Late April snow

Hail and west snow gave a brief cover this morning, 27th April.

Even the nearest field was white briefly.

Yo Window update

I noticed this had stopped updating so installed the latest version which has subtle changes.

ScreenSaver Forecast by yr.no

March figures

A month rivaling December 2010 in how far the temperature deviated from the mean.
http://weather.westerdale.info/climatedataout32013.html

The first week was not unusual but around the 10th some very cold air arrived from the east and is more or less still with us 1st week of April.
The second half of March is probably the coldest such period in at least 100 years (1892 may have beat it)

March and indeed April will often have a few snowy days often associated with a brief Northerly.
This period has been quite different with a long fetch easterly bringing exceptional cold air for the time of year across most of Europe.
Germany for example has also been extremely cold.

Paul Hudson now says it has been the coldest March since 1892
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/paulhudson/posts/Latest-weather-climate-news

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.