Summer didn’t want to end this year; temperatures of up to 27 degrees were recorded in Austria until October. So far, autumn has only been for a short time, and in recent days there have been strong winds in some places thanks to a foehn storm, but there have also been warm temperatures again over a wide area.
But now winter is getting closer and closer – and weather models are calculating the first long-range forecasts for the coming months. A first trend is already emerging: it shouldn’t be too cold. “It will be a mild winter again,” qualified meteorologist Dominik Jung from the weather service wetter.net told the Bild newspaper.
The expert refers to calculations by the North American meteorological service NOAA, which predicts a winter that is too warm and too wet in Europe. According to this, next winter will be 1 to 2 degrees warmer than the new climate average from 1991 to 2020. “We will be in the range of the 10 warmest winters since 1881”, explains Jung. While it can always get icy and snowy, this is likely to remain the exception. Instead, moderate air masses will likely continue to bring rain.
Climate change as an unpredictable factor
The reason why many weather models repeatedly predict cold and snow, which then fail to materialize in the short term, may be because the calculations cannot yet deal with the factor of climate change.
Graduate meteorologist Jürgen Schmidt from Wetter-Kontor also expects a warm winter: “My feeling is that it will be mild overall, although a colder phase is now on the horizon for late October/early November,” he told Bild.
Is Ms. Holle still surprising us?
However, another expert points out that the predictions could be completely wrong: “The reason is the phase of El Niño, which has so far guaranteed an extremely hot year in 2023 in many regions of the world. Due to the influence of El Niño, there have also been very cold winters in Europe in the past – this happened, among other things, in the winter of 2009/2010″, emphasizes climatologist Karsten Brandt from donnerwetter.de.
So there is a small chance that after 13 mild winters, the winter of 2023/2024 could finally live up to its name again.