Snow in Leeds

The snowfall started on last Friday. I had just arrived from my trip to St.Poelten in Austria, it was shortly after midnight, temperature was just below 0 Celcius. My car on the airport long term parking had been frozen over, so I had to scratch the windows free. Shortly after I had started driving, it began to snow. I came home safely, and in the morning there was a snow cover of maybe 1-2 inches in and around Leeds.

This is very unusual here in UK, to have snowfall that early in winter. In the astronomical calendar it is officially not yet winter ...! Only the Eastern part of the UK seemed to be hit by that snowfall, when looking towards the Yorkshire Dales, the mountains there appeared to be bare without any snow.

The following days and nights there was some further light snow, and since the temperature remained below freezing, the snow kept accumulating. And then today after 10:00 am there came a big snowfall, as I was at work: there were thick snow flakes, and they began to accumulate quickly. When I checked my car, there was a cover of about 4-5 inches on it!

When I returned from lunch, my colleague from the neighboring office asked me if I could give him a lift home. He only lives a 15 min driving distance from our campus, but in the morning it had taken him almost 4 hours to come to work, using buses. A main meeting that had been scheduled for the afternoon was cancelled - many people could not make it because of the snow. And Leeds Met closed down at 3pm. So I drove my colleague to his home; took about 30 minutes. The road was quite full, traffic was moving slowly. Cars started to skid as soon as there was a slight incline.

The Smart car is not really ideal for these snowy conditions: it has rear wheel drive, and its automatic clutch does not give me any control over a soft starting. But I managed anyway, just had to be very careful when accelerating - and avoid using the brake, just rolling out a slow speed instead. The northern Ring Road in Leeds was full of cars in both directions: this road has quite a few hills, and any incline, either downhill or uphill, present a major problem for driving, as cars easily start to skid. I avoided Ring Road by driving through local roads in Adel and Alwoodley.

I had promised another colleague at Leeds Met to give him a ride home too, so I drove back to Leeds Met. Since the Ring Road was full, I had to drive a longer way than I had anticipated, going all the way East to the A61, then driving south to the city centre. This direction was quite empty, but long lines of standing or slowly driving cars were heading out of the town, inching along through the slippery roads. At one point I missed a right turn and had to drive quite a detour because I did not want to drive back into that long line of waiting cars, and in one location I also started to skid and almost hit a fence at the side of the road. But I managed to avoid the collision and slowly moved further on. 35 Minutes later I was back at Leeds Met, picked up my colleague, and drove him too to his home.

In the news today on TV the main topic was the weather and the traffic chaos. Not sure if LeedsMet is open tomorrow. I have teaching of a class scheduled for 9am - and I will try to be there. As a reward for students who will show up to this lecture I will bring some German Lebkuchen and Pfeffernuesse - if I manage to keep away from eating them myself tonight.

Happy New Year 2010!

A bit belated I wish you all a Happy New Year 2010!

Here in Leeds there was a "White Christmas". It had snowed before the holidays, it snowed before New Year, and yesterday a new snow dump brought at least 15 cm snow cover everywhere in and around Leeds.



As usual, road traffic collapses here in the UK when such snow conditions occur. There is usually not much snow here in winter, so when it comes, the road services are overwhelmed. One problem is that here in the UK a lot of salt is used to clear the roads from snow. They do not use snow ploughs but instead spray salt and sand grit. This is only effective when the snow cover is not more than a few cm. But with the current snow amount, I believe it would be better to use ploughs to move the snow to the side, before spraying salt on it. This is also for environmental reasons: salt damages the environment around the road ways. It also leads to increased corrosion of cars.

Driving on the M62 Motorway across the Pennines from Leeds to Manchester on 2.January 2010.

"Worst" Snow in 18 Years - UK is in Crisis

A nice snowfall started on Sunday evening, with big flakes falling down. Today in the morning, the streets were covered with a few cm of snow. And as it happened in December, also this time the traffic broke down.
One of the reasons is of course that there is very rarely true snowfall here in the UK - winters are usually mild, and the temperature rarely falls below 0 C. But when it does, and when then a few snowflakes fall down, the country cannot cope with it because it is not as prepared as for example Canada, or the Northern US. There are too few "critters" (these are the vehicles which spay sand and salt). So many of the side roads remain snowy.
Also, nobody here ever puts winter tires onto their vehicles; I am not sure if they even exist here. So I experienced today when driving, what it means to drive uphill on a road full of snow sleet just with regular summer tires, and to feel the sliding to the side etc.
Snow kept intermittently falling today, sometimes just a bit of flurry, sometimes thick heavy flakes.
The weather report says we will get more snow through the night.