Jump to content
IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT ABOUT LOGGING IN ×
  • WELCOME GUEST

    It looks as if you are viewing PalmTalk as an unregistered Guest.

    Please consider registering so as to take better advantage of our vast knowledge base and friendly community.  By registering you will gain access to many features - among them are our powerful Search feature, the ability to Private Message other Users, and be able to post and/or answer questions from all over the world. It is completely free, no “catches,” and you will have complete control over how you wish to use this site.

    PalmTalk is sponsored by the International Palm Society. - an organization dedicated to learning everything about and enjoying palm trees (and their companion plants) while conserving endangered palm species and habitat worldwide. Please take the time to know us all better and register.

    guest Renda04.jpg

European Extreme Weather?


Chester B

Recommended Posts

With the annual wildfires in the west, hurricanes in the south east, polar vortexes, tornadoes and bomb cyclones that we experience regularly over here in North America we rarely hear of such things on the European continent.  Do any of the European countries experience the same type of damaging weather on a regular basis that we have almost become accustomed to live with?  Or is it the lack of world news and our own ignorance (myself included) of events that we receive over here in the US? 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

10 minutes ago, Chester B said:

With the annual wildfires in the west, hurricanes in the south east, polar vortexes, tornadoes and bomb cyclones that we experience regularly over here in North America we rarely hear of such things on the European continent.  Do any of the European countries experience the same type of damaging weather on a regular basis that we have almost become accustomed to live with?  Or is it the lack of world news and our own ignorance (myself included) of events that we receive over here in the US? 

Might be how you get your news info.. Follow a few U.S. storm chasers / climatologists on Twitter and see lots of pictures of pretty wild weather events across various parts of Europe / Mediterranean/  Middle East posted by people there.

Just a few tweets from across the Pond. Don't ask me to translate, lol *** Credit to each Photographer**
 

 


Weather can be just as crazy over there.. A bit envious of the summer storms Italy gets..

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 9/14/2020 at 11:32 PM, Silas_Sancona said:

Might be how you get your news info.. Follow a few U.S. storm chasers / climatologists on Twitter and see lots of pictures of pretty wild weather events across various parts of Europe / Mediterranean/  Middle East posted by people there.

Just a few tweets from across the Pond. Don't ask me to translate, lol *** Credit to each Photographer**
 

 

 

Well, we didn't quite reach 35C (95F) here at 51N during the recent 'hot' spell, however it has been very warm still. And very dry too. I have not recorded any measurable rainfall for the whole of September so far. The month started off with below average temperatures but has averaged out with temperatures well above average over the past week or so.

These are the temperatures I have recorded over the past 6 days...

Saturday - 22.6C / 13.1C

Sunday - 28.1C / 12.0C

Monday - 32.7C / 15.8C

Tuesday - 32.9C / 18.1C

Wednesday - 27.6C / 16.0C

Thursday - 23.3C / 14.3C

As you can see, temperatures have started to drop off massively again now and I am only expecting a high of 21-22C on Friday here. Although we should recover to the mid-20's C over the weekend, with 25-26C forecast from Saturday through to Monday. That might be the last burst of summer heat for us though.

The sun is really starting to lose strength/intensity up here at 51N, given that we are only 3 months away from the winter solstice now. The lack of sunlight intensity will clearly have a bearing on how much we can heat up during the day. Even if we get another big burst of warm Saharan air, combined with high pressure, the lack of sunlight intensity at this stage of the year will make it very hard to go above 30C again now, as we go into October.

We could really do with some rain as well, given how dry it is right now, still. Most of northwestern Europe has experienced the warm, dry conditions since spring, not just England. Most of us over here would probably put it down to climate change.

Dry-summer Oceanic climate (9a)

Average annual precipitation - 18.7 inches : Average annual sunshine hours - 1725

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Europe is only the western part of the Eurasian continent like the american west coast is for the American continent. A large part of Europe is also at the same latitude as Canada so pretty far to the north as well. We have our occasional forest fires and heat waves in the Mediterranean and winter storms from the Atlantic but that's about it I think. Europe is too far to the north to experience tropical storms like hurricanes and because most of our mountain ranges are from west to east instead of north south we don't have things like tornadoes which I understand are created when warm and cold air collide. Overall I think the weather is more stable in most parts of Europe compared to north america. 

Edited by Marco67
  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 hours ago, Marco67 said:

we don't have things like tornadoes which I understand are created when warm and cold air collide.

It's funny you say that because I think England actually experiences more tornadoes per sqm than any other country in the world. They're obviously nowhere near as extreme as the ones in North America though, for whatever reason. But it does appear that England is the most tornado prone place in the world, per sqm at least. Saying that, we had a couple of twisters around here last winter, including an F2 that wrecked a few neighbourhoods in my county. Nothing major though.

I don't think we have ever had anything worse than an F3 here in the UK and those are very, very rare. Most twisters are F1's on the scale, with a few F2's each year here, and then the odd F3 once every decade or so. The UK as a whole experiences about 45 twisters each year, which certainly doesn't seem like a lot, until you look at the number per square mile. Our twisters don't hang around long either and seem to disappear quicker than the ones in North America too. I won't even pretend to know the science behind why that is.

 

6 hours ago, Marco67 said:

Overall I think the weather is more stable in most parts of Europe compared to north america. 

This is definitely true to a degree. We don't have the same extent of extreme cold and extreme heat that is seen in North America. We don't have the same number of storms either and the storms that we do have are often lower in intensity. I think the Mediterranean and North/Baltic seas massively moderate the climate in Europe and help keep things relatively stable.

  • Like 1

Dry-summer Oceanic climate (9a)

Average annual precipitation - 18.7 inches : Average annual sunshine hours - 1725

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I was surprised te read that we seem to have tornadoes in the Netherlands as well. But most of the the time they seem to be much less destructive as in for example Oklahoma.  

One big danger we have is of course flooding because we have lots of rivers and a large part of our country is below sea level. Fortunately we invested so much in preventing this that the threat doesn't seem to be very large anymore.  At least that is what we hope. 

Things like hurricanes  and typhoons seem to be typical of the east coast of a continent. Typhoons are very common on our Eurasian east coast in places like Japan and China. 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 9/15/2020 at 12:32 AM, Silas_Sancona said:

Might be how you get your news info.. Follow a few U.S. storm chasers / climatologists on Twitter and see lots of pictures of pretty wild weather events across various parts of Europe / Mediterranean/  Middle East posted by people there.

Just a few tweets from across the Pond. Don't ask me to translate, lol *** Credit to each Photographer**
 

 


Weather can be just as crazy over there.. A bit envious of the summer storms Italy gets..

Key words: Slowly, but surely.

The Dry Epoch on Western Europe is easing away, just trust me. Here's a clue; notice how temps on Italy have not even come close to reaching the 40s F yet in September, and Italy had over 2 inches of rain this week from thunderstorms, where these events used to happen every couple of years in the 20th Century, during one peak of the Dry Epoch.

Edited by Texyn
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 4 weeks later...
On 9/14/2020 at 11:58 PM, Chester B said:

With the annual wildfires in the west, hurricanes in the south east, polar vortexes, tornadoes and bomb cyclones that we experience regularly over here in North America we rarely hear of such things on the European continent.  Do any of the European countries experience the same type of damaging weather on a regular basis that we have almost become accustomed to live with?  Or is it the lack of world news and our own ignorance (myself included) of events that we receive over here in the US? 

We surely do have extreme weather here in Europe but maybe not always as destructive or a size that you people in US sees. Climate warming/change is also here helping to increase the amount or power from extreme weather events as well just like at other parts of the world.  I do however speak quite often with people from US because of my work and most of the time that kind of news does not really reach that part of the world. 

Few recent examples. 

  • Past few years parts of northwest Europe does experience drought with dying nature but compared to my colleague living in Texas where its dry all the time year in year out he does not look surprised.
  • Last few years there have been huge wildfires in Siberia, very far up north, this year 49 million acres of landscape (27million acres forest) burned to ash which is basically completely the size of Greece. Other parts of the world sees wildfires every years, thinking about Australia or California recently.
  • Heat records are being smashed all over Europe the recent years with sometimes extreme figures for their latitude. Personally I recorded just over 40C/104F on a day last year. Last year 46C/114F in Southern France or what about the high temperatures record in Siberia/Scandinavia. This year 30C/86F reported close to the polecircle. This kind of heat are extremes but also here looking to US or Australia this kind of temperatures are seen more often or are normal to experience in those continents. 
  • Storms are more powerfull, we have seen more "medicane" type of storms in the mediterrean sea, the past few years Portugal/Spain have been hit by tropical depressions/storms what was left from a cyclone but all that is more or less a breeze for the people that experienced the truly cyclones. 
  • Now and than we also see damaging tornado's, two days ago for example one in Ukraine, but the amount of tornado's trough the year are likely to see every year in the state like Oklahoma. 

Again, I think we deal with our extreme weather events as well but just in a European scale and that kind of things might have the same impact on our way of living but nothing special to other parts of the world. 

 

Edited by Exotic Life
  • Like 1
  • Upvote 1

Southwest

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I’ve heard the tornados in Italy can be quite large and powerful, there are tons of YouTube videos of them. Of course they are not like the ones in North America (or not as frequent, I should say), but it is still interesting to learn about them.

Edited by PalmTreeDude

PalmTreeDude

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Here in coastal Croatia we have strong Bura ( Bora ) winds every winter ( cold dry Northern winds ). They are very strong up to 50 m/s (oko 180 km/h).  Record was 304 km/h on 25. December 2003.

https://youtu.be/dImtiFXPseA

https://youtu.be/B2lpFhB_cqE

 

Edited by Cikas
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now



  • Recently Browsing

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...