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Lightning during a thunderstorm on Sunday near Hanover
Photo: Julian Stratenschulte / dpa
If you couldn't sleep last night because of the noise, then it was probably "Wolfgang" 's fault.
That was the name of the low pressure area that swept across Germany from Sunday to Monday.
From Bavaria via Thuringia up to Rügen - with lightning, thunder and sometimes heavy rain.
In the meantime, the storm has withdrawn to the north, but its consequences will give Germany a two-tiered weather on Monday, there are astonishing temperature differences in the country, the difference is close to 20 degrees.
There is a meteorological explanation for this.
Why are there such extremely different temperatures in different parts of Germany?
On Monday morning there was an extreme contrast in temperatures.
While the values in the east were still around 30 degrees - Görlitz came to 29.1 degrees at 11.30 a.m., Cottbus to 28.7 degrees - as on the hot days before, in some cases not even half of these values were reached on the North Sea.
Schleswig came to just 12.4 degrees on Monday at 11.30 a.m., List on Sylt to 13.7.
Here the values had dropped by around ten degrees compared to the hot weekend.
"That always happens in such borderline weather conditions," says DWD spokesman Andreas Friedrich.
Specifically, it is also about "Wolfgang": Air currents around such low pressure areas always run counterclockwise in the northern hemisphere.
This currently means that the south and east of Germany will continue to be heated by warm air from the Mediterranean region.
Warnings of extreme heat were therefore issued on Monday morning in the east of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Brandenburg, Saxony and Bavaria as well as in Berlin.
In contrast, cooler air from northern Europe flows into the northwest.
It creates dense clouds and initially shower-like rain.
This explains the large temperature difference.
Where does the big difference in rainfall come from?
Gardeners and farmers are happy where the low pressure area has caused precipitation in its train path - even though they would probably have preferred a calm, steady rain instead of heavy.
The amount of rain over 24 hours varies greatly, which also has to do with the formation of thunderstorms.
Wherever they fell there was a lot of rain: from 25 liters per square meter in Erfurt or Gera or 21 in Lahr or Nuremberg.
Where the thunderstorms did not discharge, everything stayed dry.
Berlin can only use 0.4 liters per square meter.
And places like Regensburg -
oh, the irony
- Dresden or Angermünde were left with
nothing
when it
rained
.
Is it now an end to storms?
In large parts of Germany the situation calmed down somewhat after the passage of "Wolfgang", but a general end to the storms is not expected. "We will have the third thunderstorm night in a row," says DWD spokesman Friedrich. Especially the south of Germany is still influenced by the humid air. From Switzerland and eastern France, a new thunderstorm area moves in in the evening and at night, causing southern Baden-Wuerttemberg and Bavarian Swabia sometimes up to 40 liters of heavy rain per square meter, hail up to 5 centimeters in diameter and gusts of wind of up to 100 kilometers per hour can bring. On Tuesday, the meteorologists expect brisk showers and thunderstorms in the southwest, the center as well as on the Oder and Neisse.
There were tornadoes in Belgium and France over the weekend.
Are we threatened with something like that too?
The danger is definitely there.
The DWD experts have also warned against such a possibility in the past few days.
The problem is that the formation of so-called super cells, i.e. particularly dangerous thunderstorms that can also lead to tornadoes, cannot really be predicted.
No one can predict whether and when such a dangerous storm will occur.
But the potential for this is there.
chs
