Heaviest Snow in Decades Batters U.K., Ireland and the Continent<br />The National Grid, the operator of Britain’s power and gas networks, issued a warning<br />that Britain might not have enough gas to meet demand on Thursday as temperatures continued to plummet and imports were hit by power failures.<br />Meteorologists say that the cold spell could last for up to two weeks, and<br />that even with temperatures expected to rise during the day next week, temperatures will most likely remain close to freezing at night.<br />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<br />of drifting snow amid blizzard conditions to the moorlands of Devon, as well as Cornwall and South Wales, before barreling toward Ireland.<br />Ireland was bracing for a direct hit on Thursday from Emma, the powerful storm system roaring up from the Bay of Biscay<br />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.<br />Chloe Moore said that These changes in the upper areas of the atmosphere over the North Pole then lead to the jet stream<br />being pushed southwards, which is what normally drives weather patterns in the U.K. and northwestern Europe,<br />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<br />that has alarmed scientists and forced some to reconsider even the most pessimistic forecasts for climate change.
