The Weather Notebook: Alps

Alps
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Have you ever seen a flying saucer? Well, if you look above a mountain on a windy day, you might be surprised to see a massive grey-white disk floating over the summit.

Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton and this is the Weather Notebook.

You've likely heard the phrase, especially if you live in New England‹"just wait a minute, the weather will change." Well, in the Alps, you just have to go to the other side of a mountain to find different conditions.

Correspondent Curt Nickisch traveled to Austria recently and has the story.

The southernmost province in Austria - called Carinthia - is also the sunniest. Some people even call it the Austrian Riviera. Why? Carinthia is sandwiched between two mountain ranges. Twelve thousand-foot tall Austrian Alps block the cold Atlantic air sweeping in from the north.

GALLOB: The weather gets stuck sometimes.

Gerwin Gallob lives in Klagenfurt, the capital of the province. He often notices how beautiful weather stays put there when he's in another part of Austria, and then crosses the mountains to go back home.

GALLOB: The weather might be a lot better on the other side actually. So if you go through one of our tunnels, you might experience different weather on the other side. And it only takes you a minute to go through this tunnel.

But Carinthia loses the good weather when winter hits. With the Austrian Alps on one side and the Julian Alps on the other, bad weather can't escape. So Gallob says Klagenfurt, in the bottom part of the basin, is often blanketed with fog for weeks on end.

So the province has its own version of a snowbird. Many Carinthians spend their winters in Italy or Spain, and then come back in the summer for more good weather.

In southern Austria, this is Curt Nickisch.

Curt is usually found on the rolling hills of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The Weather Notebook is a production of the Mount Washington Observatory and is supported by the National Science Foundation. For a glimpse of the Austrian Riviera, go to our website at weather notebook.org. Thanks today to assistant producer Doug Sanborn.