Tahoe Weather Discussion.com

That’s not a good thing. You can see up on the top bar we are now back in positive territory again. That tends to be associated with West Coast ridging. If you click on it you can see it better but you can see that it was negative in November when we had storms, and then positive until going negative the past week when we had storms again.  This was the case last season as well as the Positive PNA showed up for the 6 week dry spell in Jan before going negative again in mid-February.

We can get storms with a +PNA pattern if the ridge is positioned far enough North to allow storms to cut underneath.  The storms do tend to be mild though with higher snow levels. The models suggest this could happen the 2nd week of February. Until then we look to be dry with maybe a quick dusting Sunday night or Tuesday night as storms brush by to the North.  The MJO forecast on the right sidebar does look interesting but it hasn’t made it to phase 7 without falling apart in a long time.

This is becoming a drought year and if we keep down this road it may become the driest moderate La Nina with a cold PDO season we have ever had. Those seasons normally average out to average snowfall which is why I forecasted that for the season in the Fall. We are doing better than the driest year on record however. Here is a look at the current snowpack analaysis.  You can see the pink line for this current year is ahead of the driest year of 76-77.  We are just a little behind last season in green, ha.

Don’t forget that from mid-February on last season we picked up 500 inches.  When we have these dry spells I am not just saying oh well I’ll just check back in a week. I don’t post everyday because there are only so many ways to say no snow for 2 weeks, but I am working just as hard as ever trying to find something positive in the pattern that can get us back on track with the snow.

As most of you know I am not a meteorologist. I switched majors halfway through school after a trip to some third world countries including Madagascar made me want to study Economics. Now as an accountant by day and snow obsessed weather hobbyist by night I like to call myself a snowcaster. I have spent my time over the years focusing in on one thing with the weather and that is being able to forecast when big snows will come (specifically to Tahoe). I will mis-state things sometimes but overall my goal isn’t to write a term paper here, it’s to write an easy to understand discussion on what I have found during my research of when we might see snow again.

I have had the privilige since starting to this blog to talk with and gain insights from lots of meteorologists around the country. I am excited now to be teaming up with one who is just as snow obsessed as I am and has written a similar blog in Colorado called Coloradopowderforecast.com.  He is meteorologist Joes Gratz and he has started a new site called opensnow.com.  This site will bring together meteorologists and snow forecasters from each ski region to write a daily brief blog on the upcoming snow chances.  It also has a snowfall forecast by day for the resorts in each area.

I will be updating the snowfall forecasts for the Lake Tahoe resorts and writing a short blog on the upcoming snow chances for Tahoe in the CA section.  I believe this site will compliment my long discussions with more a more condensed “when is it going to snow next in 60 seconds or less”  plus added bonus of a quick look at potential snowfall at each resort for the coming week.  It will also allow me to have the resource of several meteorogists to discuss the weather patterns with and to bounce ideas off of.

I hope that you will all visit the new site if you don’t already.  I will continue to do my long-winded rants and long-range forecasts and theories on this site as always.  I hope to setup some icons linking between the sites for quicker access.  The lack of snow has allowed a little more time for setting this up, but I am dying for the next big dumps.  I will be the first to let you know when there is something on the horizon.  Stay tuned….BA

So we finally got some decent snow but what now? The forecast has us going back into a pattern similar to what we had for 2 months before the storms with the ridge sitting off the coast keeping the storms to our North. The storms will not be that far North of us and as the ridge shifts back from from the coast a few times over the next week we will see the storms slide down far enough South to bring us a chance of some precip.

It’s nothing to get that excited about as we will most likely see more clouds than flakes. The first system moves into the Pacific NW on Thursday and Thursday night we could see a snow shower with maybe a dusting above 7000 ft. The weekend will be quiet with higs in the 40′s before there is a chance we could see another flake or two on Monday as another storm impacts the Pacific NW. There is a 3rd system on Wednesday. This one has the chance of coming a bit further South but still looks like it would only bring an inch or two at most.

The European model has continued to move toward the GFS for next week so the chance of a cold trough with any bigger storms seems unlikely now. The big difference between the dry pattern now vs. last month is that the Arctic Oscillation is negative as you can see above on the chart. That doesn’t correlate with more snow but it does correlate with high latitude blocking patterns like the one responsible for the storms we just had. The negative PNA does correlate with a trough and stormier pattern but you can see the forecast is for it to go back to postive which tends to be associate with ridging and dry conditions for us unless the ridge is far enough NOrth and the storms come underneath.

You will see that many weather outlets including the NWS blamed the above average snowfall last season on the strongly negative AO and the below average snowfall this season across the US on the strongly positive AO. The negative AO is associated with a suppressed jetstream and increased storms across the U.S. We will have to wait and see if a blocking ridge will setup over Alaska or Canada again in February supressing the jet stream South into the West Coast. The forecast models do hint at this for the 2nd week of February.

Stay tuned for updates and I will have more on the developments of the new partnership I’m working on with a meterologist developing a site that will bring you more tools to feed your snow obsession. BA