Snow is a welcome relief from climate change drama
AMID the tumultuous weather of recent days, with South Yorkshire submerged, flood sirens wailing in Venice and bush fires surging through Australia, I found it strangely, well, settling, to see snow falling in western parts of Britain.
It wasn’t much, just a few centimetres in Wiltshire, east Gloucestershire and Wales, which coated the hawthorns and hedgerows and left the sheep shivering in the fields. Snowy Exmoor and Dartmoor looked especially magnificent.
I found it calming, I suppose – having earlier in the week trudged through seemingly endless floodwater in Fishlake near Doncaster to interview people displaced from their homes – to see a less attritional form of weather descend upon us.
That said, you cannot please all the people all the time: police in southwest Powys have warned of vehicles getting marooned on the ice.
It is early in the year to experience any snowfall of note. Remember, even though it may be bitter out there and the days depressingly short, winter proper is weeks away.
On average across the UK, there are only 15.6 days a year when snow is on the ground, compared with 26.2 days in Scotland. And much of that falls in mountainous areas.
For all the talk of a white Christmas, it is still relatively rare to experience snowfall in December, too. Across Britain, snow or sleet falls on average 3.9 days in December compared with 5.3 days in January, 5.6 days in February and 4.2 days in March.
Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself. The outlook for the next few days is that it’s going to stay cold with more widespread frost overnight.
But the long-term forecast for the coming weeks is depressingly familiar: mild to average temperatures, gales, and plenty more rain to come.
Perhaps it would be simpler to drop my fantasies of a snowy winter now and get back to that joyous 2019 seasonal activity: filling sandbags in the cellar.