Alps hit by ‘once-in-a-generation’ snow storms

Image credit: Andrew Holt

Parts of the Alps have seen a return to 1978 weather conditions according to this report, with some places only accessible by helicopter.

Hundreds of roads across the Alps in France, Italy and Switzerland were closed, cutting off resorts and villages, after the kind of snowfall that only comes once every 30 years, as Euronews reports.

Tens of thousands of people have been stranded across the Alps after ‘once-in-a-generation’ weather dumped almost 2 meters of snow on some ski resorts in less than 48 hours.

Schools and nurseries have been closed and roads cut off after the Savoie department in France was placed on red alert – the highest warning for avalanches.

Tignes and Val d’Isere have been in lockdown with tourists and residents confined to the area.

Why you shouldn’t believe a UK snow forecast more than three days ahead

Channel 4’s Liam Dutton

TV weather presenter Liam Dutton runs through some of the pitfalls awaiting UK forecasters.

Predicting snow in the UK is difficult and weather computer models rarely get it right more than a few days ahead. But why is this the case?

The past week has seen Arctic air and snow affect the UK, and with another cold blast later this week, there is much excitement about the prospect of snow.

Twitter has been awash with graphics from various weather computer models showing large swathes of the UK covered in snow in a week’s time.

However, the bottom line is that you should never believe a detailed UK snow forecast more than three days ahead.

California’s record-breaking snowfalls continue : so much it’s hard to measure

There’s going to be a lot of meltwater sometime.

The snow amounts in California’s Sierra Nevada mountain range this winter are difficult to wrap your head around, reports Sott.net. In many cases topping 500 inches, they are some of the highest totals in memory.

At the Squaw Valley Alpine Meadows resort, seven feet fell in just the past week. The snow is so high that it buried chairlifts and ski patrol shacks.

The resort has received 565 inches (47 feet) this season, including a 45-year record of 282 inches in January. On Thursday, it announced that its ski area would remain open through July 4.

Since 1962, it will mark just the fourth instance of Independence Day skiing (the other years were 1998, 1999, and 2011), according to a resort spokesperson.

States Spent Over $1 Billion On Snow Removal Last Winter

Snow-clearing in Boston
[image credit: ABC News]

Last winter parts of the USA received record snowfalls according to reports. While one winter is not a trend, it was also the second consecutive year of severe freezing of the Great Lakes on a scale not seen for decades.

A particularly harsh winter left many states over-budget on snow removal, with some having to kick in tens of millions in additional funding, according to a survey released Monday.

The survey of 23 states, conducted by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, found that combined spending on winter maintenance operations exceeded $1 billion for the period between October, 2014 and March, 2015, the Associated Press reports.

Forum on climate change postponed due to snow

Snow mountain [image credit: ibtimes.co.uk]

It’s not funny to be facing the result of massive snowfalls but this might be an exception.

BOSTON – A legislative forum on climate change has been postponed, ironically, due to the weather.

“I hope these repeated, severe storms serve as a platform for some important conversations around bolstering our natural and built infrastructure against climate change once a new date has been set for this discussion,” said State Sen. Marc Pacheco (D-Taunton), who chairs the Senate Committee on Global Warming and Climate Change and organized the summit.

The forum had been scheduled for Tuesday at the Statehouse, but the MBTA is shut down Tuesday as Massachusetts continues to dig out from an unprecedented amount of snowfall.

Pacheco’s forum was going to include numerous speakers from environmental organizations and academia as well as Secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs Matthew Beaton, Senate President Stan Rosenberg (D-Amherst) and other legislators. Raymond Bradley, director of the Climate System Research Center at UMass Amherst, and Richard Palmer, a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UMass Amherst, were among those who had been slated to attend.

Report from masslive.com.

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Things are so bad they may have to dump cleared snow straight into the ocean.