BBC Weather warning: ‘Six-metre waves and heavy snow’ as storms batter continent

Weather warning: Huge waves and heavy snow forecast

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BBC Weather’s Sarah Keith-Lucas warned of torrential downpours to affect Spain and Italy until Wednesday while heavy snow is expected to fall in Norway and Sweden. An area of low pressure has been churning up gale-force winds in the Mediterranean. Ms Keith-Lucas said: “The weather is set to cause some disruption in the western Mediterranean.

“We’ve got a slow-moving storm. You can see the cloud rotating around an area of low pressure in the western Mediterranean and it’s not going to go anywhere in a hurry.

“The next few days will have really torrential downpours across the Balearics and gale-force gusts, four to six-metre waves and really heavy downpours up to Sicily and Corsica.

“Meanwhile it stays warm and dry for Turkey and Cyprus.

“Quite unsettled for Scandinavia, windy conditions and also some fairly heavy snow across Norway and Sweden.

“The outlook is a fairly quiet one for London, Paris, and Madrid but in Rome, we’ll continue to see those heavy showers over the next five days or so.

“Largely dry and settled in Berlin with a few showers working in here by Saturday.”

It comes as climate change triggers deadly heatwaves, droughts, and floods, three UN agencies on Wednesday rolled out funding plans to improve weather forecasting in vulnerable countries.

The initiative, announced at the UN climate summit in Glasgow, aims to plug gaps in weather monitoring and data collection so developing countries can better prepare for possible climate-fuelled disasters.

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Over the next decade, organizers at the UN’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO) plan to boost weather monitoring in 75 small island nations and least-developed countries that have done little to cause the climate crisis but face the biggest and costliest impacts.

“We have to invest in weather and climate services,” WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas told conference attendees.

“Without observations, we are not able to provide good services.”

“In modelling, we say that if you put junk in your forecasting models you are getting junk out. Unfortunately, that’s the situation in several developing countries and also several island state countries,” he said.

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Improving rain forecasts, for instance, can help farmers manage their fields, communities manage water resources or governments plan for food imports when yields look likely to falter. They can also allow people to prepare for possible flooding.

For the Red Cross in Burkina Faso, such forecasts – when they exist – are crucial to the aid organization’s budget and procurement planning, Red Cross climate scientist Kiswendsida Guigma said.

But in many places, there is a “huge gap” in accuracy and detail, Guigma said. “We don’t have very dense networks of instruments collecting data, and (there is) a lack of human and technical capacity.”

The new initiative, called the Systematic Observations Finance Facility, is led by the WMO, the U.N. Development Programme, and the UN Environment Programme and falls under global plans to provide $100 billion a year in climate financing to poorer nations.

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