The weather pattern map for January shows a big low pressure anomaly over Iceland and the high pressure anomaly over Italy. The prevailing winds gave a warmer than average month across most of Europe, but notably so in the northeast of Europe. The MetDesk map in the image above shows the temperature departures from average.
Not surprisingly, due to the warmer than average weather, the snow depths are below normal over much of Europe, apart from some above normal locations across the mountains of Spain. Andin the London area, January 2020 will probably come out as the warmest since 2008.
The main question is: are we going to see a big turnaround in the weather or will we see more of the same during February?
From our analysis, the signals are considerably strong and our forecast is for another warmer than average winter month across Europe, with the warmest places, relative to average, being a line east of Sweden to Poland. Similar to January, we believe low pressure will be much more frequent across northern Europe with a cell of high pressure likely over the western Mediterranean Sea.
In general terms for February, we expect all of Europe to be milder than average - but with a north-south split for wind and rain. The northern half of Europe will probably be very wet and windy at times, whereas Portugal, Spain and across to Italy and Greece will have below average wind and rain but above average sunshine levels.
The MetDesk map in the image on the main pagegives us an illustration of how we expect the weather pattern to be during the period from Tuesday 11 -Saturday 15 February. The main low pressure is centred just west of Iceland and the high pressure is established across Iberia. Between the two, we can see the isobars which indicate a strong westerly wind coming in from the nearby Atlantic Ocean and extending all the way to Scandinavia.
The risk of wind storms is higher than normal for February and these could impact Ireland and the UK. The risk of flooding is also enhanced, especially in areas with already saturated ground. We expect some snowfalls and gales over the Scottish mountains, perhaps most likely after the cold fronts move across. For anyone interested in mountain weather we recommend this website from the Met Office -
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/specialist-forecasts/mountain
There seems to be little threat of any extreme or prolonged cold weather in February, but if we see any potential changes we will issue updates to our weather blog.
For more weather information you can follow our meteorologist, Simon Cardy on Twitter weather_king.