I'm getting settled in here in Innsbruck. It's been a beautiful week here with temperatures reaching as high as 20°C (68°F) in town yesterday. It's not great for the skiing, but if you can't have snow, its the next best thing.
Utahn's are well aquatinted with dust and so are people in the Alps as there is a very big source to the south, namely the Sahara Desert.
Yesterday skies were clear of clouds and visibility was good. A look at the weather camera that looks south toward the Wipp Valley and the Brenner Pass to Italy shows
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| Source: https://www.foto-webcam.eu/webcam/innsbruck |
Late yesterday, as forecast, the dust began to move in. Today the visibility is much worse, although it appears the paragliders aren't too concerned (dust of this concentration does not have that large of an impact on solar radiation and surface heating.
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| Source: https://www.foto-webcam.eu/webcam/innsbruck |
Geosphere, which provides weather services for Austria, has a very nice dust modeling system and it nicely illustrates the coverage of dust, which is even thicker in portions of the French and Swiss Alps.
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| Source: https://portale.geosphere.at/hpEUgw/?p=HP_DUSTLOAD_EU&gl=EN |
European operational numerical weather prediction is well ahead of the US now. The Swiss, for example, are running an 11-member ensemble at 1-km grid spacing out to 30 hours 8 times a day and a 21 member ensemble at 2.1-km grid spacing out to 120 hours 4 times a day. I can access an experimental forecast from the Deutscher Wetterdienst (German Weather Service or DWR) with 500-m grid spacing through the University here. Not sure yet if I can share, but it did a spectacular job with the winds yesterday. These forecasts all use the ICOsahedral Nonhydrostatic (ICON) model that was developed by DWR and the Max Plank Institute and is now used by several European countries and other countries outside of Europe including in South American, Africa, and Asia.
Very impressive.
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