Everyone dreams of spending a Snowy Christmas—a dream that rarely comes true and mostly lives on in the thousands of commercials airing non-stop before and during the Christmas holidays.
Snow at Christmas is more of a quintessential winter image: the required ingredients are sub-zero temperatures and a generous weather front—two elements that do not always go hand in hand.
Yet this 2013 winter could treat us to a White Christmas: almost all weather models now confirm this trend, and even with a week still to go, the odds of having snow at Christmas are high.
After a month without snowfall and with relentless thermal inversion, winter has returned to the Alps, bringing snow and at least partially restoring the warm/cold balance between mountains and plains.
The southward shift of the high-pressure system has created the conditions needed to let through the storm systems that until now had been held back over Northern Europe.
How Much and Where It Will Snow at Christmas
Anyone expecting snow in Rome or Milan will be disappointed reading the next few lines of this article: the storm arriving for Christmas will bring plenty of Snow, but only in the mountains.
No snow in the cities, then, but heavy snowfalls across the entire Alpine Arc and parts of the Apennines.
Barring changes, a major storm system will hit our mountains: in just 2-3 days (from Christmas Eve to Boxing Day) a full 100 cm of Snow could fall—you read that right, a full 1 meter of snow at Christmas!
The ski resorts where the most snow is forecast are those in the Aosta Valley and Piedmont, where the core of the Christmas snowfall will stall.
While the north-western Alps are already looking forward to a record snowfall, the remaining regions are also set to stock up on snow: across Lombardy, Trentino Alto Adige, Veneto, and Friuli Venezia Giulia, 30 to 90 cm of snow are forecast.
The snow line will settle around 1,000 meters, with major accumulations especially above 1,300 m of altitude.
Not bad at all after such a long dry spell; let’s hope the forecasts come true and make Christmas 2013 an event to remember in the history of epic snowfalls!
RECOMMENDED LINKS:
– Snow Forecast by resort
– Snow Report
– Live images from the slopes
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