Bergwetter

The Christmas weather is not showing its contemplative side this year, but is arriving with a decent storm and fresh snow. Friday and Saturday in particular are expected to be very inhospitable, with high wind speeds and lots of precipitation. The next report from our colleague Orakel won't be long in coming!

Compared to the last few winters, the start of the season was reasonably good for the northern side of the Alps. Even Munich and even Lower Bavaria enjoyed and groaned under unprecedented amounts of snow. This was followed by a warm and wet period of precipitation, which caused considerable damage to the snow cover at lower altitudes. But now a cold front gives us hope for good fresh snow before we head towards sunny times. We are also noticing that the southern side of the Alps is still suffering from a considerable lack of snow.

This week we introduce you to the next round of our PowderGuide team. Sebastian earns our PowderGuide weather, Johannes has been with PowderGuide for a while and takes care of the IT and Toni, Josh and Timo rock social media.

It will remain varied. Today, Wednesday, it will snow again in many places in the north, while the sun will shine in the south. With temperatures rising, it will be quite friendly on Thursday and Friday. The next major disturbance is approaching at the weekend and is expected to bring a new round of storms and precipitation from Sunday. Unfortunately, it will probably rain at lower altitudes.

The WeatherBlog can also be found on the new PowderGuide website. It's high time, after all, the season has already been heralded twice by the PowderAlert! As usual, we will dedicate ourselves to the framework story for the PA and take a look at the general weather situation. Attention: At the end there is part 1 of a tutorial series on the new PG weather.

For the first time in years, ski resorts are opening earlier instead of later, there's more snow than at the beginning of March last season and it's cold too. Can it get any better? Yes and no.

With the new PowderGuide website, we are also presenting our community with a completely new weather service: the PG-ICON weather. Sebastian, who is probably best known to most readers from our "Videos of the week" section, is in charge of this. Sebastian holds a doctorate in meteorology and is currently researching tropical precipitation in high-resolution global climate models at the University of Trento. We are very happy to have Sebastian as a specialist in our team and are delighted to be able to introduce him and the new PG-ICON weather with an interview.

The PowderGuide weather service is saying goodbye for the season, the usual data on new snow, snow depths, sunshine, etc. will no longer be updated from now on. We'll continue next winter!

I actually wanted to write something about a "last hallali" or "Ullr's last attack", but martial war and hunting metaphors somehow have a stale aftertaste after the last year.

It's getting wintry again! What we missed in the height of winter will be delivered in April: With a bit of luck, we'll get a lot more fresh snow over the next few days, especially on the eastern main ridge. And with pretty low temperatures!

Numerical weather forecasts and snow models are now very good, but there is still room for improvement. In the mountains, the complex topography is one of the biggest challenges for weather models. Every mountain peak and every valley influences the movement of the atmosphere and thus small-scale processes such as snow drifting.

Shortly before Easter, the weather will be almost more wintry than at Christmas. It is and will remain relatively cool with a mix of sun and clouds and somewhat more unstable weather from Friday. The cool temperatures don't hide the poor snow conditions, but according to the WeatherBlog's subjective assessment, the snow quality has been significantly worse this season!