Thread by @althecat

Here is the continuation of the #WestAfricaWaterPlume transformation of European weather this morning into something which is both unpredictable and not particularly nice, i.e. windy wet and cold.

The following three animations are offered to help Europeans who are curious to understand what is going on. Our weather reports tend to be geographically confined in a manner that obscures the bigger picture.

The first shows the water vapour picture over 84 hours till Friday arpund midday. The #WestAfricaWaterPlume can be seen coming in bottom left over Algeria. simultaneously another storm is coming in at speed into the British isles. Hence all the rain.

Above you can see an area without rain crossing from West to East, from UK to the Baltic. This corresponds with the low pressure area you see here which has come in from the Arctic and is dry air. The combination of dry cold air and warm wet air is unstable =rain.

And finally the cold. The low system moving east results in flows of cold air from the North Atlantic flowing into Western Europe and that accounts for the cold nights and daytime temperatures in their teens at a time when they should be in their 20s.

Finally, its worth noting that it could have been worse. The two Indian Ocean cyclones #Tauktae last week and now #Yaas have been impeding the flow of water vapour west along the equator from the Pacific. Had they not done so, this weeks water plume may have been much stronger.