Austrian Alps Hammered by Huge Autumn Snowfall

“Extraordinary, if not unprecedented”. It’s only mid-September after a summer alleged by the BBC (and others) to be the ‘world’s hottest on record’, but a barrage of unseasonal heavy snow has landed on parts of the Austrian Alps, as severe flooding from Storm Boris is causing havoc in various central and eastern European states.
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It often snows at altitude in September, but the levels seen over the past few days in places have been described as ‘unprecedented’ by weather experts, says PlanetSKI.

Snow is falling to as low as 700m in Austria with as much as 2m expected to fall at altitude by the end of Monday.

Austrian storm warning centre UWZ says that in some areas, previous records for the entire month of September will be “surpassed in just a few days”.

Manuel Kelemen, a forecaster for Puls24 TV, said “what we’re experiencing is extraordinary, if not unprecedented”.

“Although occasional (mostly) high-altitude snowfalls are nothing unusual in September, this degree of storm is not something we have seen this early for many years and it will probably end up dumping record snowfalls (for the time of year) across some parts of Austria,” said Fraser Wilkin from weathertoski.co.uk.

“Many other Alpine regions have also seen significant snow at altitude, but it is mostly in Austria where the early winter onslaught appears unusually severe.”

It is being described as a 1 in 50 year event by the Ministry of the Environment of the Czech Republic where there has been heavy flooding.
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The current weather in the Alps has been caused by cold polar air from the north interacting with a very warm Mediterranean sea to the south.

It has been so severe for two reasons:

— The position of the storm has pulled in colder air from the north to mix with moisture drawn up from the unusually warm waters of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.

— The low pressure has been slow moving and has been stuck in a blocked weather pattern, meaning the storm is trapped between high pressure to the west and the east.

The weather has caused huge disruption and some loss of life.

Full article here.
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Image: Alpine snow scene [credit: planetski.eu]