Lots of fantastic pictures. Thanks folks.

It looks like the heavy snow event on a Saturday morning that I especially remember must have been a different event from the one that everyone else has been talking about.

Yes was a very interesting event.

Monday 4th January was bitterly cold and sunny during the day, but I remember seeing high cloud moving in mid afternoon.

By evening, a light westerly flow developed and a streamer set in. Manchester started getting pasted and parts of Merseyside/Lancs I think.

Overnight a feature moved down from the north (given the entirety of northern England heavy snow, including east of the Pennines), it's this feature which pepped up the convective snow and gave us such big totals.

It was the same feature which then gave all the snow in Southern England too (as it developed into a more significant low pressure system too if I recall)

I've seen some great pics from you over the years, but these are amongst my favourite pictures I've ever seen (and I remember you posting them at the time).

Incredibly atmospheric.

There were no ice days, so plenty of drip-drip-dripping going on when the snow stopped. The snow had all gone by the end of the 15th, but a fortnight of snowcover is nothing to be sneezed at regardless.

Yes, similar in Essex but no real big deal but I probably would have thought so if I was under 40! The thing I have noticed since the eighties has been the lack of drifting snow here. From the sixties to the nineties there were several events where snow ploughs piled the snow as high as the hedgerows down the lanes.

Sounds like the only significant snow event in CS England in December 2010, i.e. the following winter. That definitely happened on a Saturday morning about a week before Christmas. We got 2” but the M40/A40 corridor got up to a foot.

That’d be Saturday 18th December 2010. Remember it well, first day at home with our newborn first child. Midwife came to visit around 10am and it started chucking it down. In the 30 minutes she was with us, 2-3 inches was put down and it continued for a good few hours, till we reached a good depth. Poor midwife had lots of other visits to make that day, bet her journeys were very difficult.

That Granada Reports video shows Merseyside having the deepest cover in the region, not sure exactly where it was filmed. 

As an aside, I did measure 8 inches in my back garden on the Wirral on 23rd March 2013, we seemed to be on the northern edge of that one cos Liverpool hardly had any. Snow is possible on the Wirral!

Martin, Irby

Thanks. Yes, that sounds like the one I was thinking of. I could have sworn it had been the previous January, but my memory is becoming very unreliable these days.

Yes 23rd march the very far north west of wirral had snow plouhgs out.  With very deep falls ... howrvwr 5 miles east I had an exam in chester for my Prince 2 exam. Thought it would be cancelled. I lived in rock ferry at the time. We had 2 inches... ellesmere port had rain.  However 20 miles away in howarden they had 60cms snow. It stayed for over a month with farmers finding sheep still alive stuck in 6ft drifts.

I have some very similar pics from that spell, I will try to post them tomorrow. 

Just as good in Somerset:

In terms of snow depth and sledging Jan. 2010 ranks alongside 19 March 2018 down here. For longevity and atmosphere, December 2010 will always be the daddy, although for sheer mad depth of snow and cold, the first few days of March 2018 beats the lot.

We really are lucky to be alive in such an era. (Well, at least living down here we are.)

Here is a thread from uk.sci.weather on the build up - think you started this Rob?

https://www.weather-banter.co.uk/uk-sci-weather-uk-weather/140625-somethings-afoot.html 

For anyone who analyses the CET data, what was the CET for approximately 16 December 2009-15 January 2010?

https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/wea.735 

Jeff

December 2009 is overlooked but it was a very good month for snow here and delivered our first White Christmas for a fair few years. 

Christmas Day 2009 in Rodley, Leeds:

This was the 10th when things were largely dug out.
It had been more or less subzero for many days
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Stunning pictures. Hopefully similar scenes on the way.

If it's the one I'm thinking of, I think it was several years earlier. There was actually a special warning broadcast between programmes in mid-evening on BBC 1, something almost unheard of, which I remember watching. The presenter might well have been McElwee, though I can't remember for sure. But next day the temperature must have been a degree or two higher than expected, as all we saw where I live was sleet. IIRC, across the country snow was pretty much confined to high ground.

Yes, I can't quite remember when this was but I do recall that the next day breakfast news programmes had dispatched reporters across the country in anticipation of the unfolding apocalyptic blizzards, and they had to do their pieces to camera in rain or sleet, or else drive to the very top of a hill and stand in a patch of snow! 

Yes that was a massive fail. 

If it's the occasion I'm thinking of, it was February 2005.

A low pressure pushed in from the SE after a fairly OK easterly spell - we expected snow but it was largely rain away from high ground.

Yes December 2009 was brilliant. Not just for your patch, but also for large parts of Lancashire & GM including usually snowless places like Preston/Lancaster. 

A bitterly cold westerly.