WeatherBlog 11 2020/21 | Still unstable, fluctuating temperatures

The cooler "backside weather", which caused cloud accumulation and precipitation on the northern side of the Alps on Monday and Tuesday, often brings local surprises. Some of the showers were heavier than expected, and there has been a fair amount of fresh snow in the past few days, especially from Tyrol eastwards. Today, Wednesday, it is also cloudy in the north and snowfall is spreading, see the current PowderGuide.com. In the south, on the other hand, it will be clear and windy with north föhn.

On Thursday, a warm front approaching from the NW will put an end to the cool temperatures across the area and precipitation will intensify. As can be read in more detail in the oracle, there will be considerable amounts, but the snow line will rise significantly. It will tend to remain favorable in the sense of colder in the inner Alps and towards the east, but it will get warmer everywhere - from the current perspective, the question is not whether it will rain, but how much. It will also be very windy. All in all, very uncomfortable weather conditions are on the horizon, as well as a very critical avalanche situation.

After a presumably brief, insignificant calming of the weather on Friday morning, the next round of precipitation is still to come on Friday according to today's model status, followed by another warm front with a less than ideal snow line on Saturday and the associated cold front with cooling on Sunday... The trend for next week is persistently changeable with a rapid succession of smaller highs and lows from the west. So similarly turbulent as before, but with clearer intermediate high options.

The WeatherBlog recently did an in-depth look at another station that was installed when Twitter wasn't even dreamed of and neither satellite phones nor particularly functional solar panels were available: After a Japanese mountaineering team perished in bad weather on Denali in 1989, a colleague of the casualties set out to use a weather station to prove that the wind there could get so strong that you "d be blown off the mountain", or knocked over and crash as a result. To set up the station, the four of them each hauled around 60 kilos of material from the base camp at around 2200m to the station site at around 5700m. The expedition lasted a total of 3 weeks, and the departure was delayed by a volcanic eruption.

The station was probably the highest in the world until 1996. After installation, most of the instruments broke every year - the wind tore off the wind sensors, connection cables broke and so on. Until 2007, people still went back every year to repair the whole thing as best they could.

When I look tomorrow morning to see where in my area the PowderAlert has brought the most fresh snow and how high it has rained, I'll think about it again and be happy about the incredibly good station network in the Alps! And if I see that it's just too critical and uncomfortable, I'll stay at home and watch what's happening on the webcams...