An impressive Weststau is underway with heavy snow falling across the favored areas of the French and Swiss Alps. This will continue through Sunday evening. As the storm progresses eastward, the winds will temporarily shift to the southwest. This will result in some heavy snow on the southern side of the Italian and Austrian Alps. 

You can see the snow accumulation during that time favoring the southern side of the Italian and Austrian Alps below.

While the heaviest snow will wind down Sunday evening, snow showers will remain possible through Monday night.

The next strong system arrives Thursday morning and will feature two distinct rounds of snow as the upper-level low crosses central Europe. The first round of snow will occur between Thursday morning and Friday morning, with the second wave will happen between Friday afternoon and Monday morning. 

This will also result in two primary wind patterns during the storm, with the first favoring the French/western Swiss Alps underly westerly flow, and the second favoring the Austrian/eastern Swiss Alps under northerly flow. This will deliver solid snow totals to many parts of the Alps. 

Check out the snow forecast and winds during the initial round of snow with westerly winds below.

And below is the snow forecast as well as the winds for the period of northerly winds. 

My early thoughts on snow totals for this event are 25 - 50 cms above 2100 m and 15 - 30 cms between 1800 - 2100 m. 

A weak storm is possible right on the heels of this one as well.

In the long-range, the models have another storm around the middle of the month, but it may track too far north for major impacts. Beyond that, there are some signs of a ridge setting up over southwestern Europe that would deflect storms to the east limiting impacts in the Alps. That is still a long ways away though, so there's plenty of time for changes. 

Thanks for reading the Europe Daily Snow! Check out this short clip from this past weekend in Aspen, where nearly 3 feet of snow fell in twenty-four hours. Follow me @lstone84 on Instagram to track and chase storms all winter long!

Luke Stone
Forecaster, OpenSnow