STORM UPDATE (9 P.M. TUESDAY): Wind, precipitation likely to be less severe than feared overnight Tuesday, officials say avalanche risk remains

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Update 10 p.m.: The Norwegian Meteorological Institute is now forecasting only modest winds (up to 25 kilometers an hour) and precipitation overnight Tuesday, although heavy snow/rain/sleet is still predicted Wednesday.

Original story: A storm that hit Longyearbyen on Tuesday night won’t be as windy as originally forecast, but officials said heavy precipitation forecast through Wednesday still poses a significant avalanche risk.

A mixture of snow, sleet and rain are forecast due to temperatures just above zero, with up to 17 millimeters of precipitation possible between 9 a.m. Tuesday and the end of the day Wednesday. Winds are expected to reach peak speeds of up to 47 kilometers an hour (down from 65 km/h originally expected) by midnight Tuesday.

“The weather looks a bit better than feared, but it is too early to say exactly how this will evolve throughout the evening,” Gov. Kjerstin Askholt said in a prepared statement. “We hope to be able to carry out an avalanche risk assessment in Longyearbyen on (Wednesday) morning,”

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Mark Sabbatini

I'm a professional transient living on a tiny Norwegian island next door to the North Pole, where once a week (or thereabouts) I pollute our extreme and pristine environment with paper fishwrappers decorated with seemingly random letters that would cause a thousand monkeys with a thousand typewriters to die of humiliation. Such is the wisdom one acquires after more than 25 years in the world's second-least-respected occupation, much of it roaming the seven continents in search of jazz, unrecognizable street food and escorts I f****d with by insisting they give me the platonic tours of their cities promised in their ads. But it turns out this tiny group of islands known as Svalbard is my True Love and, generous contributions from you willing, I'll keep littering until they dig my body out when my climate-change-deformed apartment collapses or they exile my penniless ass because I'm not even worthy of washing your dirty dishes.

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