Snowy Easter walks, sunny, warm foehn weather immediately followed by more precipitation, in turn followed by clearing and rain: April weather lives up to its name.
Current situation & outlook
Today, Wednesday (11.4.2012), a cold front originating in a low over the British Isles will cross the Alps. Tomorrow, the current will increasingly turn south-westerly and the clouds will clear briefly before a Mediterranean low becomes active in the Alps on Friday. It will be interesting in terms of snow on the main ridge and, depending on the existing base, in the southern Alps, as our colleague Orakel can also read about and, who knows, may be able to read about again towards the weekend.
With the precipitation of the past and coming days, the extreme dryness in the south is coming to an end and if April continues like this, it could make up a little for the summery March. Even if the exact development next week is still uncertain, long dry phases like those of the last few weeks seem rather unlikely for the time being.
Five layers
Once upon a time, there was a teacher and meteorologist called Wilhelm Jacob van Bebber. In 1891, he published a treatise on large-scale weather patterns in Europe, in which he described ways in which areas of low pressure move from one point to another. He numbered the different variants with Roman numerals from Ia to VIb. Most of his designations were lost over time and nowadays only those are used that are not taken into account in the modern large-scale weather situation typology. These are mainly weather conditions with a center of action over the Mediterranean: Bebber's V-situations. For the Alpine and Central European region, the Vb (pronounced 5b) low is the most interesting, which follows a north-easterly track and can cause heavy accumulation precipitation in eastern Central Europe. Vc and Vd lows move east and southeast respectively and sometimes bring the heaviest precipitation to the Balkans, Va moves west of the Alps from north to south and then continues south of the Alps as Vb, -c, or -d.
The approaching low over the Mediterranean could be the first low in a long time with a Vb character, so you can be curious, if you find such things exciting, and continue to enjoy the April weather.
