The Snow Thread

Yes, don't worry, it has been too warm in the last few days and so the issues are all concentrated at altitudes above 1500 m.
In my valley there was an avalanche much higher than in here, which isolated a little village called Rochemolles , and luckily no one's hurt.

It really sounds extremely French, to me it also sounds like it could mean something (it sounds like "soft rock" or something like that to me). Anyway, wikipedia says that it was founded by people who were escaping a Saracen invasion around 1000 years ago. I really can't imagine how it was to live in there during the middle ages...

About which country did the village belong to, it is quite complicate because the geo-political situation was completely different back then. The most of my valley was under the Frank rule already before Charlemagne (the borderline between Frank reign and Lombards reign was at the entrance of the valley), while in the following centuries the valley was disputed between the Savoy family (which at the beginning practically ruled over a region of France, then became more and more independent and, finally, became kings of Italy) and the Dauphiné. Linguistically, that part of the valley is traditionally a Occitan speaking area too, and also the rest of my region started to seriously speak Italian something like 70 years ago. 

Unfortunately our Met Office doesn't keep snowfall averages but I've worked Bingley's out from December 2009 onwards using snowdepth data on Ogimet, it might not be 100% accurate but you get the idea. I think this might be close to the 1981-2010 average because we've had a few really snowy winters (93 cm in 2012/3, 41 cm in March that year alone!) and lots of almost snowless ones to balance them out - the median will be below the mean.

November: 2.2 cm
December: 6.4 cm
January: 12.3 cm
February: 7.9 cm
March: 8 cm
April: 2.4 cm
Total: 39.2 cm

We've had lying snow in 4 of the past 8 Novembers, 6 of the past 9 Decembers, 7 of the past 8 Januarys, 5 of the past 8 Februarys, 4 of the past 8 Marches and 2 of the past 8 Aprils.

Odd that half of Novembers have seen lying snow so far this decade but only a quarter of Aprils, snow is probably more likely to fall in April than November here because of evaporative cooling caused by heavy convective showers, but it's usually too warm for it to accumulate to anything because it's more likely to happen during the day.

For the Lawn Guylanders shalop, bizzy and @noowaka. [Queens is on the island, right? you're almost one!] neat image, snow totals from eastern Long Island. by decadal average, this decade has been the snowiest since at least the mid 40s. But it's definitely not the coldest decade, some cold winters were mixed in with very mild winters. Full size image



source

Image seems broken, not sure if it shows up for others.

There's an actual blizzard outside, I can hardly believe it.

I can see it fine, sometimes I can't see images though and more often than not it's ones that nei's posted

I'm told from this forum there are very strange climates in Yurop where there are more days of snow falling than snow on the ground. In North America, those spots are limited to the least snowiest places. My ratio is on the high side, as we don't get that many small snowfall events unlike upstate NY

It seems normal here to have more days with snow falling than lying.

That's because we get a lot of convective snow events that melt on contact, and the average winter temps are mostly above freezing, so snow never lies for long.