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WeatherBlog 19 2918/19 | Spring weather at the beginning of spring

Sun until further notice

by Lea Hartl 03/20/2019
It's the beginning of spring again! This time in the astronomical sense, meaning that the sun is vertical above the equator today and day and night are the same length everywhere. The weather is sticking to the calendar and ensuring sunny mountain weather and - hopefully - firn fun

Current situation and outlook

An area of high pressure is spreading over Central Europe from the west and will remain there for a few days. Today, Wednesday, the temperatures are still rather fresh with partly brisk winds from north-easterly directions. In the coming days, the wind will die down and it will get warmer. Thanks to the clear nights, a good snow cover should form and apart from the daytime warming (on Friday the zero degree limit will probably be over 3000m), nothing should stand in the way of successful firn tours.

The weather situation won't change much until the weekend. It is expected to slowly change on Sunday: According to the current model opinion, a cold front will reach the Alps around Sunday evening, heralding a more changeable, significantly cooler stretch of weather at the start of the coming week.

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Permafrost is getting warmer

The Swiss Academy of Sciences and the WSL state: After a brief pause, Swiss permafrost is continuing to warm. As part of the PERMOS monitoring network, borehole temperatures have been recorded in Switzerland's alpine permafrost since 2000. After one or two winters with little snow, the permafrost temperatures have recently been somewhat cooler - little snow means that the ground can cool down more, as the "insulation layer" is missing. However, after the snowy winter of 17/18 and the very hot summer of 2018, they are now on a clear upward trend again.

Permafrost soil also thaws on the surface in summer. How deep the ground thaws in summer is an important indicator of the condition of the permafrost, along with the ground temperature in various layers. The depth of the thawing layer reached new record levels at some Swiss locations in 2018. Resistivity measurements in the ground also indicate that the proportion of liquid water underground is increasing - an indication of ongoing ice melt.

About 5% of the Swiss territory is permafrost. In the entire Alpine region, discontinuous permafrost is found from around 2500m, generally in shady, debris-rich cirques and north-facing rock faces. Discontinuous means that the permafrost is limited to certain areas - such as shady scree slopes - and does not occur over a large area.

Continuous permafrost is mainly found in the polar regions. The prerequisite for this is an average annual temperature at the ground surface of -5°C or less. Increased solar radiation depending on the orientation of the surface - a decisive factor for mountain permafrost - is then no longer a decisive factor. Under certain circumstances, low-lying permafrost can also survive very warm climatic periods. In the Canadian Yukon, permafrost ice exposed by mining activities has been dated to an age of up to 700,000 years.

A number of things can be found in old ice, including methane and CO2 (neither of which is conducive to slowing down the rise in global temperatures), viruses and worms. 30 - 40,000-year-old specimens from Siberia have already been successfully thawed and appear to have survived cryosleep unscathed, at least physically. How they are doing mentally is unknown - presumably no one has asked them.

This article has been automatically translated by DeepL with subsequent editing. If you notice any spelling or grammatical errors or if the translation has lost its meaning, please write an e-mail to the editors.

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