Matthew Simpson

The Winsford Academy held a screening of the People's Emergency Briefing film on Friday, May 15.

Knutsford Heritage Centre's gift shop, in King Street, is reopening its doors to customers from 11am until 4pm on Saturday, May 30.

Mercury Lifts in Middlewich was handed the 'emerging family business' award at the 2026 North West Family Business Awards.

Lydia Mansell will auction her painting, Hope, on Thursday, June 11, in aid of The Joshua Tree charity.

NORTHWICH is set to welcome back Japanese band Violent Magic Orchestra after a sell-out show in 2025.

Chris Billows was appointed the head professional at Wilmslow Golf Club in March 2026

On August 26 last year, Daniel Hutchings was handed a 12-month community order at Warrington Magistrates Court for two counts of assault and two of…

Dr Syntax will be appearing at The Salty Dog in Northwich as part of its Annual Diversion festival

Forecasting of extreme precipitation in areas of complex topography remains a challenge for the numerical weather prediction community. California receives 25%–50% of its annual rainfall from just a few storms, referred to as atmospheric rivers. Accurate and timely forecasts of atmospheric rivers are critical for managing water resources and flood risk. An important consideration is whether limited computational resources are best spent on larger ensembles or on finer horizontal grid spacing. In this study, we compare two experimental versions of the operational West-WRF ensemble run at 9- and 3-km grid spacing, each with 72 members and 60 vertical levels. Decreasing the horizontal grid spacing from 9 to 3 km adds skill to the forecast but increases the computational expense by a factor of ∼27. We then evaluate how the skill of the 3-km ensemble degrades as we reduce the number of members to 45, 30, and 15. We find that the 45-member version of the 3-km ensemble still outperforms the 72-member 9-km ensemble; however, a 45-member 3-km ensemble is too computationally expensive for most centers to run operationally. As we move to smaller ensembles, the skill degrades significantly, especially for extreme events. The 15-member version of the 3-km ensemble, while still being almost 6 times as computationally expensive, performs worse than the 9-km ensemble in almost every metric considered. Therefore, we conclude that while there is clear value in decreasing the horizontal grid spacing in an ensemble forecast, ensemble size is also important, particularly if the focus of the prediction is on extreme weather.

A night of live music, great food and community celebration is coming to Anderton this summer as Stanley Fest '26 takes place at The Stanley…