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WeatherBlog 23 2016/17 | April weather follows very warm March

Weather outlook and March review

by Lea Hartl 04/04/2017
The unsettled weather continues for the time being. After the very warm weekend, temperatures have now dropped back to a level appropriate for the time of year and the April weather is living up to its reputation with a mix of showers, clouds and a few hours of sunshine.

Current situation and outlook

The changeable weather of the last few days was due to some rather aimless disturbances, which at least reminded the northern Alps that it is not yet high summer. A better-defined cold front will reach the northern Alps on Thursday night. This will bring accumulating precipitation with a snow line at an almost wintry height (~1000m), but it should clear up again quickly. It will be relatively sunny in the south with north föhn. Friday looks a bit more mixed in the east, but already very sunny in the western Alps. The weekend looks quite friendly everywhere, with the high pressure influence spreading from west to east. The air mass is rather unstable, so that even if the weather is mostly sunny, the tendency to shower will increase in the afternoon.

Very warm March

Last Friday, various members of the PG crew met in the afternoon at the Alpspitzbahn parking lot to take the last gondola up to the Stuibenhütte. In view of the temperatures, the summer-clad hikers shuffling wearily across the dusty parking lot and the complete lack of snow, we all felt very strange as we made our way to the gondola in full ski gear. Once there, some of us already regretted putting on our ski jackets and longed for a swim in the lake. With temperatures sometimes exceeding 25°C, March 31 was a summer day by meteorological definition.

The exceptionally warm phase was caused by a trough off the coast of Western Europe. The Alps were at the front of this trough and thus in the path of very warm air masses that the trough shovelled in from North Africa. The southerly flow also brought a foehn wind, which caused temperatures to rise a little more.

The last day of March was an outlier, but the rest of the month was also quite warm. In Austria, March 2017 was 3.5° warmer than the long-term average, making it the warmest March in the 251 years of records. There was a north-south gradient in precipitation. It was relatively wet in the northern Alps (only very warm, so not particularly snowy). In the south of the Eastern Alps, on the other hand, the prolonged drought is continuing. The lack of water is causing problems for agriculture and the plant world in general. The risk of forest fires is also becoming a problem. Things are looking better in the mountains of the southwest, where there was some precipitation in March and snow at high altitudes.

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Rain on snow

In time for the warm spring, the SLF presents a study on rain-on-snow events, in which over 1000 such cases were evaluated. On the one hand, a dry snow cover can absorb a lot of water, but on the other hand, snowmelt sets in at some point if it rains long enough or the snow cover is already soaked. Snow can therefore act as a buffer for flood events, but it can also intensify them. In most of the cases investigated by the SLF, the rain caused a large part of the runoff and the snow cover played a subordinate role. In some cases, however, it was the other way around and the snowmelt caused by the rain contributed up to 70% of the runoff. Flood events in the past have shown that the interaction of heavy rainfall and snowpack is not yet sufficiently understood to predict problematic flood conditions well in such cases.

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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