Snow in Plymouth

I have lived in Plymouth for 25 and a half years now and in all that time it has only snowed properly just a couple of times (by properly I mean that enough snow falls and settles on the ground so that things turn white and it is just about possible to make a snowball or a midget snowman). For this reason, today is quite a momentous day. Perhaps for the first time ever I walked into work amidst flurries of snow and then within a few minutes of getting there the white stuff began to fall more significantly and the ground became covered. These two pictures show the view from my office window just a few minutes apart at around 10am this morning…

It stopped snowing pretty soon after the second picture above was taken but made a few brief returns as the day progressed. I left work a bit early (all teaching was suspended for two days when the forecast is best described as ‘interesting’) and many of the pavements and side-roads were covered in thin layer of compacted snowy, becoming gradually more crusty and set to be pretty lethal as temperatures drop overnight and it freezes solid.

At home, the road outside out house is still snow-covered:

and the back garden has a pleasant wintery look about it:

Apparently there could be more snow tomorrow. In fact, I saw one piece on the local newspaper website that suggested that as much as 20cm could fall. If that happens the weather really will be exceptional and Plymouth will be talking about these few days for many years to come. But it is set to be warmer again on Friday so whatever snow falls or ice forms, it isn’t going to last, here at least.

Meanwhile, I was reading last night that temperatures in the northern Arctic are hugely above the climatological average for this time of year – a monster anomaly that is well beyond anything even the most expert (and pessimistic) climate scientists were expecting. Let there be no doubt, our planet’s atmosphere is changing and we’re starting to see the impacts of this change all over the place…