Combining the reports of "Link Found Between Cold European Winters And Solar Activity (+) The Great Frost, Devastated Europe from Italy to Iceland this shows that with the fall in solar activity we should see the Rhine River in Germany begin to freeze and late season snows and early season snows. Now fit in declining TSI and decreasing solar wind pressure and we have the conditions for a mini ice age in Europe, but are there signs? Let's Look at the snows and record cloud this week in Europe.

Easter for many across Germany meant either snow, rain, or even both over the weekend. And the chilly weather is set to continue.

From Berlin down to Munich, snow fell across the country over the Easter weekend, making the springtime holiday feel more wintry than perhaps many had hoped.

Flowers were already blooming for the season, but in some places, icy blankets hid them from sight, like below in Feldafing, Bavaria.

Snow ploughs even had to be deployed in some places, like below in Taunus, Hesse, to clear away the fields of white powder.

A reader in Russia sent this link about unusual cold in St Petersburg.

St. Petersburg authorities have asked lay people to support migrating birds suffering a lack of food, writes Alexey Parkhomenko. The temperature anomaly there is -5-7 degrees C (9 to 12.5F) below normal.

"In the Moscow Region, where I live, the temperature this morning has been below freezing, with some snow and strong NW wind."

The Smolny Committee on Nature Management, which asked residents and city visitors for help, said the unexpected snow that came to replace the spring heat caught the birds unawares.

A serious winter storm over the weekend covered central and northern Saskatchewan with a thick blanket of snow.

Over four days, Lloydminster was hit with 42 centimetres of snow. Buffalo Narrows and La Ronge received around 20 centimetres, while Flin Flon received 28 centimetres.

The snow created icy road conditions and poor visibility.

Despite warm temperatures, Environment Canada believes the snow will be around for the next several days.

"We can still see the band of snow on satellite imagery," said weather specialist Mark Melsness. "There's still a bright band of white left on the ground."

The province's Water Security Agency is monitoring the situation. For now, the agency said it is not concerned about flooding caused by the sudden snow dump.

There's been up to 30cm (a foot) of fresh snow on the Eastern side of the Alps over the Easter weekend.

Mid-winter conditions have returned - probably briefly - to resorts like the Arlberg region's Lech (pictured above and below this afternoon) and St Anton where the ski season still has a fortnight left to run.

Although more than half of the northern hemisphere's ski areas had closed for the season by yesterday evening (Easter Sunday), some did see fresh snow on closing day after a largely warm and Sunny spring to date.

The snow has also fallen at glacier resorts open later in to May like Switzerland's Engelberg and Austria's Molltal Glacier.

Easter Sunday got off to an unusually cold start across Sweden - with three weather records broken as some towns experienced their chilliest April night in decades.

Southern Sweden saw unseasonably cold temperatures, with up to 10cm of snow in northern Skåne, Blekinge, Kronoberg, Halland and Kalmar.

In Örebro, the mercury dropped to -14C, making it the coldest April night since 1944, according to P4 Örebro.

In Karlstad, Sweden's meteorological institute SMHI said temperatures reached -9C, meaning it was the coldest night of April since 1985.

Shortly before 8am on 26 December 2004, the cicadas fell silent and the ground shook in dismay. The Moken, an isolated tribe on the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean, knew that the Laboon, the 'wave that eats people', had stirred from his ocean lair. The Moken also knew what was next: a towering wall of water washing over their island, cleansing it of all that was evil and impure. To heed the Laboon's warning signs, elders told their children, run to high ground.

The tiny Andaman and Nicobar Islands were directly in the path of the tsunami generated by the magnitude 9.1 earthquake off the coast of Sumatra. Final totals put the islands' death toll at 1,879, with another 5,600 people missing. When relief workers finally came ashore, however, they realised that the death toll was skewed. The islanders who had heard the stories about the Laboon or similar mythological figures survived the tsunami essentially unscathed. Most of the casualties occurred in the southern Nicobar Islands. Part of the reason was the area's geography, which generated a higher wave. But also at the root was the lack of a legacy; many residents in the city of Port Blair were outsiders, leaving them with no indigenous tsunami warning system to guide them to higher ground.

Humanity has always courted disaster. We have lived, died and even thrived alongside vengeful volcanoes and merciless waves. Some disasters arrive without warning, leaving survival to luck. Often, however, there is a small window of time giving people a chance to escape. Learning how to crack open this window can be difficult when a given catastrophe strikes once every few generations. So humans passed down stories through the ages that helped cultures to cope when disaster inevitably struck. These stories were fodder for anthropologists and social scientists, but in the past decade, geologists have begun to pay more attention to how indigenous peoples understood, and prepared for, disaster. These stories, which couched myth in metaphor, could ultimately help scientists prepare for cataclysms to come.

Anyone who has spent time around small children gets used to the question 'why?' Why is the sky blue? Why do birds fly? Why does thunder make such a loud noise? A friend's mother told us that thunder was God going bowling in the sky. Nature need not be scary and unpredictable, even if it was controlled by forces we could neither see nor understand.

The human penchant for stories and meaning is nothing new. Myths and legends provide entertainment, but they also transmit knowledge of how to behave and how the world works. Breaking the code of these stories, however, takes skill. Tales of gods gone bowling during summer downpours seems nonsensical on the surface, but know a little about the sudden thunderclaps and the clatter of bowling pins as they're struck by a ball, and the story makes sense.

As our Earth's magnetosphere is affected by the Sun entering its grand solar minimum phase, our troposphere will bulge at the equatorial latitudes and compress elsewhere with wild out of place jet streams. We are beginning to see this in 2017 with out of season rain events in dry season across Asia, formerly rare super cells across Europe and rain in deserts of South America, Australia and USA. Regional food crop losses continue and these types of weather events will intensify year upon year.


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A snowboarding daredevil, Justin Buss, attempted to make his way through a rare "snownado" at the Lake Louise Ski Resort in Alberta.

The moment was captured by Brett Soderholm, his meteorologist companion, and the video was uploaded on YouTube. The clip went viral as soon as it was posted, with some lauding Buss for the stunt. The clip showed Buss walking into the fierce wind formation then disappearing as soon he got close.

CTV news spoke with Soderholm who shared that he also followed his friend right after disappearing in the rare snownado. Soderholm said he did not want to miss the rare opportunity. Soderholm described the experience as "painful."

"There were fierce winds swirling around me with little pieces of ice chucked up against my face," he said.

Svensmark's research into increasing cosmic rays and low cloud layer formation dovetails perfectly with the increase of the Grand Solar Minimum as our Sun enters a weakened activity state in its 400 year cycle. So if this is coming to fruition we should see record floods, snows and unusual out of season precipitation events intensifying globally. These are the six examples from last week.


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