OT: 5" or 5cm?

Weather bods said 5cm,

Not entirely true.

We got 5"

Just the opposite here.
I was looking forward to being snowed in , but no such luck.

No more than about an inch but they have still closed the lad's
school.

Ours too.

I've had to spend the last 2 hours slegding on the golf course :-)

See my comment up there somewhere - unfair it is. Especially as
neither of them will come out and build a snowman with me, what's the
point of being off if you don't go and enjoy it.

Absolutely. I took the cat out for a snowball fight earlier, but she
wasn't too enthusiastic.

They'll be full of spiders.

Within parameters.

Soft and Fluff White and Cold

I did 85 miles this morning [1] and it was a delight, the roads had almost

It was strangely quiet around these parts too, and I saw about three
flakes all day. No snow here.

And the much-heralded 6-8 inches of further snow failed to turn up here.

Odd. They got the time and depth of the previous lot bob-on.

no traffic.

[1] I took the car.

That's snow.

Sounds like a Houston style measurement cock-up

IIRC 'snowfall' is the depth of snow once it's melted - i.e. they collect it
in a container, same as rain, melt it, then measure the depth of water.

No, I don't think so.

Just Googlified it - I'm thinking of the 'water equivalent' method of
measuring snowfall, which is a commonly-used method. Though they'd probably

No, I don't think it is. Not where anyone who's in the habit of
measuring snowfall is concerned.

web-search for "snow water equivalent" or SWE - it might not be used that often
on the weather forecast on the telly, but the scientific community seems to
like it.

state it if that was the method used for reporting.

Reason for this is that it's the only way to get a consistent measurement,
as the flake size and how it happened to settle in the measuring container
could have a big effect of the reading.

So 5cm of snowfall could easily equate to 5" of snow lying on the ground.

5cm of water would equate to around 50cm of lying snow, as there is at
least a 12:1 difference between snow and rain. In ski areas in the US
I've heard it said that an inch of rain becomes a foot of snow if the
freezing level falls.

Anyway, reporting snowfall using your method would be meaningless - we
want to know how far it comes up our wellies.

You'll be wanting the 'sheep equivalent' method then.

That's 'snow depth' as opposed to 'snow fall' though, which is the important
one, admittedly.

Tricky to distinguish, actually. Snow fall is a tenuous measure, as
you can't actually measure it until it's already on the ground, by
which time the process of compaction has already begun. So the
normally quoted measure is the amount of snow settling over a
specified period. Measured after the event, IYSWIM.

I don't listen to the weather forecasts anymore. I just look out of
the window.

On that very subject - does anyone have a window in Derby out of which
they could look ?

Unlikely - they've probably all had them bricked up because of the
window tax.

at 11:30 very light snow nothing to worry about

I've been looking. There's a couple of inches and it is going to snow
solidly all day.

I do that, but I still get it wrong.

It really is the best way IMHO

Err no. If they say "5 units-of-measure of snow" then that's what they
say. They did put a range for the depth in the forecast and you know
that they cannot forecast with perfect accuracy. As to the rain gauge
value for snow it's 12 inches of snow make 1 inch of melt water.

No, you're hard of understanding. Here's the warning copied from the
weather website:

"Thursday 8 February WEATHER WARNING Wales, Midlands, southern and
southeast England: Snow will become heavy during the early morning and
may fall for as long as 6 hours at any one location. Typically 5cm of
lying snow can be expected with as much as 15cm possible in some
areas. Snow will move further north during the morning and afternoon.
Valid until 1100GMT "

Note the measurement.