Friday and Saturday offered strong winds in combination with snowfall interspersed with rain in the mountains.
“Our advice is to avoid all avalanche terrain during Saturday,” writes the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency on its website.
Popular ski resorts covered
In western Vindelfjällen, southern Laplandfjällen, southern Jämtlandsfjällen and western Härjedalfjällen with ski resorts such as Funäsfjällen, Hemavan, Kittelfjällen and Åre, the Environmental Protection Agency is now warning of significant avalanche danger, a third on the five-point scale.
– It is a serious step. We expect avalanches to occur spontaneously. Now the weather is quite bad, so there probably aren’t that many people out where avalanches happen, but if you were, it’s easy to start them yourself, says Petter Palmgren at the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency’s avalanche forecast service.
Advice: Avoid steep terrain
The forecasts are only made for mountain areas where there are usually a lot of people, but the weather affects the entire mountain chain, so the risk also applies elsewhere.
– The general advice is that while this storm is going on, and the day after, you should avoid steep terrain. You must also be very vigilant in the days that follow.
Heavy rainfall, strong winds and mild weather increase in the short term the danger of avalanche accidents, which are almost always triggered by people when the snow cover is weak. Seen over a whole winter, however, the snow becomes harder and more durable in the long term, says Petter Palmgren.
– In larger storms, large forces load the snow cover, so over time it will bind together and get used to greater weight. Then it is noticeable that the extra load a person poses is not so much.