The WeatherBlog is back from its summer break and vacation far away to catch up on the weather of the last few weeks and the current conditions.
Current situation
If you take a walk through the city these days, the smell of mulled wine at the Christmas market mingles with the smell of cozy crackling log fires. Or is the latter perhaps more a mixture of car exhaust fumes and cold chimney smoke that has been hanging motionless and increasingly yellowish in the valley for some time due to inversion? First impression after returning from vacation: boring, stable autumn weather, fairly unclouded sunshine in the mountains, high fog or at least bad air in the valley. A look at the reanalysis map of the last few days shows, as expected, a gradient-weak Central Europe with a thick high sitting on top of it.
Review
Interviews with informants and a trip to the local mountains show: it has snowed before, probably quite a lot. There's still a bit of it left and the general snow situation is nothing like the tragedy of last year's start to the season. We dig a hole next to the piste on the Stubai Glacier and find: a layer on the ground that has been transformed by building up, a crust of melted snow on top of that, another layer that has been transformed by building up, then some harder, round-grained snow and finally some almost fresh snow. From this we can speculatively conclude that there were indeed early, heavy snowfalls. Presumably it was then warm or even rained. Since then it has snowed several more times, once probably with a lot of wind. On the ZAMG website, which is highly recommended as always, you can read that it actually snowed 30 to 60 centimetres at higher altitudes at the end of October and even the valleys were white. Otherwise, October had more precipitation and was warmer than the long-term average, including new temperature records in some places.
Outlook
So far so good, the WeatherBlog feels sufficiently informed about the missed weather and can devote itself to the much more interesting topic: What's next? The next few days promise at least a bit of variety and a cleansing blow through for the valleys. The high will slowly push further east and the current will turn to the southwest. This will bring a few snowflakes to the south on Thursday 22.11. and increasingly foehn-like conditions to the north. It will be more exciting, albeit more glassy, after the weekend. The GFS ensemble forecast is still optimistic, according to the motto: hope only dies when you look at the other model.
