Quote:
Originally Posted by Cambium
Ha. That's crazy. I know what its like driving just 30 minutes and seeing the snow rain line but to physically see it right in front of you from a vertical sense is so interesting.
Which way are the winds blowing? Which way are you facing? What is the temp difference from floor to above snow line.
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Actually, this is a quite common situation in here. But not at the beginning of February, it is more like a November or February situation. When it happens in November the photos are even more interesting than this one, because you see the transition from trees in the middle of foliage and snow.
I showed a really similar photo nearly one year ago:
Now I will try to give some better explanation. For doing this I need to give you some reference point, so here there is a screen shoot from Google maps, with the map centered around my place:
If you want to explore the area with google maps by yourselves, here there is the link:
https://www.google.it/maps/place/100...44!4d7.0484573
I live in a side-valley of the Susa Valley, that goes from the Mont Cenis pass and arrives in Susa (so its orientation is North-South, more or less). The side-valley is named after the mountain torrent Cenischia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cenischia
On the map I indicated the point of view of the picture, so in practice I was looking toward the west side of the valley.
I think that in here this is so easy to see mainly because our mountains are quite step. My village is at the really base of the mountains, and the slope of the terrain below the village is not excessive because the village is build over an accumulation of sediments generated by the mountain erosion. The real mountain starts just above the village, and is much stepper (in some points is practically a wall).
So my house is at about 650 m of altitude, but the snow line in that picture was at about 750-800 m. Going above that altitude the picture becomes progressively less clear, and more or less the mountain remain visible until the level of the road SS25, which is at an altitude of more or less 1000 m.
Talking about temperatures, it is not easy to give good measures because Val Cenischia has only two weather stations, which are the two circles I added to the map:
- The blue circle is in Bar Cenisio, at an altitude of 1525 m. It is also further north than us (really close to the French borderline), so in practice that place is never visible from here.
The picture was taken at about 10 AM, and at that hour this weather station recorded a temperature of -2°C. That weather station also measure the amount of accumulated snow: right now it is 57 cm, nearly 20 cm more than before the beginning of this perturbation.
- The red circle is Susa (locality Pietrastretta), which is at the really entrance of Val Cenischia. Altitude 520 m. When I took the picture, it measured a temperature of nearly 1°C (which is also the lowest temperature recorded yesterday in that station). Over there it hasn't showed (yet).
Here we are at a slightly higher altitude if compared to the second weather station, so I would say that the temperature in here was just above 0°C. Yesterday we had rain alternated with snow (that didn't stick) for all the morning.
Both the station recorded a wind speed lower than 5m/s for the morning of yesterday, which is really low for us. Wind direction was not particularly interesting, it was just following the direction of the valley.
Yesterday afternoon was much more windier instead, with a really short episode of foehn wind that brought away the clouds for a while (it really looked like the wind was mixing everything)
This morning was cloudy and rainy again, but the snow level has lowered. Just after lunchtime it started to snow in here too, and right now (3 PM) it looks like it is starting to stick to the ground.
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