Europe in a Deep Freeze

Belgrade, winter 2012
Photo from the Kuwait Times

Heavy snow and bone-chilling cold weather are holding central and eastern Europe in their grip.  Countries not used to such weather are struggling with power and traffic issues: Serbia, Ukraine, Poland, Bulgaria, Turkey, Romania. The cold is hitting the U.K. today.

The Met Office in the U.K. has issued a Level 2 alert that there is a 100% probability of severe cold weather between Thursday and Sunday, with temperatures dipping as low as -6 to -10 Celsius. Their alert levels depend on three thresholds: mean temperatures below 2 C for 48 hours or longer, heavy snow, widespread ice. Only one of the three needs to occur before an alert is issued. A level three alert means prolonged periods of cold weather, and triggers some specific actions by social and healthcare services to target high-risk groups. The highest level, 4, means that the weather is so severe that even the healthy could suffer adverse effects and that the effects are so broad that they extend outside the health and social care system. The Met forecast for Belgrade, for example is for a maximum temperature of -10 C and a minimum of -12 C today and tonight. Things then "warm up" to negative single digits through Monday. Bucharest is even colder, at -12 to -14 today, and -7 to -10 tomorrow.

It is very rewarding to know that people actually read this blog! Shortly after I posted this morning on the situation in Europe, I received a comment from Siim Sepp in Estonia: 


"Europe is in a deep freeze indeed but I am somewhat puzzled by these temperatures given in this article. -10 C is really nothing unusual in eastern part of continental Europe. Right now temperature in Estonia where I live is near -30 and Estonia is not the coldest country here. Our climate is influenced by the Baltic Sea which makes it wetter and warmer. Russia, Ukraine, and Poland are in large part more continental climatically and suffer usually even more despite being located in more southerly latitudes (except parts of Russia of course)."



I (SWK) can explain what happened, and how it sometimes goes with blogging.  I started the post this morning, and then went searching on the WWW for a reliable meteorological source (I try to do that whenever possible rather than relying on news reports or "soft" sources.) In so doing, I went to the U.K. Met Office, got distracted with the forecasts for Britain, and forgot to get back to central Europe before leaving for my "real job" at work! Apologies to those freezing there--Stay Warm!


On top of everything else, another not-uncommon blogging problem hit while I was inserting this addition--I hit the wrong key and deleted everything that I had typed up to this point. So, I'm going to post this before anything else goes wrong!


At least 150 people have died in Europe as a result of this deep freeze in countries spanning from Italy to the Ukraine. Temperatures plunged to -32 C (-25.6 F) in Poland overnight. In Ukraine, tens of thousands of people are in shelters.

Last year was one of the coldest winters on record in Britain, and it was linked to the strong La Nina in place at the time. La Nina returned again last fall, and the Met Office predicted another cold winter this year, going so far as to suggest that Britain could face decades of bitter winters and return to a "Little Ice Age." This is based on observations of the sun that show that the UV output up to five times more variable than previously thought. The sun had been in one of its quietest phases of the 11-year cycle until this year, and during this time there were three years when the UK and northern Europe experienced unusually cold conditions, with warmer weather in the southern parts of those areas, around the Mediterranean, and north in Canada and Greenland. Although a number of papers have shown the correlation of low sunspot activity with cold weather in Europe, a mechanism has been lacking. The proposal here is that UV is absorbed in the stratosphere by ozone, so that in quiet parts of the sun cycle there is less UV to absorb and the stratosphere stays cooler. The effects from this "percolate" down through the atmosphere, affecting the jet stream above Europe, North America and Russia. The significant change is that air flow from west to east is reduced, which allows colder air into the UK and northern Europe.

A significant result from this research is that the Little Ice Age, often attributed to climate change phenomena, was due, rather, to changes in the solar output that redistributed the temperatures around the north Atlantic but that, on average over the whole earth, the climate was constant.

Here is a news release about this issue, and here is the original article in Nature Geoscience. The news release spawned considerable discussion of weather vs. climate that you can find here.