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.
