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Europe Daily Snow

By Luke Stone, Forecaster Posted 11 hours ago January 20, 2025

Summary

A solid Retour d'est storm is bringing some long-awaited snow to the southern Alps. The Italian and French Alps will do best with this setup before a quick-hitting storm from the northwest brings another round of moderate to heavy snow. It is still uncertain if the storm track later this week into next will be far enough south to impact the Alps.

Short Term Forecast

The Retour d'est over the Mediterranean continues to move northwest today, bringing moderate to heavy snow to the southwestern Alps. You can see the easterly winds moving into the southwestern Alps below. This favors the east-facing aspects of the Italian Alps. Closer to the coastline, the winds come more from the northeast, enhancing the snow totals along the France/Italy order as well.

Below is the latest snow forecast from the high-resolution WRF model through Thursday. The favored areas should see 25 - 50 cm, with locally higher amounts right along the higher elevations near the France/Italy border. As you move farther north, where the Italian Alps have more of a southerly aspect, totals decrease, but 10 - 20 cm is still possible.

As you can see below, a weak piece of energy will merge with the low from the Retour d'est. Then, a fast-moving storm will move in from the west. This storm will initially bring south-southwest winds, favoring the southern French Alps, transitioning to southwest and eventually northwest.

Snow totals of 25 - 50 cm will be possible in favored regions of the southern French Alps, with 10 - 20 cm elsewhere. When the winds transition to the northwest, the focus will shift to the northern French Alps. With moderate to heavy snow on Thursday, 15 - 40 cm will also be possible here.

The northern side of the Alps in Switzerland and western Austria should see 10 - 20 cm as well.

Extended Forecast

The long-range models are still struggling to pin down the pattern for next weekend and beyond. The latest guidance keeps things mostly dry until Sunday when one of the storms in the northwest dips down farther enough south to bring more snow to the Alps. Beyond that, the models show too many differences to get into any details.

My next post will be on Tuesday.

Thanks for reading the Europe Daily Snow!

Luke Stone
Forecaster, OpenSnow

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