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WeatherBlog 3 2022/23 | Stormy times!

South föhn, then colder and snow in the north

by Lea Hartl 12/07/2022
The outlook is turbulent. On the one hand, seasonal shopping, baking cookies, vacation planning, family management and the like are on the agenda. On the other hand, we are eagerly awaiting the arrival of a seasonal polar vortex and what this means for our winter weather! Summary of the next few days: stormy south föhn, colder from the weekend and snow from the N-NW.

The starting point

The PowderAlert has now officially heralded the start of winter and the social media feeds are filling up with epic Pow shots, shredded lines and seasonal safety updates. The shredded lines are still suspiciously full of rocks in the landings, but with the right Instagram filter, even that can look epic. In any case, the mountains are now more or less white - more so in the south and west than in the north and east. With the next, hopefully approaching snowfalls, perhaps the rock problem will slowly improve. However, the snow cover problems that are now also present are becoming more critical. The SLF has now started regular, daily bulletin operations (with intermediate stages!), Salzburg and Vorarlberg too. The "Avalanche Report" for Tyrol, South Tyrol and Trentino is still a kind of patchwork. Trentino, like the rest of Italy (except South Tyrol), has already started warning operations. The map for (South) Tyrol is still blank, but that will certainly change soon.

When it comes to the weather, a look at the GFS northern hemisphere map shows us a very non-circular polar vortex. A rather pronounced Greenland blocking is currently decisive for what is happening here. High air pressure over Greenland is blocking the flow over the Atlantic and the air has to move around the blocking high in a very large wave motion. As a result, cold air flows from the far north to Central Europe. The Alps are currently still slightly south of the cold air and are only touched by the cold and low-pressure influence from the north.

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The outlook

The Greenland block will remain with us for a few days. This means that the main protagonists of the general weather situation will remain unchanged, namely the strongly wavy current and low pressure over northern and central Europe. However, there are still small changes and, as we know, these can have a big impact! The pressure centers will shift over the next few days: You can't see much in the large northern hemisphere map, but there will be some changes in the European section.

Tomorrow, Thursday (8.12.), will be quite sunny again in the Alps, at least above the partly thick high fog. However, the large area of low pressure has moved slightly to the southwest and is causing the direction of flow to change! During the course of the day, a Föhn wind will slowly develop in the north, while it will become increasingly cloudy from the west in the south. A smaller low off the Iberian Peninsula will support the whole thing from the other direction. Friday will be correspondingly stormy with Föhn in the north and rain or snow in the south. From today's perspective, the southeast will see the most accumulation; more details - including the height of the snow line - will depend on the development of an Italian low.

The Föhn will break down on Friday evening or Saturday at the latest. The current will turn to the NW but remain strong. The focus of precipitation will thus shift to the northern side of the Alps. At the same time, temperatures will drop, so snow is expected down to low altitudes, at least in the north. Sunday looks cold and mixed, but will tend to be less stormy and more relaxed than Saturday. It will remain wintry cold at the beginning of next week too, with the weather likely to be calmer. After that, the forecast will become much more uncertain - this can be clearly seen in the ensemble forecasts from around Tuesday next week (image left). The further apart the lines are, the greater the uncertainties.

Overall, the WeatherBlog doesn't think the weather outlook is too bad at the moment. The extremely high temperatures in large parts of the Arctic seem worryingly symptomatic and we don't like them (see picture below), but on the spatially and temporally limited scale of skiing in the Alps, we're in a pleasantly wintry range!

Photo gallery

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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