28th April 2016 - Very, very late air frost

[Nicholas Gardner]

The temperature went down to -1.9°C last night making it the latest air frost I have recorded but was also one of the colder nights of the winter/spring season!

And unusually for April, today's frost duration was nearly 5 hours long. Normally, the infrequent air frosts that do happen in April are mostly less than an hour in duration and occur just before sun rise.

There were no April air frosts in 2014 or 2015 and my average air frost duration for the entire month is 6 hours.

With the garden trees and plants in flower, blossom and leaf I checked for damage this afternoon and it seems that the only casualty is the kiwi whose leaves have suffered some 'scorching'. The apple, plum and cherry blossom, the vines and fig tree all managed to escape. I suspect if the frost had been more severe then the number of casualties would have been much more.

[Richard Hunt]

Same here, a screen minimum of -1.4c this morning, my latest air frost for at least a decade (have to check for the exact dates). Freezing fog this morning that lifed around 0730 UTC.

My latest ground frost is May 8th, so let's see if that 'record' falls.

[Richard Hunt]

Same here, a screen minimum of -1.4c this morning, my latest air frost for at least a decade (have to check for the exact dates). Freezing fog this morning that lifted around 0730 UTC.

My latest ground frost is May 8th, so let's see if that 'record' falls.

[Edward Graham]

Amazingly, here in Stornoway we had the coldest night of the "winter" on 28 April with -2.7degC recorded at 7am. This value beats the the previous lowest this 'winter', -2.3degC on 27 Feb. Two hours later heavy snow was falling - on Twitter, pictures showed the normally frost-free isle of Tiree covered in a rare thick cover of snow.

Snow lay the previous morning up to 1cm deep in Stornoway (but thawed quickly by 9-10am), and the two previous mornings also had a 80-100% snow and hail cover, but not quite up to 1cm in depth.

All this follows on from some remarkably topsy-turvy variation in seasonal weather over the past 12 months (from the 2nd coldest night of winter on 1st May 2015, and the worst summer in least a century in western and northern Scotland - and not to even mention the astonishing Dec 2015!)

Eddie Graham, Stornoway
@eddy_weather

[Len Wood]

Did not quite make it to my latest air frost on 28th. Only got to 0.5C.

My latest air frost still stands at -1.0C on 26th April 1989.

Record began 1985.

[Edward Graham]

Here's a photo of the unusually heavy late snowfall on Tiree on the morning of 28th April (from the BBC):
http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/660/cpspro ... _tiree.jpg
E.