Cold March

With wintry weather likely to dominate until at least the last day or two, this will be the coldest March for many years - probably since 1979.

At the moment the mean is running at about 2.2C which is 3.5C below normal.
It's also below January's mean, which is unusual considering that month was near average. March is noted for having cold and snowy events and they can be as severe as anything through winter - but usually they are short-lived affairs and the most characteristic weather type is drying winds often from a rather chilly North Westerly direction.
Apart from 4 or 5 almost dry breezy days near the start, this March has been very disappointing.

 On balance, good weather in April might be preferred over what happened last year with a pleasant March then a cold, wintry wet April!
Paul Hudson suggests it will be the coldest since 1969.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/paulhudson/posts/More-snow-as-March-set-to-be-coldest-since1969

Timelapse

I did this a few days ago after buying a cheap intervalometer for the SLR.

In the past I did the easier 'timelapse' technique of simply speeding up video in moviemaker, but this is 300 jpg stills at one second intervals, combined into a very fast slideshow.
I found some free software which has the ability to pan and zoom in the frame if I ever work out how to do it!
Anyway for a first go it worked OK and it would be nice to get some moving skyscapes through the year.

Drier but chilly

Fairly typical February weather coming up with a slack easterly flow and fairly dry - but some light wintry showers from the sea at times.

The snowdrifts will be here a while yet.

Microsoft blog writer

Having just downloaded the windows live package to update moviemaker, I thought I would try the blog writing tool also.
Setting up seems fairly easy anyway but it will need a few experimental posts like this to decide if it is better than logging in to blogger.

Snowdrift survival

Despite temperatures well above 10­°C yesterday the snowdrifts show every sign of being around for a few weeks yet!

Rapid thaw

Although there was a sudden change on Sunday and a lot of green re-appeared in the space of 24 hours, it was never exactly 'mild' - but this afternoon we touched 11.8C for a couple of hours which is quite impressive for the coldest point of the year late January.

Even over the moor tops the old drifts were pouring away.
However by mid-evening temperature was falling away again so only a brief interlude.
Since it was blowing a gale and drizzly it was hardly pleasant.

New dials page

To be honest I was never that impressed withe the Weather Display dials - it seems quite hard to read some of the elements, however I've made a new page with them on.

You can still see the current temperature clearly in the top bar.
The odometer on the right shows the current day's windrun - but it only updates every 5 minutes.

It's a pity it doesn't kind of click up continuously!

I've noticed the image is often 5 minutes behind for some reason.
Perhaps this is due to rather slow internet mid-evening just now.

http://weather.westerdale.info/dials.html

And here they are live: