Hello!
Our family of 4 (boys ages 18 and 11) will be staying in Wengen for 7 days arriving in a few days. Our first trip to Switzerland and cannot wait! Sadly, the predicted weather is rain every day of our trip! Any recommendations for a weather app or site specific to this area for us to plan accordingly? Any rainy day recommendations? Thank you!
Posted by
West Michigan
422 posts
For Switzerland, I use a weather app called Swiss Weather. There are a number of webcams for various mountain peaks. Weather changes a lot, and quickly, so it's good to keep checking.
Posted by
15 posts
Do not rely on your smart phone weather app nor even www.weather.com for wunderground or forecasts as these often default to weather at the ski peaks or nearby valley towns and not in the mountain villages. Or are just completely wrong. For example, a couple years ago we were enjoying a beautiful 70F afternoon in Wengen and weather.com told us it was snowing!
To complicate matters, forecasting weather more than one to two days in advance in mountainous areas is largely folly. Mountains create their own weather.
It is extremely rare for it to rain all day in this area. Rather, indications of rain are more typically a light shower in late afternoon and good weather the rest of the time. Download a couple of apps that will give you better information. Meteoblue and meteoswiss then make sure that you are looking at the area where you actually want the forecast.
Posted by
OP
22 posts
Thank you for the tips and reassurance! I’ll download these apps prior to leaving.
Posted by
Chicago
3678 posts
Never trust the weather apps. :-) They will always show rain.
I always use 3 weather apps for Switzerland (meteo swiss, meteo blue, and weather on iphone) and the majority of the time they are all wrong. It’s so frustrating!! Prepare for the worst, but just know the weather will probably be better than it looks.
Forum member shoe put together some ideas for rainy days:
Posted by
Bern, Switzerland
1074 posts
As a local this is the one I use:
Posted by
Wengen
3264 posts
Nobody knows what the weather will be in a few days. The met office isn't even sure what the weather will be tomorrow. All that we are fairly certain off is that it will rain during the night until tomorrow morning, and then it will stop. We are timing our excursion tomorrow around that.
So far weather has been very variable. What is important is get a detailed forecast. A forecast that just puts on a single symbol to represent the weather for a whole day is useless. The reason it is useless is because that will indeed show rain every day. Because we have indeed had rain most days. We have also had sun most days. We have had cloud most days, and we have had blue cloudless skies most days. This because pretty much every day has every type of weather. You do not know what "variable weather" means until you have spend some time in the mountains.
Today for example started with a blue sky, and the in the afternoons clouds came up, then we had a short shower around 14:00, then the sun came back and we had our aperitif outside, then around 18:00 it started raining again.
And the Meteo Swiss app, by the Swiss Federal Met Service was spot on. It predicted when it would start raining, and when it would stop.
So this is what you do: You get up early. You check the details weather forecast, and then you plan your day around the weather.
We have had very variable weather recently but all the guest we have had so far had a good time, and got in plenty of hikes and excursions. Just be flexible. And do not buy tickets for mountain railways in advance...