Sometime in the next few weeks I will most likely find myself in Greece and on the Turkey - Syria border covering the plight of refugees and migrants who now face the additional horror of looming winter weather.

This has not crept up unnoticed. For months now as humanitarian agencies concentrated on firefighting the immediate problem of refugee and migrant needs, aid workers have been conscious of the massive new threat that freezing winds, rain and snow will bring to the hundreds of thousands still in transit.

“Winterisation” programmes have become the priority now in a month that saw no sign of numbers letting up as desperate people continued to cross the Mediterranean Sea and forge their way through Europe.

According to the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) a record 180,000 people had already landed in the EU as of October 26 compared to 173,000 in September.

In response the UNHCR will present a $81 million “winterisation” plan to the EU this week, knowing all the while that many more refugees are on the way

while fighting escalates inside Syria itself.

Some estimates have put these figures at hundreds of thousands more which perhaps should come as no surprise given that some 700,000 refugees have arrived already by sea this year.

It’s a terrible fact but this will no doubt be music to the ears of those unscrupulous and callous people smugglers and traffickers who have been concerned that ‘business’ might be badly hit as numbers drop off and winter seas make the Mediterranean crossing even more harrowing and dangerous.

So worried were the profiteers that some are said to have been offering ‘seasonal discounts’.

Prices during the summer would sit around $1,300 per person whereas in the winter they were willing to drop this to $900 per person because of the dangers that might put some off taking to the flimsy rubber dinghies used to ferry them across the sea.

The smugglers themselves however have nothing to fear if current numbers are anything to go by.

“Let’s not forget the crisis in Syria is going on, the fighting is being intensified, and the hopes of people are not being enhanced,” was how António Guterres, the UN high commissioner for refugees summed up the reasons for the ongoing rise of numbers on the move.

Just as in Europe so in the Middle East a separate winterisation programme is underway for the millions displaced within the region. But here too funding remains short and donors, government and non-government alike, will need to dig deep into their pockets if another downward spiral to this humanitarian crisis is to be averted over the coming months.

Already in some regions the snows have arrived and television news pictures that showed refugees suffering from dehydration during baking summer weather now show them wrapped in space blankets trying to ward off the effects of hypothermia.

If massive casualties are to be avoided then humanitarian relief will need to shift quickly to finding ways to protect refugees from the winter cold with better shelters and insulated temporary holding areas.

As if winter is not enough to contend with, there is growing panic too among those refugees already en-route that the EU’s commitment to the principle of free movement is beginning to waver.

This week saw Austria whose record to date has been exceptional in terms of its humanitarian response to the refugee crisis, become the latest country to announce plans to build a border fence.

This would be the first to go up within the supposedly borderless Schengen area, albeit without the razor wire that has been a feature in neighbouring Hungary.

For the simple fact remains that the EU has been completely overwhelmed by the crisis with disagreement over proposed quota plans still threatening to tear the bloc apart.

Add to this the fact that bottlenecks have been created in areas where countries have partially closed borders or tried to reduce the flow of refugees and the scale of the latest challenge becomes tangible.

Right now border crossings between Serbia and Croatia, Croatia and Slovenia and Greece and Macedonia have experienced the largest build-up’s of refugees, sometimes with thousands of people massing at the frontiers.

After European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker warned that refugee families could “perish miserably” during the journey from Greece through former Yugoslavia and into Austria and Germany, a plan was created to come up with 100,000 places in shelters along the so-called western Balkans route.

This plan though remains hampered by a continuing lack of political dialogue between certain nations some of whom have never really seen eye-to-eye.

On the wider diplomatic front too solutions to the Syrian refugee crisis have been problematic to say the least.

German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, in an effort to ensure her continued leadership in Germany- and the EU as a whole - has been pulling out all the stops, but there remains little clarity of strategy.

For a time there was emphasis on tacking the problem at source by trying to move towards ending the civil war in Syria, but that is a long way off not least given Russia’s recent intervention.

Another approach has been to move one link further up the chain and request Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's cooperation to stop the flow of refugees with Mrs Merkel trying this tack over the course of several meetings with Erdogan this month.

As the wrangling goes on the refugees themselves become ever more anxious of the border closures and winter bearing down. For those caught in this nightmarish limbo the months ahead will prove as traumatic as those that now lie behind them.