8:30pm Update
The snow was coming hot and heavy for a while. There is between 3-4 down now. It looked like it was over but it started snowing again. This will definitely help the trails. It isn’t super packing snow but rather a pretty a fine powder. We are not as close to the rain snow line as expected, and we are well on the good side of it.
Greetings and welcome!
The weather forecast has a lot of maybe in it. Right now it looks like we will do ok on tonight’s storm, and Tuesday is still up in the air.
We have a storm coming out of the southwest. It isn’t a huge one, but it has potential for 3-6 or maybe a little more. The models vary considerably on where the rain/snow line will be. The GFS is firmly planted in the idea that the warm air will push it well north of here. The NAM is holding it south just enough to keep us in play for snow. The HPC is on board with the NAM solution.
The NWS forecast discussion also mentioned that there would be some evaporation cooling as the precip fell. That might be the key to us seeing more snow than rain out of the storm.
After spending a lot of time this morning looking at temperature profiles and models I like the NWS forecast. It looks like we could see snow most of the night and a little rain at the end. They are looking for possibly as much as 4-6 and up to 1/10th inch of ice. Here is the Winter Weather Advisory and Hazardous Weather Outlook.
Being that we will be really close to the rain/snow line this is not expected to be anything like last week’s puffy snow. This will be heavy stuff that will make good base. The models are looking for about 0.5″ of precip, if it was almost all snow we could see the 6″, changing over to rain sooner would stunt the totals. Right now things look pretty positive, but the line is within about 40 miles.
There are two more storms possible behind the Sunday night Monday storms. At one point it was one storm and it looked fantastic. Now it looks like two, with one going on either side of us. It would leave us in the warm air and rain, but not too much of the rain. Behind that is a cold blast like last week’s.
There is a lot of rain and freezing rain Monday, Monday night, and Tuesday forecasts, but none of it looks too heavy.
In my glass half full world this could end very well for us. The snow we have down could use some moisture. A 4-6 layer of wet heavy snow and a little extra rain to cement it into place followed by a cold snap sounds like the recipe for a very nice base. Less snow and more rain, as long as the warm and rain don’t get out of hand, would have the same effect to some extent as it saturates our puff snow and gives it some heft.
Right now it is the waiting game. With the line so close and the models in disagreement on where it will be it is a long wait.
I have about 100 things to do today in preparation for the snow and the freezing rain early week so I am going to run along. Have a good Sunday and thank you for visiting!
RJB