Summary:

Sunny with highs in the 50's through next Wednesday.  Then Thursday into Friday a storm may bring a brief return of colder air and snowfall.  This could be a moderate snowfall event if the storm comes together right.  Then we should see quiet weather again starting the weekend of the 20th as high pressure builds back in.  We are still watching for a break through of the jet stream under the ridge into CA towards the end of the month.

Details:

Not much has changed on the forecast.  The models mostly agree on the pattern for the next 2 weeks.  

We start with a ridge over the West with dry weather into next week.

Then a trough will push into the West Coast next Thursday

The forecast models are in decent agreement with bringing us a moderate snowfall event for the mountains Wednesday afternoon into Thursday.  They are varying on total precip amounts from run to run.  Right now a foot plus for the mountains is the early guestimate based on the latest model runs.

It is too early to get into specifics, but we will keep watching the pattern develop over the next week.  I have introduced the snowfall into the Resort Forecast Pages.  Until then we have highs in the 50's and lows near freezing on the mountains which is the right kind of weather for growing Spring corn.  The snowpack is still above average and the snow is nice and soft.

The snowpack over the past week did drop from 116% of average to 104% of average.  The total precip amounts dropped from 121% of average to 112% of average.  So we may drop below average for both by the time we get the next storm.

Long-Range:

These dry 2-3 week dry spells are common every Winter including El Nino winters.  By next Thursday we will be at about 17 days without accumulating snowfall.  

The long-range of the models are in decent agreement that the ridge begins to build over Western Canada the week of the 22nd.  With a large trough in the Eastern Pacific.  We are watching to see if the jet stream can break under the ridge into CA.  The models are showing weak systems trying to push in that week but no big breakthroughs are showing up yet.  The trough is setup a bit too far West.

This is not unlike the pattern we saw for a lot of this Winter so far with the storms weakening as they push into CA.  We will watch the last 5 days of the month and into the first week of March to see if we can get some big storms to break into CA.

Stay tuned...BA