It’s rainy up north, with the added threat of tornados along the coast with many of Portugal's areas already on yellow alert this Thursday.
Heavy rain with thunderstorms will continue to affect the mainland at least until Saturday but the Algarve will only get rain, from this evening with showers already showing up in western areas.
"The rainfall will cover the whole country because we have a depression centered to the northwest of the continent. Today and tomorrow it will be stationary and then it will move south towards the mainland," said the ever-cheery meteorologist Maria João Frada.
Besides rain, Frada says that "there is the possibility of extreme wind phenomena. The possibility of scattered events such as tornadoes can not be ruled out near the coast or even over the sea. It's a low probability, but the threat is there because the air mass is unstable."
From Saturday afternoon the rain will ease off, and Sunday will be colder but without rain.
The rain in the Algarve may not be the sustained heavy showers needed to even start to fill the dams and aquifers, sucked dry by a record year for tourism and a recent boom in water-thirsty agriculture. The weather men say we need two months of constant rainfall to replenish supplies and the government already is looking at six shelved dam projects to see what is achievable to boost the country's storeage capacity.
The southern forecast is for rain until Saturday, but these may turn out to be no more than weak showers from a grey, gloomy sky.
Temperatures certainly are falling, with a daytime maximum of 21°C in the Algarve for the next few days and nighttime lows of just 12°C.
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