Neuschnee

Somewhat belatedly, the oracle looks into his crystal ball and sees fresh snow for the northern slopes of the Alps. Ullr has finally finished his Christmas vacation and pushes this annoying warm high into the orcus. It has already started to snow from the northwest and won't stop until Saturday morning.

Last Saturday was, let's say, the most interesting day in the WeatherBlog's ski instructor career for a long time. Even getting out of the car in the pouring rain proved difficult for the entire team due to a lack of motivation. A few hundred meters up the gondola later, it was still almost as warm and still pouring, to the particular delight of those colleagues whose workplace is located on the magic carpet next to the gondola. Only at around 1800 m, at the top lift in the area, could the precipitation be described as snow with a little good will.

Ullr has a heart for the East and before it gets really warm for a few days, he really covers the almost Polish-Russian areas of the Eastern Alps.

At last Ullr is listening to the envious deep snow divers east of the Arlberg, because they haven't exactly been spoiled with dumps so far, so now the cornucopia is also being poured out in the east of Felix Austria.

As announced, here is the Thursday update. The predicted amounts of 70-100 cm have already fallen across the board and, especially in eastern Switzerland, in some cases significantly more than the 50-70 cm with the 20 cm bonus, because interestingly there was no border through central Switzerland to the main precipitation areas in the west, which is probably due to the model orography, in which the east is simulated to be less high. Even the 120 cm have become full here and there outside of France.

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.

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.

Some resourceful students with too much time on their hands and online access to a precipitation radar may have already noticed: it's snowing again. (Everyone else can't use it anyway). They will also have noticed with surprise: It's snowing, but not in the north for once.

A storm was forecast for Monday night, which should have ended our boredom. Unfortunately, once again nothing came of it. Far too warm and only 1 cm of fresh snow - and windy to boot. This would be the fifth day without skiing and somehow it feels more like spring than winter outside. The forecasts from Wednesday onwards are still excellent, so we'll just have to be patient for a few more days. The weather service is talking about a storm of the decade. But it's going to feel like a long time: if you're not much of a piste skier, you won't have much to do here in Hakuba when it gets warm.

Fortunately, there was no rain and the week started with a forecast of 1 cm of fresh snow overnight. The joy of waking up to 50 cm of fresh snow was immense. The day could easily be described as heliskiing for the price of a day ticket, although it would be more accurate to say heliskiing-for-the-price-of-two-day-tickets.

It's time for an alarm, because there's fresh snow from the west to northwest again. And the magic meter is likely to be broken again by Sunday. The chances of this happening in the congested areas from Glarnerland to Arlberg are quite good, and in the far east, from Salzburg to the Dachstein, it's even very likely.

While the north-western Alps are drowning in snow, there is no sign of winter in the lowlands. January temperatures are often around 5 degrees above the long-term average and it has only seriously snowed above around 600 meters so far. There doesn't seem to be an end in sight to the wet and mild westerly slide - or is there?