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The Japan Meteorological Agency's official warnings and advisories for Shirakawa Village — heavy snow, snowstorm, avalanche, heavy rain and landslide — with the wind right now and the road channels to check before driving in.
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Thunderstorm Advisory
Yellow
In this valley the weather is the calendar. A JMA warning here gets acted on: heavy snow closes the mountain roads and strands cars without winter tyres, heavy rain on the steep Shōkawa slopes means landslide risk, and for a village of thatched roofs, dry windy days are fire weather.
As of Mon 24 August at 10:51.
Light air (about 4 km/h, gusts to 23), out of the north-northwest.
Strongest gusts forecast over the next 24 hours: about 27 km/h. Wind words follow the Beaufort scale. This is a weather model’s forecast for the hour, not a measurement — exposed ground above town will see more.
When weather closes in
Official warnings, forwarded the moment the national service issues one for the area — headline and all, in its own words. Nothing in between. No account, one-click unsubscribe.
Shirakawa-mura is designated heavy-snow country, and a heavy snow or snowstorm warning here is a road event as much as a weather one: the village sits behind long expressway tunnels on limited mountain roads, and official guidance requires studless winter tyres from December through March. Cars that set out without them are how the tunnel queues and stranding happen — check the live road cameras before driving in.
Ogimachi sits at about 497 m in the narrow Shōkawa valley, under slopes that hold snow half the year. JMA treats landslide as a first-class warning alongside heavy rain — when those advisories rise through the levels in the warm months or the thaw, take them at face value: the terrain here is exactly what they are written for.
Warning data: Japan Meteorological Agency, from the official open distribution at jma.go.jp (Public Data License v1.0, compatible with CC BY 4.0); shown as JMA issues them, processed into English using JMA’s own multilingual dictionary. This page reads the warnings JMA has posted for Shirakawa Village. Wind forecast: Open-Meteo (CC BY 4.0). This page is not an alert service — sign up to the official channels above.