An analysis of the West European climate over short time scales is performed by means of time series of the 500 mb geopotential height at nine different meteorological stations. The characterization of the dynamics is based on the computation of the dimensions of manifolds on which the systems evolve. For this purpose several embedding techniques are used and compared. All methods give similar results, namely, that the data in different stations seem to derive from a single deterministic dynamical system spanning a relatively low-dimensional manifold embedded in a low dimensional phase space. The estimation of the most significant Lyapounov exponents of the global system gives evidence that the nature of the dynamics is chaotic.