Westalpen

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 play continues and artistic director Ullr wants to extend the season of the extremely successful play "Märzwinter". The little man from the street, who is always asked about this in TV interviews, doesn't think it's so great, but we're looking forward to a little compensation for the miserable start to the powder season.

The meteorological winter (December, January, February) has been over since Monday. In Austria, it went down in the statistics as the second warmest winter in recorded history at 2.7° above the long-term average, and in Germany it was also 3.4° warmer than the average. In Austria, only 2006/07 was warmer, 2013/14 was just as warm. This means that five of the 10 warmest winters in the 250-year measurement history have occurred in the last 10 years. Nevertheless, and because the weather is known to not always stick to the calendar, it was, is and will be relatively wintry, at least in the mountains. We take a closer look at this below.

Just as the book describes the cruel everyday life of war, this alarm describes the wonderful everyday life in the west of the Alps that Ullr brings to all locals and travelers for the weekend.

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.

I dust off my electronic parchment, sharpen my wit and am pleased to present you with the first alarm of the meteorological winter. Ullr has seen sense and we are finally switching from late October to winter. Oh wait, wrong... There was more snow in the northern Alps at the end of October.

The general weather situation discussed in the last blog has not changed significantly. A strong high over Scandinavia is blocking the westerly wind drift across the Atlantic, allowing cold air from the north-east to penetrate far into Central Europe. Low pressure systems are forced to move into the Mediterranean region and pass south of the Alps.

Beaucoup de Neige! Snow in the west but the heat is becoming critical.

It's getting dark quite early again, columns of cars are rolling up the valleys, the season ticket sales are over in many places, sports stores are advertising the latest developments in carving, Facebook contacts are posting smileys and snowflakes – the evidence points to the approach of winter. The WeatherBlog has spent the summer break watching TV and knows that on CSI, at least 2 perpetrators are convicted every week with circumstantial evidence. So it's high time to get to work and track down winter.