Met office weather warnings for heavy rain, severe gales and snow

[OhYouMerryLittleKitten]

Going to be an eventful few days. Have been discussing it in te Christmas weather thread but I think they need highlighting. met office warnings

I am certainly going to try to avoid the coast roads tomorrow!

We've got a two hour drive home from uni for Christmas tonight - were going to leave tomorrow but after seeing the forecast (we're travelling from Wrexham, which is in red on metcheck, back home to the coast, also in red) we decided to leave tonight or we're not sure we'll get back at all. The road we're taking is notorious for flooding and trees/power lines coming down in high winds, accidents along the stretch are very frequent and the weather's already started to turn

Wish we could've left yesterday or Friday :(

I reckon the amber/yellow warning, both for rain, is a massive typo.

they've just added wind, "only"yellow though

It doesnt quite make sense when in the rain section they have " Further inland, gusts of 50-60 mph are likely through the amber area, with a lower risk of gusts reaching 70 mph - more especially across southeast England during the evening."

and whilst 50-60mph does only need a yellow, the coastal 70-80mph should be an amber I think and on their webpage they have Crawley at 69mph. Crawley is well inland.

A pretty good bbc forecast

Ok so to round up we have

tomorrow:
Severe gales along the south coast, with the Sw being affected by late morning and the EA coast and SE early afternoon through the night.
Gales through southern counties. Flooding likely with very heavy rain.
Snow in the NW and central areas of scotland.
Very windy everywhere.

Tuesday:
Severe gales in central and NW Scotland.
Blizzards in central and NW Scotland.
Heavy rain continues in the south for a while.
Windy everywhere.

Some useful links:
met office warnings

evironment agency - for flooding

national rail disruptions

highways agency

Just adding Traffic Scotland; the live cameras are useful to check the situation before setting off.

2 degrees and sleety up north; I think the worst of it may be to the South of us

thanks oricella :) I think the snow could become a real issue. Looks like the pennines could see some snow too tomorrow.

18z GFS is in. Looks very similar to the 06z, no weird double centre to it, tight pressure gradient in the south tomorrow, even tighter pressure gradient NW Scotland Tuesday. Some very heavy and prolonged rain in the south and snow in Scotland and perhaps over the Pennines. No changes from my previous forecast.

Winter wonderland in London closed tomorrow. Will I be safe in Habitat?..

I expect so, they have comfy sofas. Take some gin in case you get stranded there.

It really is closed! Mind you high winds and 1-2 inches of rain would rather devastate the ground with people tromping all over it.

Does anyone have a link to ferry crossings? My friends due to travel at 1pm tomorrow on ferry to Isle of Wight

P&O Updates here

Thankyou

Just heard from a pal who works at Easy Jet, that they are expecting and working on the basis that the amber alert ( wind ) in the South will go to red for tomorrow.....so expect flight fuck ups......

wightlink for isle wight ferries.

Peri, it's a bit confusing as strangely the met office haven't got amber wind alerts.

Thanks kitten. I think that's the one

How odd Kitten.....Urgent enough for our Easy Jet pal to phone my Sister in law, who's been up here in Edinburgh visiting and was meant to fly back into Luton tommorow evening, and get her booked on a flight in the morning......Easy pal was also commenting on the post xmas storm on it's way and worried if SIL didn't get South tomorrow morning, it could be a while getting a flight South, what with delays, full flights, and Christmas chucked in the middle.

I'm not really understanding the reasonings behind the met office warnings this time. I know they have their own models, not released into the public domain and perhaps they are suggesting the winds won't be as bad in the south as models such as the GFS are suggesting.

Its a possible power cut that worries me. DH has ischemic heart disease and needs the heating. I remember the storm of October 2002 No power for 18 hours and not far away in Gt Notley they were out for a week.

Just read the last page here, looked at the Met Office and GFS and all I can come up with is that half of the Met Office is now on their xmas holidays and that it is very difficult to produce easily understandable warnings, using their current map/symbols, when there's so much weather happening all over the place......
Just looked at the post xmas low
Hester I swear in Weather ( I may lower the tone ) One of my favourite rain descriptions is "wanking it down".......lots of that lately...

All a bit odd. It was a lovely day in London today