Lea Hartl

This week's WeatherBlog takes its cue from the recent snowFlurry and looks at why humidity is relevant to spring firn. The weather is and remains rather dull, with plenty of sunshine throughout the Alps before it gets a little more unsettled at the weekend.

As PowderAlert has already explained in more detail: it's snowing heavily in the southwest. In the north-east, it's only snowing a little today, then spring will continue. This basic constellation won't change much over the next few days either. What's more: tomorrow is World Weather Day!

Spring has arrived in the Alps and the high pressure weather will continue until the end of the week. Towards the weekend, it will become much cloudier with precipitation on the northern side of the Alps. We are also looking at Storm Stella, which is currently affecting the US East Coast.

Atlantic lows continue to slide from the northwest towards Central Europe and determine the weather in the Alps. After the heavy foehn event at the weekend (wind peaks of 224 km/h on the Lauberhorn, Switzerland) and accumulated precipitation in the south, there will be almost continuous precipitation in the north this week.

At the meteorological start of spring, it's getting wintry on the southern slopes of the Alps. The rapid change of mild, partly foehn-like weather on the front of the trough, followed by the fronts last night and today during the course of the day, is causing a turbulent PowderAlert with interesting amounts of fresh snow, but also strong storms.

Outlook: Warm, cold, snow, rain, sun, thunderstorms - the carnival days have it all. Embedded in a windy westerly current, several small lows are heading towards the Alps in quick succession. After cold and fresh snow down to some valley locations on Friday, warmer weather will quickly follow.

She actually knew where the dangers lurked that day. Why didn't it stop her from climbing? A story about failure and the courage to talk about mistakes.

There is no doubt that we are still in the area of influence of the massive Omega High with its core in the Danish region. In the southern Alps there were still clouds and the odd snowflake until the beginning of the week, while in the north the sunshine has not been marred by more than a few high foehn clouds for some time. It will become more unsettled towards the weekend and it will snow a little in the north. Also: New Europe Climate Report and other reading tips.

After the wintry, more or less snowy interlude of the last few days, high pressure is now increasingly asserting itself again. There is still a bit of fluff in the southwest, but the remnants of the disturbances will quickly disappear. We are falling back into the pattern of the previous winter: Atlantic block, cold air from the east, unusually warm Arctic Ocean.

BCA and Alpride now have similarly lightweight and small airbag systems as the other manufacturers. Some companies that previously bought in airbag systems for their own backpacks are taking them out of the range completely after winters with low sales. Mammut has completely redesigned Barryvox avalanche transceivers - one in the mid-price segment and one high-end device.

Arc'teryx is adding another component to its insulation elementary particle collection: in addition to Atom and Nuclei, there is now the particularly breathable Proton series.

We take a look at where January 2017 ranks in the climate statistics and then consider the current situation and further developments in February: a long phase of cold, dry weather is followed by mild, foehn-like conditions in the north and fairly widespread precipitation in the parched south. It remains to be seen whether this change will last or whether we will soon return to familiar patterns.