Today and tomorrow are set to be cold and feel even colder, but the Met Office at the Malta International Airport does not expect the snowfall which an Italian meteorological website warned was possible.

A current cold snap has killed over 300 people in Europe and beyond: a rare snowfall was registered in Algiers last weekend. Italian website MeteoWeb said that after Algiers, snow was expected in Tunis today, and was also possible in nearby Malta, Pantelleria and Lampedusa.

MeteoWeb’s alert spread like wildfire through Facebook: it was shared by hundreds of people who were overwhelmingly Maltese, of whom a number welcomed the possibility of such a rare event.

Many others, however, expressed their scepticism about the claim, prompting MeteoWeb to defend its claims on its Facebook page and stress that it based its alert on the basis of a serious risk. It said that snowfall has occurred in Malta in the past, and that although it is a very rare occurrence, Europe was experiencing a very unusual cold snap.

The Malta Met Office was also contacted about the measure, and it issued a clarification stating that the maximum temperature today and tomorrow is expected to be around 10°C whereas the minimum should hover around 6°C.

Such temperatures are already colder than the norm: the mean maximum for February is 15.6°C and the mean minimum is 9.4°C. Expected strong northwesterly winds, especially today, will make the temperature feel even colder.

But the Met Office expects no slow, predicting the weather to be “partly to rather cloudy with isolated showers, possibly thundery.”