Warmer air flowing in from the Atlantic has been chipping away at the cold, dense air over Scotland today and through tonight and tomorrow the warmer air takes charge across all of the UK atmosphere with temperatures back up to 9-13C.

While warmth pushes into Ireland and the UK, arctic air will gain more ground over Europe with an upper low positioned over N Italy and the Balkans being fed this cold air straight from arctic Scandinavia. Expect to see noteworthy and possibly headline grabbing stories of heavy snow impacting parts of Italy, the Balkans and indeed many parts of central and eastern Europe in the coming days.

One of my twitter followers located in Romania, sent me this image of snow falling in Bucharest earlier today.

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As stated in last night’s post, a strong Icelandic low will swing a cold front southeast over the UK and western Europe this weekend bringing wetter, windier and colder conditions. The jet remains poised to flatten out as we commence early next week but there’s a large temperature contrast setting up with mild air to the south while very cold air resides just to the north. This boundary will sit over or close to the UK.

The latest model runs show a southward dip in the jet later next week over the UK so it looks likely to turn colder. Look for a real battle between atlantic and arctic air in the 7-10 day but I think we’ll find the cold pool should continue expanding over Europe and this should begin backing westwards as we enter December with the ridge shifting to where the warmest SST’s are while cold air heads for the cooling waters surrounding the UK.

Models persistently show an increasingly snowy continent and as the cold looks to be going nowhere, the snow covered ground will lay down the tracks for persistent feeds of arctic air coming south.

Check out the 96 hour snow chart for Europe off the ECMWF.

We’re most certainly entering a very interesting pattern when looking at the bigger hemispheric pattern with major cold over the United States, cold and snow is also taking aim at northeast Asia too as well as Europe.

The longer range models appear to be going to my long term idea of building the cold west as we progress through December but there will be a fight until we get to the finish line when I believe will be sometime between the 15-20th of Dec. Keep in mind that this cold pattern for the three main industrial regions of the world (east North America, west Europe, east Asia) is occurring as the AO is going POSITIVE and the NAO is running neutral, I say, once that NAO/AO flips back negative, look out!! The that will wobble between the UK and central Atlantic next 15 days will soon go straight to the warm NW Atlantic waters once the upper pattern feels the shift and we get a surge of warmth into the pole which fully or partially splits the vortex. In other words the polar air will go straight to the favoured areas of West Europe and East North America.

Here’s a glance at a rather cold looking ECMWF Control looking out into fantasy land… Very much a possibility though!

240 hrs

264 hrs

294 hrs

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