Jan 2025 - Snow & Freezing Conditions - Discussion PART II

I'd like a personally written letter in future at least a week in advance of any adverse weather that may affect my house and immediate surrounding area.🙄

Low eventually deepens to 960 and brings very strong westerly winds to Frisian Islands, n.w. Germany and Denmark (by Tuesday).

I drove from Longford to Trim earlier this evening, not long after dark, with a bit of a detour to the village that I used to live in until a few years ago. There was no snow until after Clonard. Enfield had a covering…..not much, maybe 1/2cm and it was very slushy.

The village I used to live in (Newtown) over the border in Kildare had similar amounts of snow.

I then drove to the top of the nearby hill and took this photo at around 140m ASL. If you drive eastbound on the M4, it's the bridge you pass under shortly before the toll plaza. The snow was drier here and not slushy.

Kilcock had a decent enough covering as well. Summerhill had a dusting and Trim was absolutely snow free, I'm sure because of its low altitude, compared to Dunshaughlin, for example. Around 70/80m seems to be where snow started settling and close to 150m was where it would not thaw like mad.

Scary bits!!!

We had a 2 yr old and my wife was pregnant then.

I started a fire in our fireplace but the house was still too cold after 5 days. Trees were broken in every street, birch trees were totally hunched over, weird.

After a week we split to my cousin’s place in a far off suburb that had not lost power. What a relief that was.
There were billions of dollars in damage done to transmission lines, and buildings, etc…

Ice storms are the biggest threat by far in winter, snow storms are par for the course, here, and scooped up pretty efficiently, generally speaking.

This is a video of a snow dump in Montreal in an old quarry. Other snow dumps are big mountains that melt throughout the summer, but some of the snow at the bottom of the quarry never melts, lol. Montreal gets so much snow that it needs to be transported, not just pushed away.

that was shovelled up against the door. You can see the individual shovel fulls. Ffs.

i know i commented on it lol

Thank goodness I didn’t miss the advice from the head of the emergency response team at lunchtime today. Said to “ drive carefully, plan you journey well and allow extra time “ . I’m actually astonished to have reached my 66th year on this planet having driven for nearly fifty years of that without knowing how to drive in a bit of slush. I for one would not begrudge this “ expert “ on his six figure salary as he has offered me such saga advice 🙄

I’d imagine it fell of a roof

I can’t chill out, I put the electric blanket on 5, and it’s burning the arse off me.

The advantage you (and I, just a few years younger) is we have experience from over the years. - We'd rather get home safely and a few minutes later than expected than think we have super powers.

Unfortunately a HUGE number of eejits think they can ignore warnings and they end up in ditches or their rear wheel drive cars can't cope with a little slush or their tyres are balder than Sean moncrieff and they don't understand why they are not gripping the roads.

They'll learn eventually.

I think Met Eireann mostly called it right, and it's highly unpredictable anyway so it's quite hard to be THAT accurate.

My only comment would be, and I think this applies to all systems, is the very big counties need to be zoned differently. E.g. Cork City, Harbour and Coastal areas need to be a separate zone for weather warnings to the county, particularly as there are >350,000 people in that area. The orange was overkill for the city, but was extremely accurate just 20km from the coast.

Same applies to storm warnings, the coasts are more exposed and the inland parts aren't.

We should be able to do something for 'coastal areas of ….' rather than just county by county. Compact counties like Dublin, Louth etc are all fine, but the ones that span large geographic areas make no sense when you get a coastal vs inland effect which is quite important in both snow and storms. The biggest population centres in Ireland by a long shot all sit in coastal and highly maritime influenced areas.

I think that's where people start to get annoyed with the flags being raised. You don't need it to be down to tiny zones, but that coastal vs inland thing is a big deal and you need to ensure you're highly accurate about warning levels for the large population centres, as it impacts a lot of businesses and so on and getting that wrong is where you get the conspiracy theories online as it's a lot of ppl.

I think you also need to give clear forecasts for the key routes - i.e. motorways and natural primary routes that cross active weather like snow. A lot of ppl may not even be entirely sure what counties they are in on some of those. Name checking the M7 and M8 today would have been very useful in forecasts for example.

Plenty of showers moving down across Ireland on Monday turning increasingly wintry on Monday evening, Monday night & Tuesday morning. Nice visible trough lines visible on the Fax Charts could indicate organised wintry bands of showers.

Some places in Donegal, Derry, Tyrone, Fermanagh, Sligo, Leitrim, Roscommon & Mayo getting between 1cm & 5cm of snowfall with up to 10cm across the hills and mountains. ARPEGE also showing fresh snowfall across Kerry and Clare.

I can't agree more. Coastal forecasts differ so much from inland. What's red in Chaleville mightn't be red in Clonakilty, 82kms away. Surely this makes sense.

GFS further downgraded chances tonight. More sleet than snow with it.

They use the term 'coastal counties' which also doesn't make any sense - as those counties have huge inland areas in most cases, some of which are almost in the midlands.

It should be 'coastal areas of counties (list)…' and they should be defined as something like 15km from a coastline so they can be mapped as a band and have appropriate colour warnings.

You can see them all marked that way on the models, but for some reason we don't translate that into the forecast communication nationally.

Overall though, I think Met Éireann's general forecasts were quite bang on.