In article ,
Colin Youngs writes:
"Eskimo Will" schreef
: T+96 ECM DT 12Z 29/2/12
: SW England upland blizzards anyone? :-)
:
: Clearly still a very finely balanced situation and one that was giving the
: Deputy Chief at the MetO some headaches this morning at the technical
staff
: briefing today. Is it an outlier? It was there a few runs ago as well.
: Interesting stuff.
Maybe not SW England - but something like that in SW Belgium this morning
and also in northern France.
Northern France near the Belgian border
http://videos.tf1.fr/jt-20h/intemper...-en-crue-a-la-
frontiere-belge-7039246.html
Lille
http://videos.tf1.fr/jt-20h/la-neige...e-7039245.html
150 000 households in northern France have lost their electricity supply as
a result of a high-tension cable snapping under the weight of wet snow.
Up to 100 000 households in the area of Tournai in SW Belgium lost power for
much of the day because of short circuits in high-tension cables caused by
heavy snow and strong winds.
Perhaps not quite the classic Channel rat - but notable enough.
I was returning from my holiday via Eurostar during the afternoon, and
we ran into the snow in northern France. There looked to be several
inches around Lille, but as we neared the coast it turned to rain. It
seems that I was lucky not to have been affected by Eurostar's troubles,
presumably caused by the snow. I must have been just early enough to
miss their cable problem, or maybe it only affected trains from Paris (I
was coming from Brussels).
There was still an awful lot of snow on the ground in the Austrian Tyrol
last week, in spite of a slow thaw at the start of the week becoming a
rapid one, with Wednesday to Friday being gloriously sunny and very
mild. At Jenbach, in the Inn valley at an elevation of about 500m, where
I was based, there must have been at least a foot. You could see the
layers from the individual falls in the snow laying on the roofs. In
some of the higher resorts there must have been three feet or more. On
the Friday we went to Salzburg, outside the snow-covered Tyrol region,
and at one point the temperature shown by the coach's thermometer
touched 16C. Even in the region with thick snow it was mostly around
12C.
--
John Hall
"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism
by those who have not got it."
George Bernard Shaw