Get ready for a northern Stau! Will winter stick around for a while?

It's going to be an interesting week. There is a northern Stau coming up and the storm that's causing this opens the door for more turbuluent weather in the Alps. The fact that the temperature will drop as well is a great bonus. If the parameters aren't cheating, we can expect a lot of snow and maybe even in the entire Alps.

In this forecast:

• Northern Stau coming up
• Snowfall on Wednesday and Thursday
• Storm Gisi will kickstart winter
• Greater chances on a cold winter

Northern Stau coming up

There is a northern Stau coming up. We saw some snow came down in the east fo Austria earlier this fall, but this time it looks like the entire north side of the Alps will benefit. A storm settles over Scandinavia and will start sending cold polar air to the Alps. This cold and moist air will hit the north side of the Alps and is forced to snow empty.

On the picture below you can see in a nutshell what will happen next week. On the left you can see that the clouds hit the north side of the Alps. The air will rise and will cool down at the same time, causing more condensation and it will start to snow.

You can see the opposite happening on the right side of the map above. The air drops south of the main Alpine ridge (check out the image below) and the clouds will disappear. The air will get warmer and you can expect a strong Föhn in the mountains. Check out the current Föhn chart which also shows the emerging northern Stau.

Snowfall on Wednesday and Thursday

The storm will be in position over Scandinavia from Wednesday and it will start sending cold air to the Alps. This will end a week with great weather in the Alps and it will start to snow. If you compare the map from the main alpine ridge that you can see above with the map that shows the expected snowfall on Wednesday and Thursday, then you'll see that the snow will come down north of the main alpine ridge.

TIP: Check out our detailled snow maps here

It will snow between Wednesday and Thursday and you can expect the snow line to drop below 1000 meters. Unfortunately you have to expect some heavy wind as well. This will result in varying snow quantities. So it definitely isn't the perfect storm. More details about that later this week.

Storm Gisi will kickstart winter

We'll also keep a close eye on the gap that Storm Gisi will create in the high pressure areas arond the Alps. Gisi will travel around the Alps first (and can bring some cold air to the Alps after she's done that), but the latest calculations show that she'll make a short cut for the storm that you can see in the upper left corner on the map.

This new storm seems to travel to continental Europe over the British Isles and the North Sea and will bring freshies to more regions in the Alps. All of this is scheduled for the weekend of the 6th of November.

That's still far away, but if you look a the NAO-index you can it gets more negative. And that fits with the weather that is outlined above.

Low pressure areas heading for continental Europe from the northwest usually bring snow for the entire Alps.

Greater chances on a cold winter

It's almost November and there are some great things visible on the weather maps. Snowfall in October is great to fire up the stoke, but snow in November is better, simply because there's a higher chance that it won't melt and forms a base for the freeride winter 16-17. Talking about that, the snow cover in Siberia is still growing and there's relatively not much ice in the Arctic for the time of the year. And that could result in a colder winter than normal. Check out this article to read more about that.

Next update on Monday!
Stay stoked. Morris