Contrarily to what happened in December of last year, the first two months of 2026 were full of weather variability. A southward elongated jet-stream not only pushed cold air towards Central-and occasionally Southern Europe-but also enhanced extreme events over Western Europe and the Mediterranean.
The result is clearly evident in the animation shown in this post, which contains the 3-hourly accumulated precipitation in the months of January and February 2026 shown in 3D as vertical bars. The month starts with few winter storms over Central Europe, but quickly turns into more active cyclones over the Mediterranean, where deadly floods were observed at the end of January.
The strongest one was without doubt Cyclone Harry, which caused record rainfalls (and snowfalls over Etna, in Sicily) between 19 and 25 January. This still frame corresponds to the 20th of January and shows the strong precipitation over Sardinia and Southern France.
The following map shows instead the total accumulated precipitation, according to the same data, between the 1st of January and the 1st of March, the same period shown in the animation. As expected, the highest amounts can be found on the western coast of the Iberian Peninsula and France, as well as Sardinia, Southern Italy and Greece.
Local accumulations may be even higher that satellite estimation, as we have already seen for Grazalema (Spain), where about 1200 mm fell in just 3 weeks.
Currently the situation has changed, as the jet-stream has moved northward again since few weeks. A strong anticyclone has developed over Central Europe, which doesn’t necessarily mean a complete change in rainfall distributions, but hopefully will lead to less extreme events in Southern Europe.
A higher resolution version of the video can be found here.
How to reproduce the animation
I’ve described a really similar methodology in this article. The only difference here is that we’re using IMERG data and not station data. In order to do that we can implement a simple reader, which requires credentials that you can get upon free registration.
