Thundersnow is quite an unusual event in these parts (Angus in Scotland). I was awakened at 3:20 AM this morning by a very loud flash bang and thought that the North Korean thingy had kicked off (no James Blunt to save the day this time around), but it was just Thundersnow.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-11857086

Winter has arrived very very early this year.

Edit Looks like someone has already posted a youtube video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7aNmGrkk5rM

The Thundersnow has now being ongoing since about 3 am this morning well into this afternoon. i.e. more than 12hrs.

12 hours!!..here in Minnesota we have thundersnow every few years but never for anymore than 15-20 minutes,and even then it's just booming in soft, heavy,warm snowfalls.

The thunder snow lightning took out Tayside Police Headquarters at 6:30am this morning, taking out their telecoms and central radio communication transmissions.

http://news.stv.tv/scotland/tayside/212556-police-headquarters-struck-by-lightning/

There have been substantial snow falls as well, with the main Dundee to Aberdeen motorway route now impassible. Much of the motorway network thoughout Scotland is now very difficult to use.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-11856694

Reports are that another 10-12 inches of snow are due in the next 24 hrs. The UK has just had the coldest recorded November night ever recorded at -18C in North Wales with Scotland slighty warmer at -15C.

Now if this happened in the London area it would be a National emergency!!

I'm now going off to watch the film 'The Day after Tomorrow' to get some tips on how to survive.

I guess this might be what we ran into snow skiing at Vail many years ago. We rode the lift to the top of the mountain. It was a blizzard up there, you couldn't see anything. Then lightening came. I had never run into that before in a snowstorm. They closed the lifts right after we hit the top and the ski patrol corralled everybody together into a controlled group kept us skiing down the hill as fast as the group could make it.

I would welcome snow any way I could get it! I have the snowshoes cleaned up, the cross country skis ready and the downhill skis are set as well. The snow is usually about 140 miles, uphill from here, This year there is little to none so far. I remember going ski touring on Halloween before and these days almost no snow all winter.

I have seen the thundersnow thing before and it was at the top of a ski lift and while no one was overly concerned, I made for the bottom of the hill ASAP. Being the highest point it a few hundred miles is not safe in a thunderstorm. Cheers!

Like it was said above we get them in Minnesotat every few years. It really isn't anything major though.

The thundersnow was something like this

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7864183.stm

but much louder and more intense.

You can see one of the towns Wind turbines being struck 3 times in around 20 sec.

http://www.thecourier.co.uk/News/Dundee/...-lightning.html

The thundersnow lasted around 12 hrs.

Apparently some light snow has fallen inside the M25 ring road around London and we are now beginning to see a National Emergency starting to take shape.

Good luck -- looks like a serious storm. Eight inches is a lot of snow for a major metropolitan area. Looks like Washington, D.C. residents aren't the only ones who get a crazed hankering for milk and eggs when snowflakes fall.

Lots of photos (including roads and empty grocery shelves) at this link:


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-...-late-work.html


Millions are facing nightmare journey home from work as forecasters predict EIGHT INCHES of snow tonight

By DAILY MAIL REPORTER
Last updated at 4:01 PM on 1st December 2010


Woman dies after falling into freezing lake in West Yorkshire
Body of man in his 50s pulled from stream in Surrey
Eight inches of snow forecast tonight for London and South East
900 flights cancelled as Gatwick and Edinburgh airports close

Shops running out of basics as lorries struggle to deliver

Passengers stranded overnight on freezing trains in South East
Police advise people not to go out unless absolutely necessary
Temperatures set to fall to -6c, with winds making it feel even colder

The weather in Scotland at this time is extremely unusual for this time of year. Forecast overnight temperatures for the next couple of days could get as low as -25C inland and around -10C to -15C on the easterly coastal areas. This is unheard off at the start of December mainly due to the country surrounded by relatively warm water from the Atlantic gulf stream. i.e. the coldest time of year should be a couple of months away at the beginning or February.

Today there has been no newspaper deliveries and the supermarket has run completely out of bread. Milk and eggs were still available. What was interesting was that there was plenty of bread flour and bread yeast available still. I guess folks don't know what bread is made from.

The main road to the main supermarket was littered with abandoned cars at the side of the road and the snow ploughs/gritting lorries were have difficulty clearing the road of snow. Public transportation within the city of Dundee is only able to run a very limited service on the main roads which can be kept open with the snow clearing vehicles.



Snow piled 8 feet high at the local Supermarket attempting to keep the car park open. There were very few vehicles able to make it to this supermarket, the ones that were able to get there were the 4x4s. One little tip if walking to and from the supermarket in 12-18 inches of snow is to not use traditional shopping bags as they drag along in the snow. Best to use a large capacity backpack as it is a lot easier to haul 50-60lbs of shopping over 2-3 miles in the snow.

The problem is you guys are using lorries. We should send you some trucks.

Wasn't it Winston Churchill who said the British and the Americans are separated by a common language? By the way I think "gritting lorry" is a fabulous term.... I presume that it is what is known in our language as a "sand truck".

Good luck & keep us posted. It still amazes me when something happens how unprepared people are. I live in Minnesota when we get the first big snowfall people are on the news buying shovels, because they don't have one. Others no gloves or hats.
I have enough food at home to last more than a few days. Maybe I'd want to pick up some perishables but if I couldn't make it to the store no big deal.

How are you all doing over there? Sounds brutal.



http://www.emirates247.com/news/world/at...-12-03-1.324411

At least 60 killed by cold snap across Europe

London's Gatwick airport reopened on Friday, but others including London Heathrow and Glasgow warned of more cancellations and delays

By Agencies

Published Friday, December 03, 2010

...Temperatures plunged to minus 20 degrees Celsius (minus four Fahrenheit) in Braemar, Scotland, while Britain struggled to get back to its feet after days of transport chaos.

Estimates are that around one quarter of all petrol stations in the UK will be empty by this Monday. That should prove to be interesting. Scenes in Dundee resemble a Lowry Painting or the scenes from 'The Day after tommorrow' after they warned folks not to leave the Library or they will die in the storm. Only main routes within the town are barely passable and in out lying areas are still suffering shortages such as bread and milk. The local Dundee City council are basically a disaster area waiting to happen, well I think it already is a disaster area with Civil Defense volunteers now taking over from the social services responsible for services for the elderly such as meals on wheels. They apparently shut up shop for a couple of days during the week. The post has not been delivered for the last week, apparently it is too much of a struggle for the Royal Mail which contrasts quite sharply to the efforts made by the newspaper delivery boys. Oh and a work colleague apparently died after falling on the untreated icy entrance steps of where she works. Basically its a complete and utter shambles. The Dundee Council policy of maintaining self gritting roads appears to failed spectacularly. It is something like FEMA deciding not to come into work that day because its cold outside, and I might get wet and slip in the snow.

Another week or two of cold weather in the UK will most likely see an unprecedented crisis despite the fact that the news media is ignoring the situation because only a couple of inches of snow fell within the M25 corridor around London.

And I'm sat at Leuchars, with:-

2 snow ploughs fitted to dump trucks.
2 JCB 4CX's
1 Case Tractor with half of the military snow blades fitted, just waiting to go.

And Dundee don't want military help, apparently they can cope. My arse. Lets see what happens when the next drop happens this week.

LOL. The snow and ice on the main roads within Dundee needed to be cleared, the problem was that the Dundee city council took 10 days to figure out where to put it once it had been cleared and transported. The snow quickly piled up at Blackscroft in the city centre after being transported there by truck (a stones throw from the entrance to Victoria Dock). Apparently, the story goes it took Dundee Council 10 days to finally allow the snow and ice to be dumped into the river Tay. Apparently the contractors had to gain permission from the City Council for the snow and ice, which was contaminated with salt, sand and grit so as not to create an environmental catastrophe within the river. Apparently no one was willing to stand up and take responsibility for the decision and no-one had the common sense to realise that there was already large amounts of salt and sand already in the river.

There was quite a funny scene in the town centre last week though as a single Dundee Council worker was observed working, cleaning up the cigarette butts from the ice covered pavements as folks looked on in disgust.

The twats at the Dundee city council have a long history of corrupt incompetence and total indifference to their constituents, being more concerned with V&A museums and waterfront developments (hopefully to be completed by 2030. ) rather than ending the policy of keeping self gritting roads in place. It took them 6 years to re cobble Albert square, about the same time it took to build Dubai. Time for a Youtube 'Hitler gets bad news' video, I think.

I make no claim to understand the local issues; I hope everyone comes out all right.

I confess, also, that I'm watching this thread with a large bowl of popcorn at hand. (No offence intended.)

Continue!

Ha Ha you couldn't make it up.

Set phasers to malky.

Doug, just a little background.

51 (Scottish) Brigade of the British Army was put on standby along with the rest of the military in Scotland to clear snow, rescue old ladies cats, move paramedics around in landrovers etc etc.

Dundee council, where Am Fear lives, issued a press release stating they had no need for military assistance. I'm at a major military establishment, 5 miles from Dundee waiting still to be stood down from 6 hours notice to move. There is more snow forecast for this week, and we all go on leave this Friday.

And the snow is back. Fun and games again.

We had more thundersnow again yesterday (I thought thundersnow events were mean't to be quite rare). The couple of inches we got today was actually quite welcome as this has actually helped getting around. The snow has made walking over the 2-3 inches of solid ice covering the pavements a lot easier.

Lots of BBC news media etc on the TV (the Christmas Caribbean destination crowd are a little upset at the moment having to bed down on hard floors with a space blanket at LHR), apparently it has snowed down in the south of England as well and are expecting another 6-8 inches tomorrow on top of the 4-6 inches they got yesterday. Hmm a foot of snow on the south of England, now thats what I call fun and games. I guess the news media shouldn't have got so smug about Scotland grinding to a halt.

I would expect to see major shortages of fuel (especially domestic fuel oil, which is currently at a critical state), food etc and even salt and grit as many local authorities are now running short, i.e. more than half way through their stockpiles within 3 weeks and the winter hasn't even meant to have started yet.

The supermarkets down in the south of England, will probably feel like a TEOTWAWKI event just before Christmas with all the foklks carrying out their mad shopping rush to cover the 2 days whilst the UK shuts down.

Hopefully I'll get some snow shoes for Christmas for when the salt and grit runs out in mid January.

The Courier is already reporting Fife and Dundee councils are cutting their grit with sand to eke it out a bit further, and are running out at an alarming rate.

British Gas have issued a gas balancing order I believe as demand rises through the roof.

Some England based courier companies refuse to deliver anything to Scotland in case their drivers get stuck.

We had a guy and a JCB come and scrape the estate I live on and all he did was scrape the new snow off, down to the ice . The local council warned him if he damaged the road surface he would be liable for its repair.

The world is totally mad.

But, bless my papergirl she got through before I was even up this morning. Must be Christmas tip time lol.

Discussion of Europe's cold winter in today's Washington Post. It gets into considerable detail:

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/capitalweathergang/?hpid=weather-sidecar


"One of the fiercest beginnings to winter on record has slammed Europe...."

"The unusually wintry weather gripping Europe as well as the cold plaguing the eastern United States are linked by a historically strong weather system locked over Greenland."

And to add fuel to fire, looks like we are beginning to see an epidemic return of Swine Flu in the country, if that wasn't bad enough with all the ice casualties i.e. broken legs, hips, wrists and arm etc swamping the local Ninewells Hospital Casualty dept.

http://www.thecourier.co.uk/News/Dundee/...sy-weekend.html

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-12052816

This will probably add to the 35,000 excess deaths in the UK during this winter quite considerably. (simply died from being cold)

http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/216765/Weather-35-000-deaths-fear-in-new-Arctic-blizzards

The government austerity cuts and the toll booth economy within the UK are certainly beginning to take their toll.

The LHR airport fiasco (even the jet set turned into virtual refugees) is just the tip of this nations woes and embarrassment.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/weathe...-fifth-day.html

BAA should have taken up the 'We are all in this together' and handed out the shovels to the passengers to get them to dig out their jets. Probably would not have been received well by all the johny foriegners

Even the garbage bins haven't been collected by the local Dundee city council now getting on for a month now and the Royal mail seem to lost the last 3 weeks of mail deliveries (probably destined for the black hole vortex of their TARDIS that they captured from a Time Lord)

http://www.thecourier.co.uk/News/Dundee/...ail-chiefs.html

Mail delivery isn't exactly rocket science yet they seem to have greater difficulty today that they did 150 years ago (in the days before electricity was widely available, i.e. you don't need an EMP for things to fall apart quickly, just poor strategic investment and a little cold weather)

From 1936;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WO7JxYlhOM

I'll spend some time looking at all those links, thanks. And continued best wishes in persevering through it all.

Interesting observation you make on the EMP analogy. It was a week-long series of ice storms, extreme temps (below 20 F) in the early 90s that pushed the NE power grid to its limits and caused periodic brown-outs that first caused me to appreciate the preparedness utility of camping gear (that I had only recently begun compiling as I was just beginning that dog-friendly mode of vacationing). After that I accelerated gear acquisition with an eye toward power outages.

A severe bout of flu the following year caused me to make a point from then on of having two weeks worth of soup on hand. Simply because I was single and did not want to have to trudge out to a grocery when sick or ask anyone else to.

The preps grew from there. And we're camping more than ever so most of the stuff gets used.

And once again the military are not asked to help. Not saying they are the answer to all the problems, but a few thousand extra hands with 4WD's wouldn't hurt.

The problem is local government would rather pay through the nose for piecemeal solutions, than look bad by asking for help from central government.

Probably didn't want some corporal issuing Dundee city council workers (they make 20% of the entire working population in the city) a shovel and telling them to follow him, forcing them to leave the warm comfy local tax payer paid for centrally heated office, was probably the fear.

The Royal mail post mystery seems to be getting solved,

http://www.thecourier.co.uk/News/Dundee/...rs-mystery.html

Apparently before this story came out one of my buddies from Broughty Ferry had threatened to make a Police complaint about the theft of mail by the Royal mail. His bundle of letters arrived the next day.

This is how ridiculous this world part of the world is getting, apparently if you post a letter in Newport-on-Tay to Broughty Ferry, it wings its way firstly to Dundee (to get collected, makes it about half way i.e. 1.5 miles), put on a train to Manchester (to get sorted, goes in the opposite direction by about 290 miles in another country), put on a train again back to Dundee (back in the right direction by about 290 miles), to get put on a post van to Broughty Ferry (the ramaining 1.5 miles) to be then dumped in the snow under a shrubbery (about 200 yards away), to be found by a neighbour to be hand delivery all wet and soggy. Royal Mail call it 'the way forward'. Third world here we come.

Same with the London Heathrow airport fiasco. The CEO of the company (BAA) that runs the airport gets paid $1.5 Million a year had spent half this amount on kit to keep the airport runways etc clear of snow.

Makes you wonder what the response would be to a true national emergency situation within the UK if the country cannot cope with a couple of inches of snow.

Even RAF Leuchars is under threat of closure due to the austerity cuts, i.e. no more QRA for northern UK and Iceland gap. No more airborne anti-submarine capability and airborne sea rescue coordination. We are being left defenseless. A national disgrace.



Thankfully we are still getting the benefit of a Nationalised National Electricity Grid system designed by Electrical Engineers in the 1970s, rather than by the bean counters and business graduates. So the electrical Grid system is still quite robust, although the bean counters now in charge are certainly screwing everyone for its use after it was given away to private business interests. Saying that though the bean counters haven't made any further investment since then and given another 10 years I can expect the Grid to begin to fall apart as the generating and transmission hardware comes to the enf of its useful lifetime.

More of that exceptionally rare thundersnow, this time in New York;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5EYH43ZlUw

The clear-up certainly seems to be having some difficulties, but hey at least they are having a go.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LVypA4YzyQ

Just who is likely to attack the UK?

No amount of conventional military forces will stop terrorist attacks against easy targets, and there really are no military threats to the UK.

London -- a world financial center -- is at least as inviting a target as New York City. I'd be surprised if Russia didn't have London top tier in its nuclear targeting. London-NYC would be the one-two punch of the western economies.

Are any nations planning on a military invasion of the U.S.?

We have an enormous conventional warfare capacity but we aren't using it to secure our borders (in the conventional sense).

2 QRA Tornado F.3s were launched on the 23rd December.

http://www.thecourier.co.uk/News/Nationa...n-aircraft.html

Closing the airbase would also effect Mountain Rescue services

http://www.thecourier.co.uk/News/Nationa...s-scotland.html

Even coastguard services are being closed due to the government austerity measures required to pay for the Banksters Christmas bonuses. (mostly government owned )

http://www.thecourier.co.uk/News/Fife/article/8839/coastguard-is-intrinsic-to-firth-of-forth.html

Even emergency services have been struggling in the recent poor weather due to the fuel shortages (which some have claimed are being held back by private business interests in their attempt to price gouge to increase private profits.)

http://www.thecourier.co.uk/News/article...s-on-track.html

Hopefully we won't see the perfect storm within the next 2-3 months, i.e. Economic catastrophe (another 2008 Wall street Banking, derivative and USD collapse leading to martial law as threatened previously) + World Wide Swine flu Epidemic + Another cold snap and snow fall (similar to the US East Coast Snow storm but with -20C temperatures for 2-3 weeks at a time.

Things can change rapidly and political and economic instability can lead to the previous habit of bombing some folks when things get expedient to do so.

I suppose the same nutters that flew aircraft into the twin towers, might reckon that the UK would be a viable target.

Light aircraft into an oil rig would be messy, we've got a few of those in a little bit of water called the North Sea.

The point is to protect against what could happen.

RAF Leuchars QRA take off nearly every day to intercept or investigate intruders to UK airspace. Who knows what they'll meet on the next flight.