Hi everyone,

I thought I'd give you an update on the weather in Greece over the
last couple of days. As you might imagine, since much of northern and
western Europe were enjoying widespread snowfalls in the last weeks,
Greece was under southerlies and temperatures were kept unseasonably
high in some areas. Only the northwestern areas of the country had
extreme amounts of rainfall in this period, with most weather stations
in the region of Epirus (the northwest) now reporting way above 3000
mm of precipitation for 2010 (some of them more than 700 mm for
November 2010 only); this includes low altitude stations.

With temperatures over 20C on 8th, 9th and 10th December, nobody was
really believing the warnings for a sharp drop in temperatures for
later on 10th December. As it had been forecast, temperatures indeed
dropped from the balmy 20C levels by more than 15 Centigrades in a few
hours and it ...snowed later on the same day, as well as through most
of yesterday in Athens down to sea level, as well as the eastern and
southern windprone areas of the country. In Crete, people are trapped
in 4m of snow (smart of them to have visited the 2000m mountains with
a forecast for snow and the still very warm Cretan sea upwind). Low
elevation weather stations reported down to 0C in northern Crete, 1C
along the Libyan sea coast in the south of the island (snow was
reported there too). Widespread frost was reported across the island
further inland. Today's temperature minima were down to -17C in
mountainous areas in the north of Greece, while areas of the
Dodecanese islands never made it below 8C.

I had the chance to see Dublin's snow last week; there was still lying
snow through yesterday, though melting. There was a lot of black ice
everywhere, especially during the first days of my stay there. -2C in
Dublin felt very mild compared to the temperatures in Berlin, where I
had flied from.

All the best for a lovely afternoon,
Yannis.