As of: February 29, 2024, 12:45 p.m
By: Moritz Bletzinger
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Snow rollers and desert sand: The Piedmontese Alps are likely to be covered in pink on Sunday.
© Imagebroker/Imago/Il Meteo
Italy is struggling with extreme weather conditions: floods, cyclones and an extraordinary natural phenomenon – pink snow.
Frankfurt – An Italian proverb claims: “Leap years are catastrophic years”.
This popular wisdom actually seems to be true at the moment.
Northern Italy is hit by storms.
Floods have left half of the country under water, schools have had to close and Veneto is on the highest red alert. The extreme weather has not yet left Italy behind and is expected to last until the weekend.
Italy is struggling with extreme weather: a cyclone is drifting across the country
The newspaper
La Repubblica
predicts that Sunday (March 3) will be "a date that will be marked on the calendar as 'terrible'."
A cyclone encounters air masses in the Mediterranean and drifts towards Italy.
A high pressure area is blocking the vortex to the east.
The consequence: The cyclone area is intensifying and will bring severe storms to Emilia-Romagna on Thursday and devastating cyclones across the entire country by the weekend.
Cyclone vortexes in Italy repeatedly cause great damage.
Two meters of fresh snow in the Alps – weather phenomenon is likely to turn snow amounts pink
The weather portal
Il Meteo
predicts two meters of fresh snow in the Piedmont Alps on Sunday.
But snowfall is not the only natural phenomenon.
At the same time, the Scirocco wind is expected to carry a load of desert dust from North Africa to the European mountains.
The result: an extraordinary natural event.
The snow in the Alps could turn pink due to mixing with red sand.
However, one should not confuse the pink sand snow with the “watermelon” snow.
The latter is a natural phenomenon from the USA in which an alga bathes the mountain peaks in a romantic color - completely harmless to humans.
High danger of avalanches due to heavy snowfall in the Alps
Although the color of the snow in the Italian Alps is also harmless, the amount of snow poses a serious danger. The avalanche warning level was drastically increased and one valley even had to be evacuated.
In the past few days, numerous snow slabs have come loose, and a German died in an avalanche in South Tyrol.
And the threat will not diminish: the heavy snowfall will be followed by a thaw.
(moe)
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