Where in Continental Europe does it snow and get cold (besides Russia, Baltics, Scandinavia) (climate, Canadian)
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Lowest temperastures ever recorded in European counties.
Lowest records in Germany, Italy and Austria were at high elevation on Alpine peaks.
It's fastinanting how Britain and Ireland are mild for latitude. Even Greece has lower minimum ever than Britain and Ireland.
Britain and ireland appear "mild" vecause they do not have high mountains... italy has dozens of peaks above 4000 meters... the highest mountain in the UK is something like only 1500 meters I guess. So obviouly it does not have as cold records than a mountain of 4800 meters...
The best places for recording very low temperatures are mountain “bowls”, i.e. plateaus at an altitude surrounded by marginally higher mountains.
Such places can experience extreme thermal inversion because the cold air stagnates; furthermore on clear windless nights and with snow on the ground they can radiate a lot of heat to the sky.
That Italian -49.6 C was not recorded on the top of a four-thousander: it was recorded on a high-altitude plateau in the middle of Le Pale di San Martino at 2700 m (Dolomites).
But very low temperatures, much colder than those record lows in the British Isles, can happen at much lower altitudes.
For example last February Campo Felice (some 80 km east of Rome, at 1500 m asl) recorded -33C.
Or Il Pian del Cansiglio, a plateau at 1000 m asl 70 km north of Venice, routinely dips at -35C (more or less every other winter).
So, since one doesn’t need exceedingly high mountains to record very cold temperatures, those all-time lows for the British Isles do indeed look quite lame.
Britain and ireland appear "mild" vecause they do not have high mountains... italy has dozens of peaks above 4000 meters... the highest mountain in the UK is something like only 1500 meters I guess. So obviouly it does not have as cold records than a mountain of 4800 meters...
Lowest records in the Balkan countries were not on so high elevation.
Britain and ireland appear "mild" vecause they do not have high mountains... italy has dozens of peaks above 4000 meters... the highest mountain in the UK is something like only 1500 meters I guess. So obviouly it does not have as cold records than a mountain of 4800 meters...
How can they 'appear' mild!! They are either 'mild' or they're not, everybody knows that the reason the islands are mild is because of the Gulf Stream, it would be a very different island without it. At like for like elevations the British Isles are still mild compared to European countries further East,
Britain and ireland appear "mild" vecause they do not have high mountains... italy has dozens of peaks above 4000 meters... the highest mountain in the UK is something like only 1500 meters I guess. So obviouly it does not have as cold records than a mountain of 4800 meters...
True, but my location is still as cold or even colder than many locales on the british isles from November to March (the rest of the year we're tropical compared to them). I'm basically at sea level. So they're pretty mild.
True, but my location is still as cold or even colder than many locales on the british isles from November to March (the rest of the year we're tropical compared to them). I'm basically at sea level. So they're pretty mild.
This is not directed at you and it might just be a Canadian thing, but I find that mild is often (too) associated with warmth. I guess it's because it's more often than not mentioned in relation to winter weather. But a place that generally gets 28-32C temperatures in the summer can't be described as mild in my books.
Places like the British Isles and the west coast of Norway would be what I would call mild. Not somewhere like Bordeaux.
January 8 2017 - an example when in central Europe and Balkans are freezing temperatures (due to cold wave from Siberia and eastern Europe), and in the same time in western Europe are mild temperatures.
This is not directed at you and it might just be a Canadian thing, but I find that mild is often (too) associated with warmth. I guess it's because it's more often than not mentioned in relation to winter weather. But a place that generally gets 28-32C temperatures in the summer can't be described as mild in my books.
Places like the British Isles and the west coast of Norway would be what I would call mild. Not somewhere like Bordeaux.
Am I understanding it wrong?
I think 'mild' means not too cold not too hot, of course it certainly can be both cold and hot in the British Isles but in the main the temperature range is from around 0 deg C to 30 deg C, therefore 'mild', I think the 'average' in Bordeaux is probably higher in the Summer months but again in the main the temperature there is between those numbers, therefore what I would call both 'mild'.
The British Isles are 'mild' in winter because they are islands in the middle of water. Maritime places almost universally feature climates with a fairly cool spring and summer and mild autumn and winter. The Gulf stream adds to this phenomenon, but it's the same factor that gives Juneau, AK a much milder winter and yet cooler summer than Fairbanks, AK (same as Halifax, NS vs Ottawa, ON). The physical properties of water are the defining element here
Think about it like this...if you're at the beach in the heat of August, the water is almost certainly colder than the air at the beach - and even more so than the air 10 miles inland from the beach (try the contrast between Santa Monica vs Anaheim on a summer day) - so it's 'refreshing'. But if you're in a polar winter and it's 20 below..any unfrozen body of water is going to be significantly warmer than the air around you. Large bodies of water are chilling factors in summer and warming factors in winter.
Then think about prevailing weather patterns (which are of course heavily influenced by those factors). Europe's summers don't usually feature stable sunny, warm conditions because the continent is subject to cyclones shuffled into Europe from the North Atlantic by the prevailing westerlies. Who is most exposed to these cyclones? The most Western coastal parts of Europe north of the subtropical high pressure zone i.e. prominently the UK and Ireland. In winter these cyclones push wet air into Europe that is much warmer than the dry cold air taking hold over the interior North of the Eurasian continent. Therefore, the further East and away from the Atlantic you go into Europe the drier and warmer the summers and the colder and drier the winters.
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