The first storm in weeks is bringing snow to the Swiss, French, and Italian Alps and will continue to do so through Wednesday morning. So far I am seeing around 5 - 10 cm on some webcams and that's probably the best I'll get for snow reports at this point in the season. 

Totals in the east-facing Italian Alps will approach 20 - 30 cm at higher elevations before the storm wraps up.

We're still looking at some snow showers for the eastern Alps in the Wednesday night through Thursday time frame as a weak storm tracks through the Austrian Alps. After that, our enemy the stubborn storm-blocking ridge will bring us a few more days of dry weather as it weakens and moves off to the southeast. This will result in a break in the action from Thursday through Sunday, as you can see below.

Our attention then shifts to the broad low-pressure system developing in the northeast Atlantic slated to arrive in western Europe Sunday morning/night and the Alps Sunday night/Monday morning. The models don't agree on the timing just yet, with the American model getting things started about a half day earlier than the European model, while the Canadian sits in between the two. I'll share the European and American models below.

You can see the American model has the storm into the Alps well ahead of when the European model does.

The models continue to diverge on the timing and track of this first storm, and the additional ones to follow. This is still almost a week out, so these differences aren't surprising. We will have to hold off on getting into the details of the forecast though.

At this time, I really like what I am seeing with this pattern change and expect at least a week of active weather. The models do agree that two or possibly three upper-level systems will move through the region during this time. Early indications are that the western Alps will be favored during this storm cycle but with the current model disagreement, there's some room for that to shift. 

There are some signs that the pattern will remain stormy during the last week of the month, but the signal isn't too strong at this time. I am just happy to see that there are no signs of an immediate return to ridging. As always I'll be keeping an eye on the long-range and will keep you posted if anything notable develops. 

Thanks for reading the Europe Daily Snow!

Next post on Wednesday.

Luke Stone
Forecaster, OpenSnow