The wheel of warmth is now advancing towards Greenland and dragging the mild air with it, away from Europe. The door is now opening over Scandinavia for arctic air to pour south bringing a real taste of the inevitable. As this warm pool splits the vortex of near -50C air over Greenland, this replacement of low pressure with high pressure will force arctic air south, either side of the blocking high. Rapidly lower heights over Scandinavia and eventually the UK means a big change is coming. As the trough drops over northern and western Europe, depending upon wind, the UK, never mind Scandinavia and Russia, may see mid-winter level by Friday night into Saturday when looking at the latest model output of 850 mb temps and thickness values.
This will be an impressive cold shot for so early and this strong northerly flow straight from the arctic will be a real wakeup call to what’s coming later down the road. Whether it snow across low levels of the UK or not, a taste of early winter is coming.
The latest run of the NCEP GFS shows temperatures in coming nights plunging towards -30C (-22F) within the deep boreal forests of northern Norway, Sweden and Finland.
Friday will see the transport of arctic air cross over the UK and by Friday night it should have established itself. Depending upon wind, lows may hit -10C in the Scottish Highlands as well as interior Low Countries of Belgium and Netherlands and Denmark. Look out for lows near -15C over the southern interior of Norway while in the northern interior, we could see somewhere hit -30C, very impressive for late October. This setup could support many record lows.
Expect temperatures Friday morning (Courtesy of WeatherBELL Models)
By the way, from what I understand the cold, arctic air is going to stir quite some storms further down in Europe when it meets the warm air down there. Lots of snow for the Alps and some seriously stormy conditions in the Mediterranian region. Interesting!
The first snow og the season in Denmark came last night and this morning. I only had hail showers before midnight, but also a bit of frost last night and in the early moring hours: -1 celsius. Now it’s 7 degrees and sunny with a beautiful blue sky and drifting clouds.
Many Norwegian cities have had very cold weather and lots of snow since the cold front passed down over Norway. Particularly Finnmark in northern Norway has had a lot of snow. Planes have been canceled uo there and forced many passengers to stay in Alta, although they should have left for Oslo a long time ago.
Here in Denmark we are still waiting for the real cold air to come down, although the cold front passed today before noon. The temperature has now dropped to 5-7 celsius, it’s tomorrow that’s going to be interesting. I don’t expect any snow cover, but a few snow showers will do it for me. After all, we are only in late October.