Bergwetter

Today, Wednesday, is still characterized by a short-lived intermediate high, but there is already a strong new low off the Iberian Peninsula. Bit by bit, it is closing in on the high and should make its presence felt as early as tomorrow night with a strong south-westerly flow.

At the meteorological end of winter (March 1), it is now fittingly getting warmer again after the exceptionally cold last few days.

While it's just a bit of a flurry in the northern Alps these days, the situation far to the south-east is more exciting, albeit very uncertain. Next week, a phase of extremely wintry temperatures is on the horizon across a large area.

There's powder again and the old pattern is back. It's snowing, but it's getting warm. This time the warmth won't stop abruptly, but on Friday and Saturday the snow line will drop back to powdery regions, so you should still have some on Sunday. It's not going to be wild, but it's going to be decent. Just a normal alarm. It's almost a rarity this season.

Today, Wednesday, will be very sunny for the most part thanks to the influence of intermediate highs, and any remaining hillside clouds should clear quickly. Thursday will be cloudy with the arrival of a warm front from the west. In the western Alps, it will probably be cloudy from the morning onwards, while it will remain clearer in the east in the morning.

Over the past few days, the Alps have been under the influence of an elongated low-pressure trough that has extended as far as North Africa. Most recently, a small low developed over the Iberian Peninsula, which resulted in a not overly pronounced southerly flow.

Anyone who lives in the mountains is unlikely to be complaining about the lack of winter feeling at the moment - the villages at higher altitudes are covered in deep snow and the enormous snowfalls of the last few weeks, including the resulting road closures and avalanche damage, are still very much in evidence. However, as January has been very mild, the picture is very different in the lowlands.

Let's get this out of the way: Yes, there will be a third alert for this storm sequence. For Part 1, I fled behind the main Alpine ridge because, as I wrote in the alert, it was supposed to push far over. It did, the rest of the storm behaved somewhat erratically due to the enormous high flow and apart from parts of the Valais, which get something with normal west or northwest winds, the larger amounts did not arrive in front of or behind the main ridge.

It's not often that international weather reports dominate the evening news. If it does, there is usually not much else happening, or the weather has a massive impact on many people's everyday lives, for example in the form of extreme temperatures, as recently seen in the eastern USA and Australia, or masses of snow, as is currently the case in the Western Alps.

Today and tomorrow will be extremely turbulent in the Alps with gale-force winds and heavy precipitation in the west and north. Also changeable at the weekend, with the current turning to the south. Also: spectacular lake-effect snowfall over the holidays in the USA!

After a somewhat surprising interim alert in the north, which also brought alarms, we're now off to Ullr Leisure Land and on a wild rollercoaster ride of alarms in the north-west, which will probably last until the end of the first week of January. And as is the way with rollercoasters, we'll all be wavering between cheering and throwing up. When it goes down, we cheer and when the snow line goes up, we feel bad...

An Italian low causes strong südstau. This is followed by a cold front in the north and then mild westerly weather. Cold air masses in north-eastern Canada are responsible for the latter, favoring the development of low pressure in the Atlantic.