Snow covered a large part of Belgian territory last night. Taking the emergency, rail and airport services by surprise, in particular. “Exceptional” snowfall, according to a meteorologist who points out that the last comparable episode dates back to… 1985.
A nice layer of snow fell in our territory last night while the forecast was calling for a little melting snow. How is this possible? We take stock with Pascal Mormal, meteorologist at IRM. “In fact, the quantities of snow that fell were sometimes higher than expected.“, he admits straight away.
It is especially on a very specific axis that the winter precipitation was the most significant: “We were faced with snow on a relatively narrow axis, ultimately, which included the province of Antwerp, the two Brabants and the north of the province of Namur. And it is probably in the north of the province of Namur that there, indeed, the forecast models may have underestimated the quantities of snow precipitation a little, since locally, notably in Sart-Bernard, we have measured up to 10 cm of snow“, explains Pascal Mormal.
We have to go back to 1985
Quantities of snow which were difficult to anticipate, according to the meteorologist: “Snow is really one of the most complicated weather parameters to anticipate with a really significant time margin. You should know that here, it was really a corridor of showers which was relatively well anticipated by the models, but afterwards, a shift of a few tens of kilometers further east or more west can change quite a bit. gives it. And it was finally one or two hours before the event that we really saw which regions were going to be more affected by these snowfalls.”
So much snow and ice on November 21 may seem surprising… rightly so. “For the Hautes-Fagnes, this is not at all exceptional. We measured 12 centimeters at Mount Rigi this (Thursday, Editor’s note) morning. On the other hand, for the center of the country, there actually, snowfall is quite early since to find snow cover on the ground in Uccle, which is our reference station, this early, we have to go back to November 1985“, points out Pascal Mormal, meteorologist at IRM.
winter snow weather
