WeatherBlog 19 2918/19 | Spring weather at the beginning of spring

Current situation and outlook

An area of high pressure is spreading over Central Europe from the west and will remain there for a few days. Today, Wednesday, the temperatures are still rather fresh with partly brisk winds from north-easterly directions. In the coming days, the wind will die down and it will get warmer. Thanks to the clear nights, a good snow cover should form and apart from the daytime warming (on Friday the zero degree limit will probably be over 3000m), nothing should stand in the way of successful firn tours.

The weather situation won't change much until the weekend. It is expected to slowly change on Sunday: According to the current model opinion, a cold front will reach the Alps around Sunday evening, heralding a more changeable, significantly cooler stretch of weather at the start of the coming week.

Continuous permafrost is mainly found in the polar regions. The prerequisite for this is an average annual temperature at the ground surface of -5°C or less. Increased solar radiation depending on the orientation of the surface - a decisive factor for mountain permafrost - is then no longer a decisive factor. Under certain circumstances, low-lying permafrost can also survive very warm climatic periods. In the Canadian Yukon, permafrost ice exposed by mining activities has been dated to an age of up to 700,000 years.

A number of things can be found in old ice, including methane and CO2 (neither of which is conducive to slowing down the rise in global temperatures), viruses and worms. 30 - 40,000-year-old specimens from Siberia have already been successfully thawed and appear to have survived cryosleep unscathed, at least physically. How they are doing mentally is unknown - presumably no one has asked them.