I note that it is already -8°C at Braemar.

A number of places in Scotland dipped below -10°C last night.

Yes, it's an incredible morning here in Edinburgh.

With the wind coming from the west here, that would suggest that the actual centre of high pressure is just to our south which means that you would typically expect the clearer skies to be our south rather than to our north so that is a rather unusual setup indeed.

There's quite a lot of frost around to such an extent that you would almost think that it had been snowing by looking at that (we had a lot of snow from Storm Bert in November but sadly, we haven't had any snow during this actual winter so far) and at Edinburgh Gogarbank, that has even mistakenly been recorded as 1.0 cm of lying snow once again.

Yet at the same time, this morning has also started off on a dull, misty and gloomy note here.

Last night's overnight minimum temperature at Edinburgh Gogarbank was -5.8°C which makes last night our coldest night of this winter so far and our second coldest night of this year so far.

However, the temperature here in Edinburgh has now gone up to around -1°C.

Several hours later - the breeze has died away, but it's still exactly 7.1 (dew now 5.5) with drizzle.

Yes, it's still around -1°C here in Edinburgh and that temperature isn't budging, so a possible ice day might well be on the cards although it will have to remain below freezing right up until 9am GMT (09:00 UTC) tomorrow morning for an ice day to be officially recorded.

The frost appears to have largely disappeared from here but given how cold it is, that is probably more likely to have been a result of sublimation in the exceptionally dry air (this takes into consideration the fact that cold air can't hold as much water vapour as cold air) rather than any actual melting.

Meanwhile, the permacast hell goes on and given that we're approaching the winter solstice, I'm still having to keep my houselights on despite it being the middle of the day due to it never actually getting properly light but that might be what helps us to get that ice day in the end, so I'm not really complaining about that and the only thing missing now is a bit of snow.

A very cold day in The Central Belt thats for sure!

So far, the highest hourly temperature reading at Edinburgh Gogarbank is -0.6°C and it's now getting dark again.

Since that is only the highest hourly reading, that still doesn't guarantee that the actual maximum temperature will be below freezing as that has still to be confirmed by the 18z and 21z raw SYNOP data but it seems unlikely that the maximum temperature which is confirmed by that will be at freezing or above and this means that as long as it doesn't warm up during the night, an ice day for here continues to be very much on the cards.

What's interesting though is that the very cold area is only really covering a very small part of the country and in addition to the milder air down south, there is also some milder air in the north of Scotland with the Shetland Islands recording positive double figures temperatures.

The last four days have seen a diurnal range of 2c - a min of 4.4c to a max at 6.4

Zero sunshine naturally!!

6.4, dew 5.5; last night's low was 6.3 and yesterday's high was 8.0 (late in the evening).