Today’s weather conditions vary significantly across the continent. Indeed, looking at the minimum temperatures (Figure 1) we can see values below zero across Scandinavia, Belarus, W Ukraine and Tatra mountains, whilst the UK, N France, Germany and most of E Europe has seen temperatures between 0/+5°C. These values are well below the climatology (up to 10°C in some areas) and are due to the strong cold air flow which pushed south from the Arctic the previous weekend.
The cold air is moving E across Russia (see strong temperature gradient just E of Moscow) with snow occurring at low levels in some areas. On the southern part of the continent instead, very warm (sometimes hot) conditions are observed (see temperatures already above 20°C in Sardinia, Sicily and Tunisia). This is due to a significant hot air advection from the Sahara which will reach the peak between today and tomorrow across the central Mediterranean, before moving E over the Balkans during the weekend.

This will be the first heatwave of the season for most of the central Mediterranean with risk of record-breaking temperatures in Sicily (expected 35/38°C). Meanwhile, between the cold and hot air masses, heavy rain and thunderstorms are occurring across the Alpine region, N Italy, S France and Spain (Figure2) due to a series of lows developing between the Balearics/Sardinia and S France.

Along the occluded front of this low, the strong S’ly flow is causing a dust advection across the Italian peninsula (Figure3), which will then move E over the Balkans into tomorrow.

In summary, it has been a interesting week, with very different weather patterns across the continent and possible record-breakings temperatures.