Snowing In BSTAdded : Monday at 15:15 Clocks went forward yesterday as we moved into British Summer Time, but the weather seemed to have other ideas with some wintry showers pushing in from the Northeast.
Needless to say, this then triggered a few comments about snow in June in 1975 across the UK when a cricket match was apparently abandoned.
This particular event has always been a bit of an interesting one for meteorologists who either weren't working or even born around this time. "Snow, in June? Never!" we exclaim. "It was probably hail or graupel".
So, we did a bit of research on this. Here was the 850mb temperatures for June 2nd 1975 :-
You can see low pressure in the North Sea a a cool Northerly airstream across the British Isles. In fact, in the run up to this, there was another low pressure system which brought colder air to the East of Iceland and the next low pressure system tapped into this air and brought it even further South.
Of course, there wasn't the GFS ► or numerical modelling of this scale around in 1975, most people were too busy listening to the Bay City Rollers and even archived data is a little scarce. But, thanks to the Reanalysis work at NCEP, the charts can now be recreated.
Here at Metcheck HQ, we also took a look at the CAPE and Sigma levels of the air at various levels in the atmosphere to see whether the air was indeed cold enough for snow.
The charts showed that colder air around 850mb level would have been around -7c across much of Scotland and Northern England, even as low we -5c for a time for the South coast.
This, combined with a strong Northerly wind and decent katabatic cooling from heavy showers means that snow was indeed possible across Scotland and Northern England, where incidentally the cricket match between Derbyshire and Lancashire at Buxton was called off.
The colder air continued to feed South for a time and Kew recorded 0.6c on the morning of the 4th.
So, if it snows in April or May in the UK and someone tells you that it also snowed in June in 1975, they were indeed right!
METEOROLOGIST : MARSH |