Weather Photos blog

As expected, a significant snowfalls are occuring over SW Slovenia today. During the last few days, models were confidently predicting light to moderate snowfalls to start on Monday morning over SW Slovenia and NE Italy. The last night was clear and pretty cold, minimum temperatures reached between -6 and -12°C, where the lowest were Babno Polje with -20°C and Loski Potok with -22°C. As soon as the morning has arrived, cloudiness quite rapidly covered western half of Slovenia due to arriving of the short-wave trough across the Alps and warm air advection in mid-levels ahead of it. Increasing moisture soon caused the condenstation and first virgas were observed over the hilly terrain. Its was a good sign that snowing is about to start soon.

As it can be seen from the both satellite images below, a short-wave trough crosses the Alps (see WV sat image) and rapid WAA over northern Mediterranean causing precipitation (see VIS sat image).

Soon, around 0830 UTC, it started snowing over Karst area and quickly expanded over the whole western Slovenia thereafter. Here is the radar sequence between 09 ah 11h local time. Surprisedly, snowfalls are more intense than it was expected by the models and due to very near or below zero ground temperature, its all accumulating easily.

As can be seen from both webcams below, one installed at my observatory and another one installed in Trieste, heavy snowfalls were occuring awhile ago, but unfortunatelly my webcam is turned more upwards and its hard to see snow intensity. However, snowfalls in Trieste were pretty intense as reported by local residents, it can rarely be seen something like this there along the coast.

As for now, until 12pm, a few centimetres of snow depth has already accumulated over whole SW Slovenia, inclusing some very lowlands close to the seaside.

I’ll update my blog with few photos and some additional information about total snowfall accumulations until the evening (18z). Stay tuned for the future updates!