It snowed in England!

Tweet

It snowed in southern England! We don’t get much snow even though we are as near as the North Pole as Alaska but because of the Atlantic Conveyor that warms our nearest Oceans, and the Jet Stream that moves Polar air away from the United Kingdom, we stay away from the hard winters of Canada and Russia. We don’t quite need Dennis Quaid yet but the snowfall was fun and a good 6 inches, and who doesn’t want a good six inches overnight? The last big snowfall we had was in 2009. Normally we got one or two days a year that the conditions are just right for snow in the south and today was that day as a wet warm front crashed into an icy high pressure over the Midlands. It’s more likely to snow at Easter in England than Christmas because of our location on the edge of the Atlantic. Great Britain is famous for her crazy weather. We actually have more tornados per square mile than Kansas! Scotland and Wales get more Canadian style weather and Scotland getting some bad storms every year. The United Kingdom has a clock face full of weather to deal with all year. At 12 o’clock we have the North Pole and polar icy winds in winter that race down over the edges of winter high pressures. At 3pm we have the continent of Europe, which can generously spread baking hot high pressures over us in the summer or cold winds from the east in the winter. Most of our weather comes from the west though, 9pm, the Atlantic Ocean moisture, rain and wind racing in 250 days of the year. At 6pm is the warmer Southern Atalntic and that’s where the really dry hot air sweeps up from the coast of East Africa, often full of Saharan sand, giving us a rare blood red sun. This year we had our first ever hurricane getting within 300 miles of the United Kingdom, one that decided not to head to the Caribbean where all the others go and growl up the coast of Africa to Ireland. Global warming is very real. The kids love the snow, my next door neighbour’s young 2-year-old daughter experiencing the snow for the very first time. She wasn’t that excited to be fair, walking up the garden with her cute little mittens and hat on and then back down again to the warmth of the house. If only she knew the next snow could be 5 - years from now.