After a warm weekend with only some snow in the northeastern Alps, this week will start again mild and mostly sunny. Only in the second half of the week things get a bit more changeable. At first it won’t really be accompanied by much snow, but around the weekend there could be more snow possible.
In this weather report:
- Tyrolean temperature records
- Some warm and sunny days
- Increasingly changeable
- Interesting developments for the weekend
Temperature records in Tyrol
We had a heady weekend with some temperature records in Tyrol on Saturday. These included a whopping 21.7 degrees here in Innsbruck, not only a February record, but even a winter record for Tyrol. On Saturday, I went for a short session at the Nordkette. On these sunny southern slopes, the snow was soft all the way to the surface, resulting in some gliding snow avalanches. See also the avalanche bulletin for this warning.
Yesterday was again warm and dry for much of the Alps. Snowfall in eastern Austria was limited to a fresh layer of about 5 to 10 centimetres (along with stormy winds) in the areas I mentioned earlier, including Loser - Altaussee.
Sunny and warm
For the next few days too, it will remain warm and, with the exception of some high clouds in between, quite sunny. Temperatures will again rise to around 15 degrees in the valleys and the zero degree limit will remain at around 2,500 to 3,000 metres.
Changeable from Wednesday onwards
The second half of the week will be more changeable with occasional snow. Initially, it is really only a few centimetres, Wednesday in the Western Alps and Thursday also further east, but because the air masses are still quite warm, the snowline is also quite high. In the Western Alps at around 1,800 to 2,000 metres and then in the Eastern Alps around 1,500 metres.
Interesting developments from the weekend onwards
The developments from Friday onwards do not look bad by any means, but unfortunately still very uncertain. Both the ECMWF and GFS main runs are in the mood and show quite a bit of snow for the weekend, but looking at the ensemble, we see that far from all members are following. The Alps are exactly in between two air masses from Friday onwards. With small shifts, the weather picture can change considerably. In a favourable case, it could produce a snow sandwich for both the southern and northern Alps, but it is thus also not out of the question that precipitation amounts will be really disappointing. Unfortunately, again, we will have to be a bit more patient.
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Each model run I see is looking less and less promising. Novice weather guy but from what I see, not looking drastically different than what it’s been over the last few weeks.
An explanation of why the predicted snow fall in 5 days from now always reduces as we move to it but seemingly never increases. Is the algo. too optimistic?
As always snow starts when you leave, this winter really bad