'Snow-show' As City Gets Xmas Ready

Belfast City Airport won't be caught out by winter snowfalls in the New Year.

Although this Christmas will see NI 'basking' in very mild temperatures as southern winds bring warm air from Africa and across Spain to the UK, the east Belfast airport is fully prepared for anything the weather can thrown at the busy airport in 2012.

Following the wintry conditions experienced last year, George Best

Belfast City Airport has invested £500,000 in two snow clearing machines.

They machinery has been sourced from Norway, with the huge apparatus able to remove as much as six inches of snow from the entire runway in less than an hour.

Seamus MacMahon, Belfast City Airport's Senior Fire Officer, is pictured receiving the equipment from Jan Eric, Service Engineer at Øveraasen, the supplier.

Officially, Christmas Day will most certainly not be white this year.

While the Met Office has predicted rather unsettled and often windy conditions across the northern half of the UK on Christmas day, there will not be any snow.

Forecasters said there would instead be cloudy conditions and spells of rain, some turning heavier and more persistent for a time.

It will tend to turn cloudier later with rain possibly spreading from the northwest on Boxing Day.

Thereafter, conditions through the rest of December on into the start of January are expected to be generally unsettled, and windy at times, with periods of milder, cloudy weather and outbreaks of rain.

However, while these will be interspersed by colder, clearer/brighter spells with showers, even with some of these showers wintry at times, especially in NI, there's still little sign of any deep freeze conditions as persisted through last December and into the start of 2011.

(BMcC)