Austria has seen big snow totals over the last few days, particularly in the Salzburg region. Storm totals of 40 to 80 + cm have been reported, with some areas seeing 40 to 50 cm in the last 24 hours alone. Snow showers will continue on Tuesday, but the heaviest snow is over in the Austrian Alps.

As this storm crosses the Alps, it will become cut off from the predominant west-to-east flow and turn into our Retour d'est. As it traverses the Alps from east to west, it will bring mostly easterly winds to the Italian side of the southwestern Alps. This will provide favorable orographic conditions for the east, northeast, and southeast-facing aspects of the Italian Alps and a few days of moderate to heavy snow. 

We should see 15 - 30 cm across most of this area, with 20 to 40 + cm on the southeast-facing aspects. This will be one of the colder storms of the season for this region. Below is the latest snow forecast from the high-resolution WRF model.

The rest of the Alps will stay mostly dry during this Retour d'est, and the Austrian Alps will dry out too. After the Retour d'est departs, the ridge over northwestern Europe will strengthen and expand. This will keep the storm track over eastern Europe, just grazing the Alps. The upper-level pattern from Wednesday, 4/2, through Saturday, 4/12, is shown below.

One of these storms should provide a glancing blow to the Austrian Alps over the weekend. This would bring more snow to the central and eastern Austrian Alps primarily, but right now, it looks like a minor event, with perhaps 10 to 20 cm. Some models have the track even farther east, with only some scattered snow showers possible. 

Another storm is expected to drop down from the north around Tuesday of next week, but this one looks even farther east at this time.

At the end of the upper-level pattern GIF above, we see the strong ridge in northwestern Europe finally start to break down. The ensembles have this happening around Saturday the 12th as well. We could see a pattern change around that time. 

My next post will be on Wednesday.

Thanks for reading the Europe Daily Snow!

Luke Stone
Forecaster, OpenSnow

Alps Regions:

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