Temperatures will fall between four and nine degrees Celsius from Wednesday in mainland Portugal, due to a cold, dry mass of Arctic air.
According to the ever-cheerful Maria João Frada, a meteorologist at the Portuguese Institute for the Sea and the Atmosphere (IPMA), Monday and Tuesday will be cold and cloudy in central and northern parts of the country and clear in the south but on Wednesday until at least Friday or Saturday it will get seriously cold, for Portugal anyway.
The predicted drop in the already chilly temperatures is due to a mass of polar air northwest of the Iberian Peninsula. This will gradually move across to towards the interior of Europe - mainly northern Europe.”
According to Frada, the anticyclone will give rise to an even cooler and dryer mass of air, "It will no longer be polar, it will be a mass of air with thermodynamic characteristics of Arctic air, that’s to say, it is drier and cooler than we have had so far, so it is predicted, with a very high degree of probability, that from Wednesday there will be a significant drop in temperatures.”
Due to this Arctic air, a nighttime temperature drop of at four to six degrees and a daytime drop of seven to nine degrees is expected, depending where you are.
"The minimum will be zero degrees along the coast and the interior regions will drop well below zero, ranging between -3 and -7 degrees in the north and central interior. Here the daytime high will not exceed 10 degrees.
As usual, the Algarve is spared the worst of the cold with lows of between two and four degrees.
The IPMA also warns of the dreaded ‘black frost’ which will damage plants by freezing them from the inside out and turning the plant black.
As for countrywide temperatures during this cold burst: Lisbon 5 to 16, Oporto 3 to 15, Vila Real 1 to 10, Viseu 1 to 12, Bragança -2 to 11, Guarda -1 to 8, Coimbra 3 to14, Castelo Branco 4 to 14, Santarém 2 to 16, Évora 1 to 15, Beja 3 to 14 and in Faro, between 8 and a positively balmy 18C - but down to two degrees in other of the Algarve's areas.
