ like.

if you can be arsed to look at the surface pressure charts on the met office website you can work out where the air is coming from, which will explain the temperature difference 

as an aside, how tf did I make that random vertical line in my post? 

Strutter, it is quite clear you don't "get" my style of posting. Which is fine. All it aimsto achieve is chat with people during a boring moment for my brain. Appaz you think this is profound and emotional for me. It's not. I don't need rof drinks sexual innuendo to feel alive. Pathos@u. I don't crave "attention" from depressing gross blokes. PLEASE free not to read. It's really not for you as I don't enjoy chatting with you. 

Buzz has ishoos, we all know that, I don't care if he gets in a tizzy but it seems a bit silly to go radge over something quite so inconsequential. I hope it's displacement rather than an example of all his dealings.

 

 

you're not factoring in wind chill clergs - winds from the east are fckng cold.  so the broads, the fens and essex are cold and the thames acts like a windy enema right into the heart of london.  

lmagine being a medieval monk in ely or somewhere.  you'd be more chilblain than human.  

I was thinking this exact monk thought re fens earlier (the weather is reminiscent of my feeble attempt to get onto Cambridge and I was thinking about the train ride from Peterborough).

Sort of relatedly am hoping to stay over on Lindisfarne shortly. I hope ghost monks don't come out at night.

 

I always get completely freaked out by the total lack of geographical knowledge of most people. Makes me wonder how the fook they know where they are or what's going on at any given moment.

 

Here, Clergs, is a set of bullets of meteorological and topographical relevance which will help you understand the weather in the UK.

 

  • the UK is an island in the northern hemisphere. Due to a range of different factors, the prevailing direction of air masses around the UK are from the west, over the Atlantic across the country, hitting the west coast first.  There are exceptions to this considered below, but in terms of mean weather patterns, this is what occurs.  By air masses I am not talking about wind direction. I am talking about massive blocks of air circulating around the globe. Mostly ours moves west to east. Sometimes, pressure changes or high altitude current cause circulation of air in a different way. Hold that thought.
  • The factors that cause air movement (not wind yet,  I will come to that) are (a) pressure systems (caused in turn by temperature differentials between air, sea and land) (b) the Coriolis force (which is the spinning of the earth causing the mobile air to move in a certain way in the northern hemisphere and in the opposite way in the southern hemisphere - think of spinning an egg and then stopping it and then releasing your hand and it starts moving again because the egg white is moving - same with earth and air) (c) water currents in the seas surrounding our island (including north Atlantic Drift and Gulf Stream) (d) topography of land and its effect on air movement and (e) the high altitude air currents including the jet stream (constant) and things like El Nino (variable)
  • There are four main air masses divided into two classes: Maritime and Continental (coming from sea or land). Then these two are sub divided into Tropical or Polar. So Polar Continental is cold and dry air. Polar Maritime is cold damp. Tropical Maritime is warm and wet. Tropical Continental is warm and dry air.
  • Most of what we get over the British Isles is Tropical or Polar Maritime, being warm or cold wet air having picked up water from the North and Western Atlantic.
  • So that's air masses. Those air masses are then affected by the build up of weather systems.  Pressure changes cause high pressure and low pressure areas (differential in heat between land, sea and air affects pressure). The air mass and high level currents push those pressure systems east from the Atlantic over the UK.  High pressure adjacent to low pressure makes air move from high to low (like a balloon with a hole). That's called wind. That's why the wind gets up when the pressure drops. 
  • As the weather patterns move over Britain, they hit land. On the west coast of Britain this pushes the air up in altitude as it steps over the high land to the west (West Wales, Tors of Cornwall, West Coast highlands and islands of Scotland etc) and as that wet air rises it condenses. This causes rainfall. Topographical or relief rainfall. The evaporation from the ocean then condenses and drops on Fort William, Carlisle, Manchester, St Davids,  Tavistock, Penzance. It does it again on the West side of the Pennines, Grampian, Pentland Hills, N York Moors etc
  • The water gone, the dryer air continues to move east and hits the flatter land of the Vale of York, Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Essex, Suffolk and Kent.  They have lower rainfall as a result. It is called a Rain Shadow.
  • Sometimes a weather system in the North Sea might battle against the Westerly coming from the Atlantic. That is what is happening now. A big high pressure in the NS and Baltic will present cold air and temperatures will reduce there. Being high pressure, it will blow wind to the west into the prevailing low pressure zone from the Atlantic weather system. That wind will carry some precipitation from the North Sea. You'll get a blasting freeze of air from the east/north with some rain or sleet, maybe snow. Pressure systems circulate, clockwise/anticlockwise according to hemisphere, so you get a coriolis-caused change in wind direction over time as it circulates and when it is coming from the north it will be v cold, as it circulates round it will be wetter but not so cold.
  • That stand off between weather systems will see a dividing line in or around the central spine of the country (Pennines) with wet mild and windy weather in the west and cold damp but calm weather to the east. It will feel particularly cold in the east and north east when wet air comes from that high pressure zone in the north sea.  Dry air does not conduct heat as effectively as wet air. Consider this - put your hand in an oven at 220 degrees. If you don't touch the metal and just wave it around in the air, you can do so without burning yourself.  Then put your hand in the kettle steam. for the same time. Burn.  So when it is damp and cold, over the Vale of York, with an easterly coming off the N Sea you'll feel about 10 degrees colder, quicker. Wind chill is to do with moisture level as well as wind speed and air temp.

current UK Pressure map demonstrates this

 

Precipitation GFS Tu 11.12.2018 09 GMT

I always get completely freaked out by the total lack of geographical knowledge of most people. Makes me wonder how the fook they know where they are or what's going on at any given moment.

Well,I would normally say google maps but I just got off at Blackfriars and my 4G wouldn't load and the street I was heading for is not in numerical order (hello what?) so I spent an hour looking for my destination.

So the answer is dumb luck.

I appreciate the meteorology although I am not sure this will help me to navigate from Yorkshire to London.

 

that thing over the Atlantic is a low pressure system with a band of rain (wet maritime air) moving slowkly west and ready to dump. That thing over the North Sea is a high pressure system standing as a block of non moving air lowering temps in the NS, Nordics and Baltic. That lump to the south is a high pressure lump of tropical continental (warm dry) air from the Med and Africa.  It is holding temps in the south of England mild. Temps in the north of England are cold. Temps in the west are mild but it is going to be wet.

"It is fooking freezing and visibility is one centimetre. 

How can it be like this and yet so close to London?"

 

Ignoring the "close to London" debacle, which is a separate geographical issue, my meteorological expose answers your question entirely. 

my daughter calls me GeoDad because I have a degree in this subject and probably should have been a geog teacher. I just couldn't bear the idea of elbow patches on tweed. 3dix would have been good at that bit.

Britain's weather is incredible as we are so influenced by the various factors I have described above.  If the gulf stream or north atlantic drift changes, this can reduce or increase our mean air temp dramatically. These currents keep Britain warm (and damp). But if the jet stream alters pattern then air masses can be pushed in our direction causing a cold event (e.g. Beast From the East) where clear cold air hovers over us, reducing our island's temperature day by day, until a standard weather pattern such as a low pressure complex coming from the Atlantic then drifts east and topographic rainfall occurs but in a much colder air environment, then you get snow.

Why don't you get much snow from an easterly but plenty from a westerly? Because a westerly starts warm, over the Atlantic. Warm air can carry more water vapour than cold air. So Easterlies are generally drier even though they come over the North Sea.

Southerlies are warm but they don't come off the water but the continent, unless it is a SWesterly when it will accumulate a load of moisture from the Bay of Biscay, then dump it on southern Britain and Western France. 

When you get it, you get plenty of it in Kent. That is because that happens when there is a significant period of NE and Easterly chill carrying moisture from the North Sea and Baltic. I'm not saying it doesn't snow, but it only does in certain conditions. Generally Kent gets less precipitation than counties further west. 

Acidic magma is thin and runny. It doesn’t explode but seeps then flows rapidly.

Basaltic magma is viscous and causes explosive and destructive, noisy releases which can be a danger to humans in the vicinity. Such releases are often accompanied by tremors.

 

etc 

etc

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