Thank God it's Friday and Keep It Simple Stupid are the themes this morning.

It has been a long 11 days without snow even though that isn't that long compared to dry spells we have seen in the past.  I think it just feels longer since we were spoiled last year.  Without much weather to report on I have had to resort to posting pics and videos to TahoeWeather Facebook and Instagram of the sunny weather and ski conditions on the mountains.  Not a bad gig as it was beautiful weather all week, but I'd prefer to be out on the mountain being hit in the face with snow as I report.

Going to keep it simple today and just quickly run through the forecast through the end of the month with images.  For more in depth discussions you can read through earlier posts this week.

We are transitioning today into a new pattern as the ridge of high pressure that has been parked over the West shifts off the coast.  That will help a cold trough to bring much colder air this weekend with highs only in the 30's.  It will also wash out the inversions briefly and bring some colder air to the upper elevations.  We could see a few snowflakes tonight with the cold front.  The winds will be gusty all weekend on the mountain tops, with gusts to 50-60 mph, so watch for wind holds on lifts.

We should warm back into the 40's for Monday and Tuesday and the winds should die down.  Then another cold trough may drop down from the North on Wednesday bringing back cold air and highs in the 30's.  It will also bring back the gusty winds. 

We could also see some light snow with this system on Wednesday.  The latest GFS and European model runs are in decent agreement on the total precipitation forecasts.

If the forecast holds this would be the initial snowfall forecast for Wednesday.

The trend on the long-range of the model runs is to shift the ridge in the Northeast Pacific a bit closer to the coast the weekend of the 23rd through Christmas Day.  That may keep us dry but with seasonal temperatures for the Holiday.

The last 6 days of the month after Christmas the forecast trend is still for the center of the high pressure to shift Northwest towards Alaska.  That could open up the door to storms breaking into CA.  It's not the ideal pattern but it does leave a slight chance.

Looking at all of the ensemble runs of the GFS and European models, about 26% of them show storms breaking into CA before the end of the month.  The rest keep us fairly dry.  Taking the average of all the runs here is the precip forecast from both by the end of the month.

So there is still some hope that we could get some snow before the end of the month, keep praying and doing your snow dances...  As we go into January the pattern may shift to one that allows storms to return to CA.  We will keep watching.  For now we can hope that the unreliable CFSv2 climate model forecast for January averaged over the last 7 days is right!

Some of you had asked to see a graph of the total precipitation through November versus the snowfall through November as a comparison.  I made you a graph last night.  You can see that there was below average snowfall but above average total precipitation at 7k.  That was from all the high snow level storms.  The ratio was better the higher you went.

We can add in December in 2 weeks.  If the storms don't arrive before the end of the month December will really start to drag it down.  Still hope even though the odds are against us.  I'll keep an eye on the sky until then.

Stay tuned...BA

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