Alpen

Over the past week, the entire Alpine region has enjoyed fantastic sunny and stable weather. If you looked dreamily down into the valley while taking a breather on the ascent or enjoying a cappuccino on the sun terrace, you could often see a brown-yellow haze or even a low-lying layer of cloud.

Due to the flu, today is more of a short weather update than a full blog.

It has been snowing heavily on the northern slopes of the Alps recently. Our colleague Orakel has sounded the powder alarm twice in four days and that's saying something. We'll leave the specific details to him and focus on the bigger picture that makes it all possible.

Another month has passed. It must be due to climate change! After a wet but mild January, February promises cooler temperatures and accumulated precipitation right from the start.

The current weather situation offers large east/west and cold/warm contrasts and remains difficult to predict. A sudden warming of the stratosphere could determine the further course of winter.

On the occasion of the fresh snowfall that Storm Heike is bringing to large parts of the Alps, we take a look at a few subtleties of the precipitation forecast.

A brilliant April is coming to an end. Snow down to the valleys and cold, wet, zero-visibility powdery weather are over for now: because midsummer is looming this weekend!

People like to accuse April of not knowing what it wants. In view of the constantly changeable April weather, this seems rather far-fetched to me. I suspect that people generally underestimate the complexity of April's character and that it knows exactly what it doesn't want, namely weeks of cold spells like January or sunshine every morning and a heat storm just in time for afternoon tea like August. April prefers variety, but without too much effort.

Snowy Easter walks, sunny, warm foehn weather immediately followed by more precipitation, in turn followed by clearing and rain: April weather lives up to its name.

After I only missed the last snowfall because I was away from the internet, here is a new alert (editor's note: we will be taking strict precautions to prevent the oracle from being away from the internet in future).

Spring can easily be mistaken for summer at the moment, especially on sweaty ski tours in black Gore-Tex clothing and merino wool underwear, which you only don't tear off and throw into the nearest crevasse because of certain social norms.

As successfully oracled by our colleague Oracle, the seemingly boring disturbance last Sunday and Monday brought a nice refreshment, at least in the north and west. It is now clearly spring again and is developing increasingly summery characteristics until the still uncertain weekend.