On current track blend, up to 90mph gusts affecting the far SW and Channel Islands and it wouldn’t take too much adjustment to bring the south coast into play. I guess a mixture of preference/interest and location understandably means a discussion bias to snow potential but maybe we should have a dedicated storm thread as well as ‘short term snow potential’?

MetO yellow warning for snow for much of Central England late Thurs - midday Friday

Suggestions of further snow on Sunday left in the main model thread for now.

Strong winds are clearly another potential concern as Neil pointed out. 

ICON 12Z runs the storm a bit further north with the centre running just north of London and exiting the coast in Suffolk. Heaviest snow well to the north over the Pennines.

ARPEGE 12Z has the track further south, as per the fax charts, maybe a few miles north, with the centre pretty well following the south coast. Heaviest snow in the west and north Midlands.

I don't expect to be telling future generations about the Great Snow Storm of 2026. but who knows. 😊

I think FAX charts and MetO forecasts are the best tools for people at this range

Great.. our house is close to the top of a vale nothing between us and New York… except an Ocean..and an evergreen.

The UKV shunts the storm north and with it the worst of the winds.

The Isles of Scilly look to bear the brunt as things stand with some of the models (UKV being one) showing gusts topping 100mph. 

Certainly a nasty storm.

I'd like it to shift approx 75 miles South of the UKV track - that'd spare the islands and have the happy bonus of placing me in the middle of the snow band! 

I have to say the track has been remarkably consistent thus far.

I'd expect quite a bit of temporary disruption though - heavy wet snow is a devil for bringing down power lines and for washing the grit off the roads.

I'd like to be back in Birdlip for this one - 300m up should give then a fairly decent shot at some significant accumulations.

In northern England this is a potential issue; we are too close to that annoying easterly wind despite having slightly colder uppers; our best chance is for the wind to remain slack with the strongest winds much further south. For high snow amounts in N England we need to rely on the scandi airmass starting to interact with the system to produce a secondary slow moving front to the north of the main system. Ideally we want the strong easterly winds to get this airmass in, and then for them to turn off when it actually arrives. Surprisingly this is a scenario that is actually shown in a few of the runs. Then again, increasingly we may just see heavy snow on saturday anyway when the full intensity of that scandi airmass does arrive.

How does ir perform on wind speeds Brian? Hopefully it over estimates those too. There's a top gust of 129mph on the 3z UKV for the Isles of Scilly - that's far and away the highest I've seen modelled at this time scale for the islands. 

But definitely don't think we should be using ECM, Icon etc, maybe for track of low but it's apparent now that's it's not just about the track of the low but marginality too .  

I don’t have any data on how it currently performs. However, PS47, which goes live between 20/01 and 04/02 improves gust forecasts. The image below is copyright of the UK Met Office.

Yep

And unless there’s a massive escalation of the Meto warning today, they aren’t mentioning anything even close to that

Absolutely - though I'd be surprised not to see an Amber warning based on the current output.

I think what is interesting is that there's clearly a lot of room for improvement in the models in terms of the strength of the gusts of wind 

- they all differ widely on this even though they're fairly aligned on the mean wind speeds.

I imagine an Amber for wind in the SW will happen at some point today. 11am ish is usually when they update the warnings. An amber for snow as well for east Wales and West Midlands likely I'd imagine.