Almost no fresh snow this week

For sun lovers, this week is a wonderful gift, but those who are looking for a nice layer of fresh powder have to wait patiently. For the most part, it will remain dry and sunny this week. Only towards the end of the week there might be some snow in the Southern Alps, but for now I’m not assuming substantial amounts. Today a short update.

Cold nights, sunny days

^The weather forecasts on wePowder are powdered by our friends from Ortovox

Due to the northeastern flow, especially Switzerland and Austria are experiencing cold nights. We are seeing very frosty nights in many valleys. In Switzerland the temperatures dropped below -20 degrees in many places higher up. If we take a look at the ECMWF Ensemble for Innsbruck, we can see that we are still dealing with these cold air masses until tomorrow, after that the temperatures will rise again a bit and we will get to just above average for this time of year. At the bottom of the chart, we can also see the problem that we will also have to deal with in the coming week, because it will remain dry almost the entire week.

Little snowfall

With the exception of some snow in Piemonte and the extreme southern areas of the Southern Alps tonight due to the easterly flow, it will stay mostly dry this week. From Friday onwards the chances of precipitation will increase, but for the time being I don’t expect a dump. The snowfall of these proportions that we see on our weather forecast (from Thursday night until Saturday) cannot be seen elsewhere in the other models and is thus quite uncertain. For now, I’m assuming just a few centimeters for the western Southern Alps, but I’ll keep an eye on this snowfall in the coming days. After the weekend, snow might follow for Austria, but for now the European model is the only one to calculate this snowfall. The GFS lets the high pressure area over Central Europe dominate too much.