Weather situation
For more than a week it has been snowing in several waves from Tyrol via Switzerland to France, sometimes heavily. In Engelberg on the Titlis, an incredible 237 cm have fallen in the last 7 days and today alone, Tuesday, it was 84 cm.
Thanks to leeward cyclogenesis, quite a nice amount of fresh snow has fallen on the southern slopes of the Alps. The once lean winter is thus rehabilitating itself, and the current conditions in the snow holes are certainly the deepest of the year, and unfortunately also the most dangerous. In the Western Alps, some extremely large avalanches are occurring both spontaneously and as a result of blasting and, unfortunately, human triggering.
However, the SLF avablog reports no personal injuries. PowderAlert 10 rightly reminds us of the similarities to the avalanche winter of 1999, although the snow depths even on the Titlis have only just exceeded the climatological average and otherwise often remain below average. We are noticing that the polar vortex in the stratosphere is very conducive to the north-west accumulations, or perhaps even forces them.
