benvironment:

Well…..yesterday was a peculiar and memorable day of weather to say the least. There was an amber warning for freezing rain but for the bulk of the day nothing happened here in Fife. Mid afternoon, the usual wet rain started falling. I stepped out the front door and it was all pretty normal outside, wet and cold but not slippy.

But then 10 mins or so later there was a peculiar clicking noise on the windows. A similar sound to hail but not quite the same. More of a popping sound, and when I stepped outside again, the difference in just that short space of time was incredible – all surfaces had a thin sheen of ice on them.

That kept on going for much of the day and after a few hours there was perhaps half a cm of ice on everything, including vertical surfaces like the windows and the stone walls of the house. Despite the 30mph wind, the weather station stopped measuring windspeed and direction as it iced up, and on inspecting the car it was clear that I couldn’t get into it even if I wanted to. 

Ice pellets followed, adding another 1cm of weirdness to the layer of ice, and then as the night wore on it turned to snow and we awoke to a normal white wintry scene this morning. That’s now melting of course as the temperature has rocketed up to a balmy 3C, but the car was still covered in an icy glaze an hour ago. 

In continental climates, freezing rain is much more common than here. I’ve only ever seen fleeting, thin deposits of the stuff in the hills, so it was fascinating to watch it falling and accumulating for hours at home. Not to the extent that it brought down trees or power lines or anything, as it famously does elsewhere in the world, but truly fascinating nonetheless 🙂