Bird's Eye View of Convection Firing Across Northwest Europe (credit: Meteo Europe)

DISCUSSION: Over the last 24 to 48 hours, there have been a series of solid convective outbreaks across portions of Northwest Europe.  This has been a direct result of strengthened warm air advection out ahead of a deepening long-wave trough (i.e., a southerly dip in the track of the predominant regional jet stream) which has created an increasingly more favorable convective environment across several parts of Northwest Europe.  The combination of stronger warm air advection and an overall larger degree of buoyancy in the region allowed strong-to-severe thunderstorms to fire across this region.  As shown in the animated satellite imagery above, you can see the variation in cloud-top brightness which also reflects the maximum height of the cloud.  The differential in the maximum cloud-top heights among the respective thunderstorm clusters is often effectively differentiated based on the cloud-top brightness temperature (i.e., in infrared satellite imagery) which illustrates the coldest (and therefore the highest) cloud-tops.  Although the imagery presented above is strictly visible satellite imagery, these were still fairly impressive deep convective storms which fired across parts of western/central Germany.

To learn more about this particular event from a photograph and imagery-based standpoint, click on the following link.

To learn more about other high-impact weather events occurring across Europe, be sure to click here!

©2017 Meteorologist Jordan Rabinowitz