If your new to the website and perhaps just starting to get interested in weather, be sure to watch the first of today’s Europe videos as I go back to basics and look at what drives our weather. Perhaps your more advanced and want to get more into the nuts and bolts, we’ll the 2nd video is perhaps more of interest.

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In a seemingly uninteresting pattern where an anticyclone dominates, keeping things quiet with little to really look at, don’t be fooled into believing winter’s over. I can rest assure you that winter isn’t over. For 1 it’s only Feb 9 and for two, modelling is showing a WESTWARD shift in the ridge which initially was centred to our west and drew down some very cold arctic (maritime) air. This is a mere 10-day doldrums period but it’s certainly producing some pretty cold nights under clear skies and light winds. Where fog forms and lingers thanks to the moisture trapped beneath this high (source is Atlantic of course), you get cold, frosty days. That to me is winter-like and not mild. In saying that where clear by night and sunny by day, we’re seeing a fairly sizable diurnal fluctuation in temperature. Perhaps -2 to -4 by day, rising to +9 or 10C during the afternoon. Somewhat spring-like.

Now, since this high shifts, we could see the return of wet and windy conditions as the Atlantic flow opens up once again and with that comes the chance of seeing mild, then wet and windy followed by a blast of cold from Greenland which brings the return of snow showers, or the high builds over Europe with core centred over Scandinavia in which we may pick up an easterly flow.

The trouble is Europe is warming up and so if we pick up an easterly, it may be chilly rather than downright cold because the source (continental) has been drained of it’s cold.

The GFS ensemble 7-day mean 500mb height anomalies shows a WESTWARD retrogression of mean ridge currently over the UK and so we may pick up more NW or even N flow again.

GFS operational shows a return to wet and windy by the end of this week but as heights build to our NNE, we may see an easterly by around this time next week.

However, the ECMWF shows a more pronounced return of the Atlantic but with bitter cold back in Greenland, these lows could bring the return of bitter northwest winds and therefore the return to a colder more progressive setup just like we saw earlier in the season.

See video for discussion.

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