You can check what happened yesterday with the weather in southern france and spain on your own charts if you like.

We had an explovise situation, which luckily rarely occurs on the mainland. Usually it occurs over the Atlantic Ocean.

First the Carribean warm air, which gave us such a warmth last friday, see blog.
Then the collision of this warm air, with the cold polar air, firing up the anti-clockwise movement of the air in our low pressure, moving in from the north. There were several low pressure centres that day. This brutal downfall of pressure, it dropped to 966 hPa (usually 984 hPa!), in a very short time.
When the cyclogenesis, which is the creating of a low pressure lets say, is that brutal or say that fast. In other words if the pressure drops more than 24 mB in 24 hours, then they'd like to call it a meteo bomb, or an explosive cyclone.
That type of cyclone is/was moved with the steering wind in the troposphere. Exactly, check the jetstream chart for this.

Amazing ? No, damn scary it was.

The last time this region had these windgusts were in 1978, 167 km per hor gusts, and of course from west, coming from over the Atlantic Ocean.