Snow forecast: next 6 days

We can speak of a decent early season where cold periods with snow alternate with milder and dry high-pressure weather. Many regions are still waiting for a good base, and that wait might soon be rewarded. As Henri mentioned yesterday, we are looking with interest at the developments starting Friday, which will initiate a new winter onset in the Alps.

Take a look at this snow map! A lot of snow is coming for the Northwest Alps. However, the colourful map fails to show one important ‘but’ and that is that the uncertainty about the snowfall (both quantities and distribution) for the weekend is still quite high. This is all related to the path of the low-pressure area.

A high-pressure area over Central and Eastern Europe will dominate the Alps starting today. This will result in stable weather with plenty of sunshine. East of Salzburg, it will remain cloudy today with some snow showers, which will increasingly be confined to Lower Austria and the eastern part of Styria (Wienerwald, Mariazell and surroundings) this afternoon.

Storm Conall’s cold front has reached the Alps and snow is currently falling on the north side. On Friday, eastern Austria will be the only one to get some extra. It will then remain dry until early next week. Therefore, in this forecast I’ll also take you on a small tour through Europe to see what the snow conditions in the other mountain ranges look like at the moment.

The very mild air has left the Alps and many regions are still waiting for their first real dump. Only the French and Swiss Alps have a reasonable base above around 2000 meters. A depression moving over the Netherlands today will cut off as an upper-level low and will be near Greece by Friday. On the backside of this system, it will snow for some time in the Northern Alps on Thursday.

The Northern Alps had to deal with föhn in recent days, causing temperatures to rise sharply. Yesterday, for instance, it got as high as 17.4 degrees in Adelboden at over 1,300 metres, which was over 20 degrees warmer temperatures Friday afternoon. The strong warming over the weekend occurred due to the large pressure differences over Europe.

We’ve had an eventful week, with the Western Alps receiving a nice base layer of snow from around 2000 meters in France and from 1500 meters in Switzerland. The Austrian Vorarlberg and the Italian Aosta also benefitted from the west-stau situations, and on Friday, a large snow front moved over Switzerland, Baden-Württemberg, and southern Bavaria.

Yesterday, Chris discussed the snowfall in detail. In the past 48 hours, it has snowed a lot higher up. All in all, these are serious amounts that will become the base for the season. At the L’Ecreuleuse measuring station (Les Marécottes), for instance, 120 centimetres have already fallen at 2252 metres altitude.

The webcams and precipitation measurements confirm this morning what the weather models had already predicted: in the French and Swiss Alps, 20 to over 60 mm of precipitation has fallen on a large scale. Above 2000 meters, this resulted in a snow cover of 20 to 60 centimeters. The Italian region of Aosta also participated well, with, for example, 49 centimeters in Lago delle Rane (2370m).

We can now provide more details regarding the snow forecast for this exciting week. The main news remains that the Western Alps will receive two significant snowfalls. However, these snowfalls will start with a relatively high snow line, which means the final accumulation below 1800 meters might be disappointing, especially in France.

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