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Heaviest Snow in Decades Batters U.K. and Ireland Heaviest Snow in Decades Batters U.K., Ireland and the Continent
(about 3 hours later)
LONDON — A Siberian weather system making its way across Europe hit the British Isles particularly hard on Thursday, bringing heavy snow, high winds and below-freezing temperatures to areas ill equipped to handle them. LONDON — Mediterranean beaches blanketed in white. Blizzards and “life threatening” conditions in normally snowless areas of Britain, where there is also a developing natural gas shortage. Motorists stranded overnight on a highway in Scotland.
The Met Office, Britain’s national weather service, issued rare “red warnings,” meaning there is “risk to life” for Thursday and Friday, highlighting blizzard conditions in a band across southwest England and southeast Wales, including the cities of Cardiff and Exeter, and it urged people there to remain at home. The Irish weather service, Met Eirann, issued a similar “red alert” for the entire country on Wednesday, continuing through Friday, and government officials urged people to stay home if they could. Since last Friday, Europe has been locked in a Siberian weather pattern that has pummeled the continent with snow, freezing rain and brutal wind chills, paralyzing cities unaccustomed to more than a thin wet film of snow and killing dozens of people, mainly older and homeless people.
Compounding the weather problems, National Grid, Britain’s main energy distributor, warned of a natural gas shortage because of high demand for heating, mechanical problems caused by the cold, and the partial closing last year of an offshore facility that accounted for most of the country’s gas storage capacity. The weather system that is being called the “Beast From the East” has hit Britain especially hard, with some areas buried in up to three feet of snow and pushing temperatures down to as low as 14 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 10 Celsius.)
Officials said they were working with commercial-energy consumers to cut gas use, so that supplies for residential heating and electricity generation would not be affected. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Robert Cole, a lawyer who spent four hours commuting into London from southwest England on Thursday. “It was like coming in from a ski resort, except nothing works.”
Forecasters said that more than a foot of snow would fall in some places from Thursday afternoon through Friday morning. That will give way to freezing rain in places, coating roads and sidewalks with ice and making conditions even more dangerous for travel. The conditions prompted the Met Office to issue a red alert warning for parts of the country, signaling an imminent risk to life.
A red warning for central Scotland was lifted on Thursday, and much of Britain remained under the less severe but still serious amber and yellow warnings. Adding to the problems in Britain, a storm system heading up from the south is colliding with the Siberian air mass, bringing as much as two feet of drifting snow amid blizzard conditions to the moorlands of Devon, as well as Cornwall and South Wales, before barreling toward Ireland.
On Thursday, the third consecutive day of snowfall, most schools across Britain and Ireland were closed, as were many businesses, and even in London, which was not hit as hard as areas to the west, many normally packed streets were quiet. The week’s snowfall totals are expected to be the heaviest in decades. Heavy snow is unusual in southern Britain and Ireland, where the local authorities typically do not have the snowplows and salt spreaders that are standard equipment where harsh winters are commonplace.
Transportation networks were badly snarled by the weather, with extensive breakdowns and cancellations on subway and train services, flight delays and cancellations, and highway traffic moving at a small fraction of its usual speed. Hundreds of drivers were stranded. On Thursday, the third consecutive day of snowfall, most schools across Britain and Ireland were closed, as were many businesses. Even in London, which was not hit as hard as areas to the east and west, many normally packed streets were quiet. The week’s snowfall totals are expected to be the heaviest in decades.
Europe’s weather usually approaches from the Atlantic, to the west, keeping conditions mostly temperate, but that pattern has temporarily reversed, bringing a frigid system from Asia that meteorologists have called “the beast from the east.” Rome had its first snowfall in six years this week. Transportation networks were badly snarled by the weather, with extensive breakdowns and subway and train service stoppages, flight delays and cancellations, and highway traffic moving at a small fraction of its usual speed. Hundreds of drivers were stranded.
Heavy snow is unusual in southern Britain and Ireland, where the local authorities do not have the snowplows and salt spreaders that are standard equipment where harsh winters are commonplace. During rush hour on Thursday, more than half of the scheduled trains at London’s busiest railway station, Waterloo, were either canceled or delayed.
The National Grid issued a warning that Britain might not have enough gas to meet demand on Thursday as temperatures continued to plummet and imports were hit by outages. Spot prices for natural gas have more than quadrupled this week to the highest levels in years, as critics blamed not just the cold weather, but also a decision last year to close a major storage depot.
Officials said they were working with commercial energy consumers to cut gas use so that supplies for residential heating and electricity generation would not be affected.
Europe’s weather usually approaches from the Atlantic, to the west, keeping conditions mostly temperate, but that pattern has temporarily reversed, bringing a frigid system from Asia that meteorologists named “the Beast From the East.” Rome had its first snowfall in six years this week.
The cold weather in Britain and northwestern Europe is to some extent a mirror image of the “sudden stratospheric warming” in the arctic, experts say, referring to a disturbance in the polar jet stream that has alarmed scientists and forced some to reconsider even the most pessimistic forecasts for climate change.
As warm air has surged into the arctic, experts say, a return flow into Europe dropped average February temperatures there to among the coldest ever.
“These changes in the upper areas of the atmosphere over the North Pole then lead to the jet stream being pushed southwards, which is what normally drives weather patterns in the U.K. and northwestern Europe,” said Chloe Moore, a meteorologist for the Royal Meteorological Society in Reading, southern England.
“When we have this setup in winter, the winds then come from the east, and this brings a very cold air mass from Scandinavia and Northern Russia,” she added.
The French national weather agency, Meteo France, put large parts of the country on alert for dangerous levels of snow, ice and wind on Thursday. The agency warned residents to limit travel and movement as heavy snowfall was expected to continue into Friday.
Thousands of homes across the Mediterranean were without power on Thursday, the power provider Enedis said in a statement, as snow fell on areas known for their sun-kissed beaches.
Northern Spain also become paralyzed by snowfall, and a 65-year-old man died after slipping on a snow-covered pavement, the Spanish News agency Europa Press reported. Another older man was found dead in the Netherlands after falling through ice while skating, the BBC reported.
Ireland, which is virtually ignored by the British news media, was bracing for a direct hit on Thursday from Emma, the powerful storm system roaring up from the Bay of Biscay that is expected to deliver 60-mile-an-hour winds and fine, granular snow, leading to snow drifts and whiteout conditions across most or all of the island.
The country was in near lockdown on Wednesday as meteorologists forecast that up to 15 inches of fresh snow would fall in less than 24 hours between Thursday afternoon and 3 p.m. Friday.
The Irish government issued a “status red” weather warning for the east of the island, closing schools and public offices, shutting down public transport and advising businesses to close. All flights were canceled at the Dublin airport on Thursday afternoon, and the police told people not to leave their homes, except in emergencies, from 4 p.m. on Thursday, when the storm was expected to intensify.
Meteorologists say that the cold spell of weather could last for up to two weeks, and that even with temperatures expected to return to higher single digits in the daytime next week, temperatures will most likely remain close to freezing at night.
“It will be a very cold start to spring,” Ms. Moore warned.