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Europe/UK/Ireland in the grips of the Beast from the East weather event
A combination of Siberian winds (Beast from the East) and Storm Emma (coming up from the South) are causing havoc in the UK and Ireland, with Status Red warnings in effect. For ireland, the worst is due tomorrow evening with the winds of Storm Emma causing snow drifts.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/uk-weather-latest-updates-snow-storm-emma-travel-trains-cancelled-roads-a8233836.html
Blizzards, gales and sleet are expected to blight the UK towards the latter half of the week as Storm Emma rolls in from the Atlantic.
The weather system, named by the Portuguese Met Service, is set to hit the UK after the so-called “Beast from the East” blanketed large swathes of the UK with snow.
The Met Office issued a red warning for snow for central Scotland on Wednesday that was extended to 10am on Thursday morning.
Forecaster Craig Snell said that although Thursday marks the first day of meteorological spring, “winter is still firmly in charge across the UK”.
He also warned that extreme weather will grip Britain for another 48 hours.
Drivers were advised to avoid travelling to or from Scotland, with Traffic Scotland telling people to ask themselves whether their journey was “worth risking lives for” before they set out.
and
https://www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/ireland/sights-and-sounds-from-day-1-of-the-beast-from-the-east-830249.html
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Tower of London
Barge on the River Barrow, county Kildare, Ireland
21 replies
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Me, I am cuddled up under my covers in weather like that. 
Paris flooded a month ago, Rome had snow a few days ago, CA is in a severe drought for this time of year, Spring tornadoes in the US a month early and now this! The scientists said that Europe will be hit particularly hard during climate change. I am so glad it isn't real and there is no need for the US govt to prepare for it let alone try to reduce the impact. 
Glancing out his bedroom window in Ballymote, Co. Sligo, on the evening of Monday 24 February 1947, seventeen-year-old Francie McFadden shivered. The penetrating Arctic winds had been blowing for several weeks. Munster and Leinster had been battling the snows since the middle of January. It was only a matter of time before the treacherous white powder began to tumble upon Ulster and Connaught.
That night, a major Arctic depression approached the coast of Cork and Kerry and advanced north-east across Ireland. As the black winds began howling down the chimneys, so the new barrage began. When Francie awoke on Tuesday morning, the outside world was being pounded by the most powerful blizzard of the 20th century.
1947 was the year of the Big Snow, the coldest and harshest winter in living memory. Because the temperatures rarely rose above freezing point, the snows that had fallen across Ireland in January remained until the middle of March. Worse still, all subsequent snowfall in February and March simply piled on top. And there was no shortage of snow that bitter winter. Of the fifty days between January 24th and March 17th, it snowed on thirty of them.
‘The Blizzard’ of February 25th was the greatest single snowfall on record and lasted for close on fifty consecutive hours. It smothered the entire island in a blanket of snow. Driven by persistent easterly gales, the snow drifted until every hollow, depression, arch and alleyway was filled and the Irish countryside became a vast ashen wasteland. Nothing was familiar anymore. Everything on the frozen landscape was a sea of white. The freezing temperatures solidified the surface and it was to be an astonishing three weeks before the snows began to melt.
Francie McFadden’s neighbour Jim Kielty was driving back from Dublin to Ballymote the night the blizzard struck. Mr Kielty would drive over two million accident-free miles in his career as a hackney driver but he swore that was the hairiest journey he ever made. Through heavy snow and near zero visibility, he could see buses, lorries and cars abandoned all along the roadside.
Every field, road and rooftop was submerged under this dry, powdery snow. In many places, the snowdrifts were up to the height of the telegraph poles. When he got caught in the snow, Jackie Doherty of Liscarbon, Co. Leitrim, found his way home by clambering up a drift and using the telegraph wire to guide and maintain his balance. In the towns too, all the shop fronts, hall doors and gable walls vanished under the massive walls thrown up by the Arctic winds.
De Valera’s post-war Ireland ground to a complete standstill. The transport system was the first major thing to crumple. Every road and railway in the land was blocked, every canal frozen solid, every power cable and electricity pylon suffocated by snow. No amount of grit or rocksalt was ever going to compete. Mick Higgins, a railway porter from Claremorris, walked the line from Claremorris to Kiltimagh, a distance of 9½ miles, to assure people that the snowplough train was coming soon. The drifts were up to his hips in places and the gallant porter required an urgent thaw when he reached Kiltimagh. However, the bottom line was that nobody was going anywhere fast and nothing would be normal for many long weeks.
https://turtlebunbury.wordpress.com/2017/12/13/the-big-snow-of-1947/
They were in the local cinema in a small West Wales town one evening, a packed house (guess it was warmer than at home). When everybody came out, there was six foot of snow.
The only way everyone got home that night was with a squad of burly guys at the front of the crowd, digging like fury to make an open tunnel.
More about experiences of it a little to the south of where they were:
Memories of the great snow of 1947 that brought Wales to a standstill
Carmarthenshire historian Arwyn Thomas recounts being able to reach telegraph wires due to the depth of show as his village was snowed in
...
At the end of January that year temperatures plummeted to a bone chilling -16 degrees celcius and what followed was a six week period of very wintry weather, with a number of blizzards.
For one nine-year-old schoolboy at the time, the memories of that big freeze bring back images of trudging through the snow to school and the sight of green fields but roadways blocked with snow - as biting gales blew snow clean off the fields and instead into every gulley, lane and road around his village nestled in Carmarthenshire.
https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/memories-great-snow-1947-brought-14062067
Carmarthenshire historian Arwyn Thomas recounts being able to reach telegraph wires due to the depth of show as his village was snowed in
...
At the end of January that year temperatures plummeted to a bone chilling -16 degrees celcius and what followed was a six week period of very wintry weather, with a number of blizzards.
For one nine-year-old schoolboy at the time, the memories of that big freeze bring back images of trudging through the snow to school and the sight of green fields but roadways blocked with snow - as biting gales blew snow clean off the fields and instead into every gulley, lane and road around his village nestled in Carmarthenshire.
https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/memories-great-snow-1947-brought-14062067
We're not in that league at the moment, but here in the west of Scotland, we're getting hammered pretty hard, and there's little sign of let-up (we usually have pretty mild winters where I am, though we did have a week or so of minus 20 toward the end of the 1990s).
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