Arlberg

The meteorologist (and Wikipedia; forgive me) defines weather as: "The weather is the weather or is the weather conditions in a certain period of time (from several days to a season) related to a certain area".

The weather in Central Europe is currently divided into two parts. A sharp air mass boundary separates the north and east from the much milder south and west. The differences are particularly evident in Germany, where, for example, temperature differences of up to 20° were measured on Monday. In Werl (NRW), on the warm side, the daily maximum temperature was 5.5°C, while in Diepholz, 120 km away on the cold side, it was only -4.7°C. The Alps are on the warm side of the air mass boundary in a humid westerly current.

This ski tour in the heart of the Verwall offers stunning views from the Arlberg to the Bernina group in varied ski terrain. With the right timing, you will be rewarded with descents in good firn and fine powder snow.

It has already started to snow and the new alarm has to come, you think? Absolutely right, but you won't miss anything today, because this alert is for Thursday / Friday, as the alert amounts won't fall until tomorrow.

The time has finally come! The saga continues. I hope George Lucas forgives me for my entry and doesn't sue me. And no, I can't tell you if you can see Luke Skywalker's hand reaching for R2D2 in the trailer for "Star Wars - The Force Awakens", but I can tell you where it's snowing. That's what I'm here for and what we've all been waiting for.

Ahoy you powder pirates. Ullr has promised loot and now the dump is appearing in the telescopes. After the rain is before the snow. It has already started to snow, or rather to rain below 1600 to 2000 m, and will continue to snow until Tuesday night or early Tuesday morning, with the snow line dropping and it will also snow again at usable altitudes. There will be a westerly flow across the entire northern slope of the Alps, but the largest amounts will come from the Lower Valais to the French Hautes Alpes.

Chef Ullr has realized that powder-hungry people in the northwest of the Alps have only been served lousy food for a while now and is trying to change that: by preparing a delicious northwest current for you and sprucing up the run-down northern Alps, just like his colleagues on TV do with the restaurants. But first there's something quick for in between, a powder snack so to speak.

Well, it won't be quite that extreme, but Ullr is finally flexing its muscles in the north this winter and is guaranteed to lure most freeriders to the Alps. This alert is valid until Saturday and then theoretically part two ("The two dumps") should follow from Saturday to Monday, depending on marginal lows, for which it is not yet clear whether they will come at all.

Accumulated precipitation, also known as orographic precipitation or precipitation on a slope, occurs when air masses hit an obstacle and are lifted by it. The air becomes colder the higher it rises and when it reaches a certain level, the water vapor it contains condenses. Small droplets or ice crystals form, which precipitate as soon as they have reached the required size.

After the last congestion has passed and the coreshots are being repaired, Ullr comes up with the idea of giving our rather dry northerly flow a bit more pep than the models have seen in the last few days and creates a small active boundary disturbance that brings us powder. So this much less sad alert comes as quite a surprise. Less sad because we have a base. At least below the tree line.

After sweating it out on the bike last weekend at just under 2000 m and 15 degrees, Ullr now suddenly decides to take over the sceptre of the seasons from the sun god Ra and we hurtle from high summer into high winter. The first dump is coming up.

After weeks of television weather forecasters rejoicing and finding warm temperatures 10 degrees above average and sunshine "totally great", the heat is finally over and we are rejoicing because Ullr is not leaving the field to summer without a sound, but is at least giving it a serious fight back.