Europe Daily Snow
By Luke Stone, Forecaster Posted 1 year ago December 15, 2023
Mainly Dry For the Next Five Days, Storms Return Mid to Late Next Week
Summary
We'll have some lingering snow showers in the eastern Alps on Friday before a ridge sets up and dries things out for the next five days. Enjoy the break because active weather returns around the middle of next week. Another round of strong storms is possible for the last week of December.
Short Term Forecast
On Friday, snow showers will continue in the Austrian Alps, as the final system in the previous storm cycles slowly moves off to our east. The upper-level ridge will move over Spain and start to strengthen, acting as a barrier to storms impacting the Alps over the next five days. This will be the dominant feature in our weather during this time.
This ridge will hang out over Spain through Tuesday before it starts retreating to the west.
This will allow the first of several upper-level storms to drop down into central Europe.
The track of these next storms will be important. Over the last few days, the models have not shown consistency in this regard. Some model runs drop this storm right over the Alps, bringing the best dynamics to France and the western Alps. Others take the storm east of the Alps, putting Austria in the bullseye. Check out the difference in one of the recent runs from the European and American models. You can see in the figure on the right side that the storm track is much farther to the east.
The models have been bouncing around quite a bit with the location of this upper-level low. So while I have confidence in strong storms returning to the Alps, exactly who will get heavy snow is still up in the air. My initial guess is that the first storm will bring heavier snow to the eastern Alps followed by the next storm tracking farther west favoring the western and central Alps. I will be watching this very closely.
Extended Forecast
Thanks for reading the Europe Daily Snow!
Luke Stone
Forecaster, OpenSnow
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