Little change.
14th February 2025
With dry and cool conditions continuing, there was very little change in Lochaber snowpack today. It was a another pleasant day on Aonach Mor. Winds were light until about 1100 metres above which there was a strong South-Easterly. Normally a South-Easterly would accelerate down the hill, so it would be as windy at 600m as a 1200m. However, this was not to be the case today, at least on the way I went up the hill. Perhaps there was enough East in the wind to stop this happening, or perhaps is was due to the inversion layers in the atmosphere keeping the winds on the top from descending. Either way made for a nice day with some pleasant sunshine and some spectacular clouds.
Above about 500 metres there is lots of water ice forming on some paths and sections of hillside.
A lovely clear day to the West. Through the day some cloud came in from the South-East.
Looking South through the col between Aonach Mor and Carn Mor Dearg. There was an impressive fingers of cloud flowing down the West Face of Aonach Mor.
The South side of Coire an Lochan with cloud encroaching.
The cloud banks flowing over the Grey Coires.
The same place as the other two pictures, but with a different camera (my phone) with a much wider angled lens.
The output from the met office AWS near the summit of Aonach Mor for today. Note the mild reading at midday, and the low relative humidity associated with it. This was probably due to warm dry inversion layers descending from above. It is possible that a similar thing will happen tomorrow, meaning it is hard to give a freezing level when there may well be various layers of warm and cold air in the atmosphere. However, due to the dryness air, even when the air temperature is above freezing, the wet bulb temperature will be below freezing, and so no thawing is expected at higher levels.
The temperature as measured by the Holfuy station at the summit hut for roughly the same time period. No sign of the midday temperature spike, perhaps due to it’s much more sheltered location and perhaps due to a layer of rime insulting the sensor and attenuating short term temperature fluctuations and/or cooling the sensor so the temperature it reads is closer to the actual wetbulb temperature. The station was giving a relative humidity of 100% humidity all day which suggests that at least some of the data from this station is questionable at the moment.
The reading of the Holfuy station on Tower 17 of the gondola (at an altitude about 600m). There a bit of a temperature rise at around midday, but not a much as was seen by the met office station another 550m or so up the hillside.
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