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WeatherBlog 2 2022/23 | Stocktaking and outlook

What happens next?

by Lea Hartl 11/24/2022
The WeatherBlog has not yet decided whether winter has really begun. But to be on the safe side, we'll give you a brief overview. At least visually, it's relatively wintry from about 1000m upwards. A north-westerly current will bring new, small disturbances and a few showers today (Thursday) until Saturday. Sunday looks very sunny, then it will become more changeable again.

"Too weird for an alarm"

In the spirit of weather journalistic transparency, we want to give the PG community exclusive insights into important editorial decision-making processes today. The picture on the right shows an excerpt from an in-depth chat between PowderAlert, WeatherBlog and Tippspiel from earlier this week. The reason was the snowfall expected for Tuesday. A possible "winter start weather event" had been looming for days beforehand. Depending on the model run, there was sometimes talk of half a meter on the main ridge, sometimes of local upward outliers exclusively in the SLO-AT-IT triangle, sometimes of just 10 centimetres but everywhere. The Adriatic low responsible did not want to be pinned down until shortly beforehand. The PowderAlert, always striving for consistency in its oracles, found the risk too high that the alarm amounts (from 30cm) would not be reached and refrained from issuing an alarm.

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A look at the weather stations and out of the window shows that a kind of mixture of the scenarios that seemed possible in the forecast has occurred. There were both upward outliers at individual locations on the main ridge and a few cosmetic centimetres across almost the entire Alpine region. In the north, it snowed briefly down to the valleys. South of the main ridge, it remained rainy at low altitudes, as far as we know. To summarize, the snow conditions are better than last week, but still far from good. Skiing outside the few open pistes is hardly possible - you still have the choice between crevasses and rocks. At least things are now looking a little more wintry again and the odd powder turn has certainly been possible in the last few days between the crevasses and rocks mentioned above.

Avalanches have also become an issue again with the snowfall for the first time in the young season. If there was snow before, the new snow is now often lying on a built-up, transformed old snow surface or crust variations. The warning services are not yet in regular operation, but are describing the situation since the new snow in blog posts and/or irregular bulletins. Especially in the early season, the warning services still have little information from the terrain, so feedback on relevant observations is always welcome!

And now?

The outlook is changeable for the time being. "Changeable" is a nice meteorological word that leaves plenty of room for interpretation. First and foremost, it means that new Atlantic disturbances are constantly producing rapid weather changes. On Monday, a front with rain and snow will pass through the western Alps, which doesn't look particularly productive from today's perspective. After that, the weather will continue to be mixed, probably with moderate temperatures and occasional showers, but without large amounts of fresh snow.

As usual, the medium-term development depends very much on the polar vortex. This is forecast to become increasingly out of round from next week, forming two distinct cold poles over Russia and the Canadian Arctic. For us, this constellation will create a low-gradient "swamp situation" and Atlantic lows will be deflected over a large area. Of course, the whole thing is not yet set in stone and we are hoping for more exciting surprises!

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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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