Havoc from ‘Beast from the East’ continues across Europe
14 degrees below average in Britain
Londoners woke up Wednesday morning to the rare sight of the city blanketed in snow as the icy blast from Siberia that’s causing havoc across Europe will linger for at least this week.
Temperatures across Europe have plummeted and forecasters predict they will remain as much as 14.4 degrees Fahrenheit below average in Britain through the weekend.
The cold spell may have turned the streets of London, Rome and other capitals into pretty photo scenes but also has cost lives across the continent. Freezing weather from Moscow to southern Europe is already testing networks and infrastructure in a bitter weather front that has killed at least 24 people throughout Europe and covered Mediterranean beaches with snow.
Neither London nor Rome usually experiences temperatures dropping below freezing during winters.
While cold weather is forecast next week, too, temperatures will move closer to seasonal norms, according to The Weather Co.
“Today should be the peak of the cold spell across northwest Europe and gas demand should be falling from today onwards,” said John Twomey, power and gas analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
Roads may become blocked by deep snow, and rural communities may be cut off for several days, while long interruptions to power supplies may also occur, Britain’s Met Office said on its website, forecasting heavy snow showers through Thursday. Shorthaul and domestic flights will be disrupted through Friday, British Airways Plc said on its website.
Average temperatures in the U.K. were forecast at 28 degrees on Wednesday, about 16 degrees below seasonal norms, but Britain’s gas network is coping with the increased demand amid supply outages.
The rest of Europe also continues to be affected. Average temperatures in Germany were forecast at 20 degrees, more than 18 degrees below seasonal norms.
Many trains and flights in Sweden have been canceled as a massive amount of snow is falling across the nation, with police advising motorists to stay at home as roads are clogged up in some regions. Temperatures have fallen to as low as minus 22 degrees in the north, and the grid manager started an old oil-fired reserve unit to ensure there is enough power to heat homes.
Russia’s Gazprom PJSC has been shipping record amounts of gas to Europe. The gas exporter has a history of limiting supplies to Europe during freezing weather because of increased demand in Russia. But with spare production capacity, no caps have been announced for this winter.
In parts of Russia, temperatures dropped as low as minus 50 degrees over the past 24 hours. Moscow, the nation’s biggest gas consumer, faced its coldest night this winter on Tuesday with the mercury dropping to almost minus 7 degrees in the center and to minus 22 degrees in the suburbs.
Europeans seeking to escape the blast of icy air dubbed the “Beast from the East” to warmer places may want to think about heading north rather than south. As Europe is buried under snow, the Arctic is witnessing one of its warmest winters ever. In fact, parts of the Arctic Circle have been warmer than much of Europe over the past few days.
“It’s never been this warm. It’s really, really unprecedented, I would say,” Ruth Mottram, a climate scientist for the Danish Meteorological Institute, told German broadcaster DW.
While occasional warm winters in the Arctic have been observed since 1896, climate change scientists say that the current string of warm Arctic winters is part of a disturbing new pattern that could be linked to colder European temperatures.
“These [winter warming] events are not unusual, but they are happening more frequently and with longer durations,” said Robert Graham, a climate scientist at the Norwegian Polar Institute in Tromsø, Norway, according to the American Geophysical Union.