Bitter European Arctic Blast Creates Roman Winter Holiday; California Epic Hail

Welcome to snowy Rome, Italy.

Priests had a rare chance to partake in snowball fights
in St Peters Square as an unusual snowstorm hit
Rome this week. Photo by Alessadro Tarantino/AP

Yep. It doesn't usually snow there, but it did this week, big time, as you might have seen in various press reports.

The last decent snowfall before this week in Rome was in 2012, and that last time before that was in the early 1980s. This time, between 1.5 an 6 inches of snow fell around Rome.

Since Rome doesn't usually get snow, the city basically shut down. Schools, airports, public transportation, businesses and streets closed.

Which left the people of Rome to just enjoy the spectacle. People were treated to the sight of priests engaging in snowball fights in St. Peters Square.

Rome did open subway and train stations to provide refuge to homeless people.

After a couple chilly days - with high temperatures near 40 today and Wednesday, temperatures in Rome are likely to rise into the more seasonable upper 50s later this week.

Elsewhere in Europe, temperatures fell into the teens in Brussels, prompting officials there to detain homeless people forcefully to protect them if they didn't want to go to warm shelters, says Reuters. 

The current weather pattern in Europe has been dubbed the "Beast From The East" as the current rather odd weather pattern has shifted winds over Europe so they're going from east to west. The air is coming from Siberia, so of course it's very cold in a broad stretch from Moscow to London.

The weather pattern has also brought an odd burst of above freezing air to the Arctic, so it was actually warmer for a time at the North Pole than in normally temperate western Europe.

SACRAMENTO ICE

A very whitened Sacramento, California after
a Monday hailstorm. Via Robert Krier
@sdutKrier on Twitter.

Meanwhile, in California, they had a hail of a time in Sacramento on Monday.  Thunderstorms combined with colder than normal temperatures unloaded a big dump of hail on California's capital city.

The hailstones weren't big enough to ding cars or damage windows, but there was a lot of it. The hail accumulated up to three inches deep in some parts of the city, snarling traffic with slippery roads. There was so much hail that some people built snowmen, er, hailmen with it.

At least the hail was some sort of moisture. California has been very dry this winter, raising fears of a return to severe drought.

There are more showers and mountain snows around California this week. Snow levels in the hills and mountains in southern California are unusually low due to a cold spell out there.

Winter storm warnings are up for elevations as low as 2,000 feet east of San Diego.

Some videos:

Snowball fight in Rome:





Here's a news report from the Sacramento hail chaos: