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12th Annual Boards White Christmas Thread!
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01-11-2021 10:03am#1
Its that day again, 1 November, when, if you are parent with kids like me, you are still full up to your gills with last night’s cheap chocolates and industrial quantities of Haribo… Anyway, with Halloween over us, thoughts turn now to the next big event on the horizon - yup Christmas is coming and thus its time to re-open our White Christmas thread for 2021!
This particular thread turns 12 today - if you don't believe me the first from 2010 is still available at - https://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/show...php?p=68686802 but in fact I found White Christmas threads dating back to 2004 (when there was a White Christmas for many...) at https://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/show....php?p=2209623 . Some familiar names posted in that thread too I note!
This time last year the thread was all discussions of what a one-off, strange, year it would be because of something called Covid 19 (whatever happened to that, eh?). How things have changed….
As usual this thread is solely concerned with the weather over the Christmas period, primarily 24 & 25 December and, in particular, is concerned with whether it might snow on Christmas day itself.
The last white Christmas (as in lying snow) for most of us was 2010 of course. However I don't think there was any Christmas day snowfall that year. The last actual technically correct white Christmas (1cm of falling snow at one of our airports I think?) for most of us was 2004. That's 16 years ago so statistically we are way overdue a white one this year (Met.ie say that historically Dublin airport gets a technically correct white Christmas every 5.9 years).
A good article is at https://www.newstalk.com/news/white-christmases-rare-ireland-happen-937867 .
It would be great if you could actually get a situation where, say, 5 days out it looked like we had proper cold upper temperatures forecast to be over us for Xmas day and thus a decent chance of snow. We’ve never had that on this thread save for 2010 – and in fact in 2010 most of us had snow on the ground 5 days out and could see it wasn’t going to melt by the big day so there was no drama then either.
The CFS (a long range weather model of doubtful accuracy) is probably the best source at this stage for making any sort of guess as to what weather we might have on the big day. At present it shows as follows for the big day:-
That shows a rather wet and stormy Christmas day, with our weather very much Atlantic sourced - not what you want when looking for a White Christmas. But as that is a weather map for T1314 there is still just about time for that to change!
As always, to get in the mood, I have pasted below a seasonal pic. This one is of Cobh, Co. Cork. T'would be great to see something like this this year...
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Although I don't have memories of Christmas 2004 myself because I was a itty bitty toddler, I had this pic lying around in my family photo archive of my little toy shed I had at that age that I thought I should share and you can see the snow settling on the roof as well as the roofs in the background but clearly it struggled. It was a screenshot rather than a scan so excuse the reflections to the right.
Nevertheless, that still definitely would have been one of the more memorable Christmasses for the snow alone because haven't seen falling snow on the day itself since!
2010 will never be beaten though from that magical blue sky reflecting on the deep snow cover everywhere to the intense cold. It was probably the first time since 1878 that we had such deep snow cover on Christmas Day.
Photography site - https://www.sryanbruenphoto.com/
Weather photo portfolio - https://sryanbruen.myportfolio.com/weather-1
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Just to update this. Less than 900 hours to go now and the tension is er..., well, sort of, er.....somewhat even, palpable.
Unfortunately, today's CFS is showing the kind of Xmas day we are all sadly too familiar with - a blast of mild air coming from the SW just in time for the big day. See chart below:-
Obviously a helluva long way to go and all to play for. Here's a seasonal pic just to keep the hope up...this time its Trim Castle.
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CFS today is mild for the big day, but has cold enough weather in the lead up.
Just for a ddifferent perspective this is what Netweather's forecast is saying:-
"....The model we're using today is the ECMWF extended 45 day outlook, which gives a week by week forecast. We're using the air pressure anomaly map, which shows the difference from average that the model currently expects during the Christmas week.
What the map shows is slightly higher than average over Scandinavia and lower than average over parts of Southern Europe. Not a bad set up, if you're looking for colder weather, as the most likely wind direction would be from the east. The temperature map for this time doesn't show anything dramatically colder than average though.
At this range, even the broad pattern is up in the air, and some other long range models show a milder, more Atlantic dominated weather pattern during the Christmas week. But, on balance right now, the chances of cold and therefore the potential for a White Christmas is a touch higher than in a typical year. We are only at the start of the journey though, so expect plenty of twists and turns...."
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CFS 12z rolling out currently. Over the past few weeks the CFS has favoured generally a mild December with only isolated colder runs compared to about a month ago when the CFS was regularly churning out very cold charts for Christmas and into January/February. Over the past few days the CFS is starting to trend colder again towards Christmas and into the new year. The current 12z is looking fairly chilly for Christmas, maybe we are starting to see a wobble in the CFS mild runs.
Gavweathers Christmas updates over recent weeks have broadly shown mild or excessively mild runs around Christmas with only 1 of them showing a cold outcome. Hopefully we will see the trend shift more towards cold over the next few weeks in the run up to the big day.
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