Schnee

Several people have asked the WeatherBlog in the last few days: Does dirty air make more snow? (The reason for this was this ORF article.) The question of course includes a second, unspoken, not entirely serious question: Should I perhaps leave the car engine running overnight every now and then? We could also remove the air filters from the industrial plants, or burn the pile of leaves in the garden all at once, and maybe throw a few car tires on the fire! What about the weather?

New trends in ski touring: even piste tourers are increasingly venturing into the great outdoors. Surveys show that for most, the experience of nature off the beaten track is the main priority.

We recently asked our readers to tell winter jokes as part of a competition. This suggestion was well received and we collected quite a few. We have compiled the results again for the sake of clarity and are now presenting them in a non-judgmental way and sorted by category.

Hype! #EightMeterSnow! Um...or maybe not. At least it's starting to snow. If you only read the first line of the teaser: Sorry Internet 3.0. No, not eight meters of snow, just the first sign of winter coming our way.

The good news first: there's enough for an alert until Sunday. But it will be very warm after the snowfall and the limit will also rise during the snowfall, so you'll have to get up high on Sunday if you want to find powder in the northern Alps.

Winter. It came for a brief moment. We welcomed snowfall in the valley with more gratitude than usual. Hope that our favorite runs would fill in was briefly restored. Whisky consumption had a positive rather than bitter note to it.

A few weeks have passed since my last report from Japan. The weather and snow conditions in Hakuba, Japan, so far in winter 2014/15 are very similar to a convenience store. In such a store, there are so many things that are just as colorful, varied and contradictory as the snow and weather conditions in the past few weeks... Here is my subjective impression of the Hakuba's snow convenience store in winter 2014/15 ...

I'm writing live from the südstau and can tell you that it's really powdering. Unfortunately, the snow is actually quite wet below 1700m as the zero degree line rises. But what do you care about yesterday's snow, you're in this section because of the snow of tomorrow. It's snowing. As always in the south. Where exactly? Further down.

The WeatherBlog was inspired by the ski instructor today and is in a bad mood, so just a brief overview:

You don't like to hear it, but the meteorological winter is rapidly coming to an end. The past three months have been more or less averagely cold, with an above-average amount of snow and extremely few hours of sunshine.

After an extremely mixed start to February, the snow situation soon got much better and we were able to experience numerous perfect days. Even though the snow wasn't always at its best and the wind was particularly strong this year, we still got our money's worth. When it storms, almost all ski resorts are often affected and there is only an alternative program left.

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.