WeatherBlog 9 2022/23 | Cold, a few snowflakes every now and then

Current situation and outlook

The current weather situation is determined by a large-scale trough over Central Europe. The trough currently extends from Scandinavia to North Africa. Cold, relatively humid air masses from the north make it far south in this constellation and ensure wintry temperatures. Although there will be small snow showers today and over the next few days, this will not bring large amounts of precipitation for the time being. The snowfall in the west and south-east described by the oracle in the last Alert will have to suffice as a base for now, with 10-15 cm being added every now and then. The alert snow in the southeast, caused by the development of smaller Mediterranean lows, was rather less abundant than the models had expected.

The weather character today and over the next few days is "changeable" with occasional rays of sunshine, the odd snowflake, fresh wind and a tendency towards cloudy skies. The rather cold temperatures are striking. Not because this is unusual climatologically in January, but rather because we are no longer used to this after the extremely warm December! WeatherBlog had cold feet yesterday for the first time this winter while skiing!

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500hPa geopotential and ground pressure on 18.1.23 (Wednesday). Large trough over ME.

meteociel.fr

Large-scale pressure formations with a wide north-south extension usually do not move on particularly quickly, but stay in place for a while. This is also the case with our current trough. It is gradually being displaced by an ambitious Azores high, but the weather situation in the Alps will not change much for the time being. The Azores High seems to be aiming for contact with high pressure in the continental east. From today's model perspective, the two will form a high pressure bridge from the weekend and the trough will be cut off. Remnants of low pressure will remain over Central Europe, but will lose contact with the large-scale flow. This would then be another rather stationary constellation in which it would remain changeable in the Alps, with temperatures and air pressure likely to rise noticeably from the beginning of next week. There is some potential for snow on the eastern edge of the Alps due to the NE flow. However, more detailed speculation about the forecast range does not seem sensible in this situation. We are predicting relatively calm weather next week with a more or less constant snow situation and are looking forward to snowy surprises.

View towards Hohe Munde and Co from Seefeld. Thin snow cover in the higher valleys, green Inntal valley to the left.

LH

Austria: very little snow during the Christmas holidays

The Austrian weather service (no longer ZAMG but now Geosphere Austria - the WeatherBlog will get used to the new name next winter at the earliest) officially announces once again what is hard to miss anyway: The snow situation in Austria is pretty miserable. The situation is mostly similar in the other Alpine countries, although individual corners are now in a better position, see the SLF snow depth map below. In any case, Geosphere Austria has endeavored to present the data in an appealing way and found that only around 35% of Austria's territory was covered in snow during the 2022/23 Christmas season. The average for this time of year is around 70%. As always, it should be noted that there have also been bad winters in the past, as the graphs clearly show. The natural variability of the amount of snow is high. Due to rising temperatures, however, precipitation is increasingly falling as rain, logically especially at lower altitudes, and winters with little snow at low and medium altitudes are becoming correspondingly more frequent.