Easter Sunday Snow and Another Crash

We've had pretty much no snow around here all winter but, last Sunday, we woke up to find that it was snowing pretty hard and, by the time it had finished, we had something like 2" of snow on the ground. It was enough to build a snowman in the garden although it did melt pretty quickly and by late afternoon there was almost no evidence that there'd been any snow.

Still, it was nice while it lasted.

Also, on Sunday, the base station of the WS3600 crashed again. That's the second time this month.

Sundog

Seen over our village during a walk yesterday evening:

Something Demonic

We had a short, sharp and pretty intense rain band come over this evening and, in its wake, it left some interesting skies. I headed out with my camera to catch some of the sights and, without a doubt, the most impressive was this:

Click image for larger version

Sundogs and Circumzenithal Arc

This afternoon I was lucky enough to catch a display of a pair of sundogs and a circumzenithal arc. The arc was rather faint, nowhere near as good as the last display I saw. Despite this I grabbed my camera and tried to record what I saw.

Pictures from today's storm

As promised earlier, here are some images of the damage caused by today's storm:

Today's storm

It's very stormy today, probably the worst I've seen in a long time, easily the worst I've seen since I started running the weather station.

We've lost power three times so far today. The first couple of times were enough for the UPS to handle but the third loss looked like it was going to be a long one so I shut the machines down (hence a a hole in the data today).

The wind during the power loss was quite scary — I'm having trouble recalling when I last saw wind like that. We appear to have lost a couple of tiles off the roof and we've also lost a garden fence. After things calmed down, but before the power came back on, I took a walk around the village to see what other damage there was and was surprised to find there was remarkably little. I saw a couple of collapsed garden sheds, a couple of collapsed fences (one of which was impaled on a tree) and a lot of debris lying around. I only saw one damaged tree (part of this Willow had collapsed).

I took my cameras with me and took some pictures. Given that I can't rely on the power at the moment (it's still blowing a gale out there and it is forecast to get worse again before it gets better) I won't be downloading them until much later.

As usual I'm not recording wind speeds anywhere near like they really are due to the design and location of the anemometer. A personal station just down the road from me is showing far more accurate speeds (showing a maximum gust of 57mph as of the time of writing).

As much as I find it all interesting, I'll be happy when it's over.

Update: Here's an image of some damage that I took on my mobile phone (like I said above, I'll grab the images off the actual cameras when everything has calmed down):

Quite a frosty morning

It's quite a frosty morning this morning. It got down to around -2.6°C at one point. I couldn't resist getting the camera out and taking a few pictures:

See the full gallery for the full size images.

Flying snail

I've just been looking back over some of the images captured by my CloudCam and stumbled on this little sequence:

Who knew snails could fly?

Added a photography section

Although I've not done much in the way of weather photography I do try and snap interesting things when I see them. Because of this, and because I want to try and do more weather photography, I've added a weather photography section to my weather station website.

Morning clouds

As I headed out to work this morning I was greeted with a great display of clouds and had to dash back indoors and grab the camera:

See the full gallery on my home page for all the images.