AbstractA detailed synoptic and mesoscale analysis is conducted of an intense convective outbreak which struck much of Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria in early March 1980. Severe winter weather caused considerable personal hardship and economic disruption over a wide area.The planetary‐scale circulation featured a confluent flow pattern across North Africa and southern Europe downstream of a block just west of the Greenwich meridian. A strong subtropical jet stream was maintained across North Africa in the confluent flow regime. Synoptic‐scale disturbances from the Atlantic were diverted northward across Scandinavia from where they plunged south‐eastward toward the Mediterranean to the west of the Black Sea. A series of three disturbances, the last being the most powerful, swept through the eastern Mediterranean as the vortex settled south‐eastward toward the Middle East.Our analysis of the available evidence has established that three physical mechanisms contributed primarily to the extreme nature of the event. First, the steady south‐eastward movement of mobile short wave troughs resulted in the progressive cooling of the lower and middle troposphere over the eastern Mediterranean Sea and the Middle East. Second, sea surface heat and moisture fluxes contributed to destabilization and the generation of extreme instability where the cold air from higher latitudes had a long overwater fetch. Third, exceptionally heavy precipitation fell where a strong low‐level moist, unstable westerly air stream impinged on the coastal mountains. The strong westerly flow was generated to the south of an intense subsynoptic‐scale vortex that formed in the lower and mid troposphere as the updraught region of a powerful short‐wave‐trough/ jet‐streak system aloft ingested air that had been