SkiSickness

So in most of the alps, there is literally absolutely no snow at all.. including anything that is within eyeshot of Lausanne (chamonix, etc).

Mon petit doigt m'a dit that there is some serious italian blower that has accumulated to levels illegal in switzerland. There was some crazy tropical shit that came through and destroyed several ancient villages on the Italian Riviera. Turns out this same storm dropped like 6 feet of snow in on the Valaisain crest.


First glimpse.


second, third, fourth glimpses.


Holy shit, this might actually be good.


Glacier pow.


Jean Charles just turned in his thesis yesterday. He is acceptably stoked.


Rimez.


Almost to the top.


kay,



From the summit, we have a 400-500 foot shot of 40 something degree immaculate blower.









Then, there are several kilometers of high-speed glacier skipping to reach the lower glaciers.









Back down to the 'Hospiz Simplon'

I don't know but I don't go to the hospice to die, I go there to live. Thanks napoleon for building this ridiculous castle.

Also, all day long the swiss army was shooting experimental munitions with panzer tanks. Someone has to make sure the shit works before the next world war.

How splendid! I wish I could have been there. I hope it snows in Chamonix, though. Another dry season would be quite depressing.

That does not look like pubescent premature double-ejection. What else does your pinky tell you?

It told me to learn to accept the fact that it no longer snows in the Western alps due to the quasi-permanent positive status of the North Atlantic Oscillation.

It's okay, gas is cheap in Europe.

Maybe now I understand why you're motivated to graduate?

i think your pinky is wrong about the north atlantic oscillation. a strong positive NAO index would acually mean increased west drift, which means more wet air coming in from the atlantic. negative means azores high and iceland low are weakly developped, therefore low pressure gradients over the atlantic and tendency of jetstream to go somewhere else, which increases chances of stable blocking situations in europe, which means no snow again ever.

http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/p ... index.html

Using my very unscientific metric, I would judge us to be right directed in the middle of suckville.

aha, yes, of course i didn't actually bother to look at the current values. i also found a paper (pdf, knock yourself out) that has some statistics about winters in CH during +NAO. there is a diagram (fig. 6) showing NAO index and pressure anomalies in Zürich, from which they conclude dry winters in CH during +NAO. there is another diagram that shows regions of higher/lower precip that normal during + and - phases which imo is far less conclusive as to what happens where exactly (fig. 4)

in general i think the whole NAO business is a lot more complicated than +NAO = good / -NAO = bad or vice versa. probably works ok on annual and decadal scales, not so sure about shorter time steps.

this was the situation for much of november:


you can see high pressure over central europe with troughs left and right, a classic omega block (it looks like a greek omega). this is a very stable situation with practically no eastwards movement of the large systems. while there is low pressure over iceland there is no real azores high. that is enough for a +NAO index but obviously not for a pronounced west drift due to the lack of an azores high. so imo we are missing the main criterium of a +ve phase as far as weather over central europe is concerned.

right now it looks like this (not a permanent image):


the jet is much more zonal and we are no longer cut off from the atlantic, i.e. there is now actually a chance that the weather may change because the blocking high is gone. NAO hasn't changed much, let alone changed phases but we are under a totally different regime...


/

I actually noticed the same thing with the placement of the quasi-permanent high over the caucuses.. I didn't realize, however, that the when this high tends to disappear, there is a formation of a zonal pattern. It all just looked desperate to me. Looking at the latest 7-day predictions, the values from meteo suisse are tending for some precip to come in, so we will see.

Let's just hope it's not a pathetic sprinkling, with some southerly flow to the alps, and the re-building of the blocking pattern like pretty all much last winter.

Who are you anyway, an atmospheric scientist?

i have a paper with a stamp from a university that says i am an atmospheric scientist and technically i am supposed to be working to become Dr. atmospheric scientist, which doesn't neccessarily answer the question.

i will come annoy you in switzerland if Tirol keeps living up to its reputation snow wise.

Don't get a paper cut! Those are the worst.