Alpine Snow - Early Warning for weekend 4th Feb 2017

If you're heading for the mountains, or driving around them, this coming weekend ... then you'll want to start keeping an eye on the local forecasts and road information! 8)

Forecasts are showing a succession of bands of snow rolling into The Alps later this week, with potentially significant falls of snow looking likely from Friday morning onwards.

Encouragingly (from a snowsports POV!) we're currently looking at a combination of weather systems; moving both into the Southern Alps (Italy) from the Med AND into the North and Western Alps from the West. So decent new snow over a very wide area.

Total accumulations could be around 1 metre at mid altitudes up, over 4 or 5 days of snow, in a few locations.

At this time it's all on the edge of the reliable timeframe of the forecasts but we're currently expecting initially mild temperatures to bring snow to around 1800 metres (rain below) to start with late Thursday / early Friday depending on location. It will cool relatively quickly, however, and successive bands of snow will fall to lower levels - quite probably to 1200m or below by Saturday.

Saturday is the first of the half-term transfer days, so traffic will be heavier than recently and there's likely to be at least some disruption depending on the exact track of the storms and the evolution of the snow line.

BE PREPARED!

Forecast detail will change throughout the week, but now would be a great time to be making contingency plans to avoid the usual road bottlenecks, change your route/timings at short notice and properly equip your car for a (possibly) long journey in winter conditions (but you'd planned that anyway, right? 8) ).

All part of the adventure!