Austria Friday: found itself buried under 4 feet of snow, creating chaos and disruption of traffic and power supply. Snowfall trapped some 15,000 tourists at ski resorts on the Arlberg Mountain. High winds are also whipping the nation. An important rail line that connects Vienna and Innsbruck with western Austria and Switzerland was to be closed until Sunday. Two rail lines that connect western Austria with Germany were also closed.
India Friday: Hailstorm in parts of New Delhi and Amritsar. 3 feet snow closed down Kashmir's main highway, and also knocked out power and telephone lines, plunging most of state powerless and cut-off from rest of the country. Temperatures in Leh plunged to minus 18.8 deg C. Many parts of Himachal Pradesh received snowfall, including surprisingly low altitude areas of the state. Records tumbled as many of these areas received snow after three decades or more. Kangra received snow after a gap of a whopping 67 years. Several villages of Pathankot and Hoshiarpur districts experienced snowfall on Saturday morning, the first in recorded history.These two events may look unconnected but they need not. They occurred the same time as the AO flipped to its weakly negative mode.