While a lot of focus is on the snow across south-central and southeast Europe this week and next week’s arctic cold but let’s not overlook the continued storminess across the central Mediterranean. It seems for days now, Italy and much of south-central Europe has been plagued by cold and stormy weather with choppy seas, gales, flooding rains and of course snowfall.

The trouble is that as arctic air drives south over the continent, it’s met by warmer air over Africa and with warm water temperatures and a strong upper wind pattern between, you’ve got the perfect environment for low pressure formation. We’re going to see that this weekend once again and that means more of the same weather.

Below is the QPF total rainfall projections through the next several days and you can see that there’s a LOT of rainfall expected over the Mediterranean.

72 hrs

120 hrs

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168 hrs

Yes the blue bulls eye along the south coast of Italy extending out to sea does indicate over 7 inches of rain in just the next 7 days.

Below is the ECMWF which shows plenty of moisture and the start of a newly form low just off Italy’s south coast.

By 72 hrs, there’s a well defined low which will continued to bring heavy, torrential rains and strong winds.

Even out to 120 hrs and it remains very unsettled although the low is far less organised.

As for the cold that will take over Europe later next week, well we ‘warm up’ again after a chillier end to this week and weekend. Ridging builds in from the Atlantic, however as you saw from the video and in the below charts, it’s as the ridge builds in so cold air gathers and expands back west. This building cold pool eventually pushes the warmer air southeast away from the UK into southern Europe and is replaced by gathering cold. The key to tapping ‘arctic air’ though is a low which passes just north of Scotland next Thursday or Friday. Much warmer air will exit North America and will reposition up over Greenland. The classic negative NAO signal. When looking over the entire hemisphere, the Europe trough is one of two.

Below is a breakdown of next week’s developing cold pattern which takes us into next weekend.

96 hrs

120 hrs

168 hrs

192 hrs

216 hrs

As mentioned in today’s video, it’s not just Europe which turns cold or very cold through the second half of next week but we are part of two regions of the mid-latitudes in which a major trough draws south arctic air. Western and Central North America turns very cold and in fact could be rather brutal with the greatest temperature departure at 850mb over the entire hemisphere settling over southern Alberta and Montana by around 240 hours. In other words, we could see the coldest air mass in all of the hemisphere centred over the US Northern Rockies late next week and weekend.

Notice the warm tongue pushing into the arctic which is driving the arctic air south into two main troughs. A lot of warmer than normal air will reside on the other side of the hemisphere.

Check out the actual 850mb temperatures for the same time period (192 hrs) and notice the much milder 850 temps extending from north-central Siberia towards the pole, this is splitting the polar vortex.

By 240 hrs the core of coldest air anywhere in the hemisphere is seen to drop over Montana, this intensity of cold could produce overnight lows of -50F, a reading the US has not seen in several years. The core of the other trough, shifts east of the UK and centres over the heart of Europe. We still remain cold however, especially if there’s snow on the ground.

Speaking of snow, here’s the latest from the ECMWF over the next 240 hrs.

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Tags: cold, europe cold, europe snow, snow, winter, winter 2013-14, winter forecast