Hallo all and belated happy new year wishes!

A couple of severe weather episodes took place in Greece since Christmas. The first one brought snowfalls down to sea level, mainly in eastern and central continental Greece and the northern, and eastern Aegean islands, as well as Crete. Under normal circumstances, I would have focussed my post on that event since it did bring a 1-inch snow cover in Athens and I was lucky enough to experience it. The low was giving one trough after the other, as is usually the case when such a low makes its way slowly eastwards over the southern Dodecanese and into Turkey or the eastern Mediterranean, so Athens did see snow falling on a couple of occasions. Snow covers were slightly more severe and temperature did fall into the minus teens in other areas, but I won't bore you with all that, because, after that, January happened.

Many of you may have seen the trough that made its way over eastern Europe and reached SE Europe on January 5. Very cold air was plunged into the Balkans and well into Greece after that. Many continental areas have been experiencing ice days ever since, although tomorrow shouldn't be an ice day for any coastal area -finally. The all-time temperaure records were not broken, but a few interesting things happened:
- some areas are experiencing a 4th consecutive ice day.
- the sea froze by the coast in some areas (admittedly, close to river mouths). Rivers and lakes had already frozen in northern and northwestern continental areas since December.
- the only areas that saw no frost were some coastal areas in the Dodecanese islands and the very east coastal areas of Crete. Most of the rest of the country saw frost, at least for a couple of days.
- it snowed practically everywhere, in waves, even in areas where it hardly ever snows like the Ionian coastal areas. From the main low and its frontal activity, a secondary surface low, troughs, zones of convergence backed up by the "Aegean lake" effect, any possible mechanism depending on the area.. It did not snow (but there were wintry showers) in some coastal areas of the Dodecanese only. Pictures with beaches covered in snow were sent around from around the country apart from the Dodecanese, to my knowledge. Athens did spend her night in the snow and woke up dressed in white today.
- some mountainous areas saw temperatures down to -20C and bigger towns saw temperatures down to roughly -19C. Tonight is also very cold and frosty and temperatures in the regions of Western Macedonia and Thessaly are quickly dropping below -17C right now. A couple of days ago, Thessaloniki was reporting -9C and high winds right by the sea. Sea smoke evident around the Aegean coastline from Thrace down to the Peloponnese and Crete.
- a surface low from the Libyan coasts made its way northeastwards and gave most continental areas snow again last evening and overnight yesterday. It did, though, bring milder air in to eastern coastal areas.
- some lying areas in the island of Evia, a well-known island for the ridiculous amounts of snow it receives from the Aegean, are now lying under roughly 2m of snow; no idea what's going on in the mountains there.

All the best,
Yannis, NW London