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Follow up on the heat wave – Monday July 31st, 2017

A blocking pattern dominates eastern half of Europe where an intensifying heat wave was spreading from SSW into central Europe past weekend. Yesterday’s max afternoon temps were locally already exceeding 35°C and even higher can be expected today. Here are peak afternoon temps across Iberian peninsula, Italy, central Europe countries and S Balkan countries yesterday – locally above 33-38 °C (e.g. S Greece, W Turkey central Balkan peninsula) with SSE Spain again up to 42 °C in some places!

Europe is actually divided in two halfs with much cooler temps across W Europe and hot weather further ESE with deep trough over W Europe and an intense ridge over ESE Europe. These two maps reveal the still strengthening ridge with 850 mb temperature’s 20 °C isotherm continuing advecting across the Alpine area onto N Balkans today, this will push temps even higher than yesterday.

This afternoon’s temps should rise into upper 30s across parts of Italy, central Balkan peninsula and parts of S France. Max temps in Spain should mostly remain below 40 °C as some cooler temps aloft will overspread the Iberian peninsula and ridge pushed more to the east.

The more extreme heat is expected tomorrow, when temps could hit the 40 °C treshold over parts of N Italian plains tomorrow, locally up to 42 °C seem reasonable given the additional warming aloft.

Latest GFS model trends for the next 10 days – now it appears quite likely that this heat wave will be very long and could extend well into next week, lasting up to 10 days without a break in between as models were hinting in previous days. However, active severe weather is expected on the western flank of the ridge (France, Germany).

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Stay tuned for further follow ups & updates soon!