The March warm spell

I'd hesitate to call it a heatwave but today 25th March has reached 18.2C under near perfect blue skies.
What is particularly noteworthy is the prolonged dominance of High Pressure.
If it were July this would have been a memorable summer spell.
Being so early in the year the North Sea is cold and some days have been rather grey.

An increasing worry is the continued lack of significant rain.
February had just 10.8mm (average is 54mm) and March will be stuck on 14.2mm (50mm)
November, December and January also had only around 50% of normal.

At the moment, April seems likely to start rather average which will seem much cooler and there may be some rain.
April is one of the driest months as rule so it will be quite unlikely to make up the deficit, although we may get enough to get spring growth underway.

March morning mist-ery

The recent spell of High Pressure has produced a few fine spring-like days with maximum temperatures touching 16.4C on the 11th.
When winds die down mist and fog are still always on the cards.

Classic March

Blazing sunshine but a chilly wind and icy patches.
The snow fell during yesterday afternoon but was only very slushy at lower levels.

Blowing snow

Short video of today's sub-zero snow falling/blowing.
Winds touched 40mph which is a serious windchill at -2C

Undulatus clouds

On Friday the 20th, after a chilly but dry start some sleety rain arrived soon after noon.
The leading edge of the cloud sheet was marked by this curious deeply textured formation.

Nice timelapse

There seems to be several people competing with each other to do these fantastic timelapse sequences.
Although it soon feels like you saw most things before, every now and then one stands out.

Finding Oregon from Uncage the Soul Productions on Vimeo.

Messin' with 7

Tinkering with my old IBM Desktop tower lately -
It originally came with XP and just 256mb of RAM.
When I first set up the online weather station, this old PC had been upgraded to 2GB of RAM and ran continuously for some 18 months running Weather-Display.
I then picked up a cheap netbook which ran the station more economically (and almost silently!) until now.

Anyway since I mainly use a laptop as a main computer these days, the old PC has been little used so with the long winter evenings I decided to see if it could be updated to Windows 7, as I really like that OS on the laptop.
Although the microsoft windows 7 compatibility tool pointed out the graphics card was too old to run Aero fancy desktop effects, it seemed as though it should work OK but might need some 3rd party drivers.

So plucking up courage I moved some old pictures and records stored on it and went for the full Windows 7 clean install.
Plan B if it failed was to set it up with Ubuntu which I had tried before as a dual boot with it (but didn't much like to be honest).

Anyway all went well, and there was only one minor issue in that the sound didn't work until I looked up a new driver for it.
I must say the old thing never started and ran so quickly before when on XP - even though it generally was OK - but prone to briefly hanging if asked to do more than one thing at once.

Being flushed with this success I began to wonder if the XP netbook could also run the Windows 7.
Again the MS tool says should be no problem although it does only have 1GB of RAM this is considered adequate, and could be upgraded to 2GB later if need be.
Since the netbook literally does nothing but run Weather-Display and upload files to the internet, it will probably be fine with 1GB.

So for now, I've transferred the Weather station and software off the netbook and onto the old desktop on Windows 7.
This was surprisingly simple and it's running fine so far, but I'd like to leave it there a couple of days to make sure no stalling occurs before thinking about changing the netbook to Windows 7 too, and moving the station back to there.

Update 5th January:
Netbook install of Windows7 went like a dream and with nothing else installed it uses only 400mb of the 1GB RAM so no problems putting Weather-Display software on it.
It took most of a day to install all the W7 updates though, as you have to do it in stages, with restarting and waiting for installations to complete.