The forecast for this week continues to excite me!

Sunday will be dry, partly sunny, and warm.

Then we will likely see snow every day from Monday through next weekend.

There are two times during this period that we might see heavier snow.

The first is from Monday night through Wednesday morning. Tuesday and/or Wednesday first chair could be fun and deep.

Then, after snow showers continue through Thursday and Friday, a strong storm could bring heavy snow to areas near and east of the divide from Friday night through Sunday, with snow showers potentially lingering through May 1-2.

Since the snow will come in multiple waves, and because the models are still not agreeing on the details of each wave, it’s best to look at a range of model forecasts.

Here is the precipitation forecast from the University of Utah ensemble, which uses the American and Canadian models. This is for the Loveland/Abasin area. The average is about 1-2 inches of precipitation or 10-20 inches of snow.

And below is the European model ensemble. The average of the 51 ensemble versions is the green bar at the bottom, showing about 1.6 inches of precipitation. This is about 16 inches of snow.

While I don’t have much confidence in exact snow amount, I am confident that we’ll see snow during each day next week and likely into the weekend. If I had to pick the best potential powder days, I’d say Tuesday all day, Wednesday morning, and then potentially sometime around Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Again, the timing of the best pow will change, so this is simply the best that I can do right now.

Thanks for reading and get ready to ski some late-season pow!

JOEL GRATZ

PS - Ibex just posted an interview with me about skiing, my job, and how climate change does and does not affect my job. More here: http://blog.ibex.com/company/changing-climate-powder-chasing/