Southern California Daily Snow

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By Mike Korotkin, Meteorologist Posted 1 year ago November 29, 2022

Where's the Storm, GFS?

Summary

Tuesday & Wednesday will feature clear and sunny conditions and average temps. It's likely we'll start to see more active weather in the rain/snow showers by Thursday. Friday could be the wettest day with more chances for rain showers and possibly snow showers over the weekend. Most of next week though is likely to be dry.

Short Term Forecast

Tuesday & Wednesday

We have sunny and clear days on tap for Tuesday & Wednesday. Highs will be seasonal with temps in the upper 30's and low 40's. Low's will be in the 30's and upper 20's. There will be plenty of sun and limited wind both days so it should be a great time to be out on the mtn. 

Thursday - Saturday 

I'm lumping in multiple days here because they're all within the 5 day window and the model differences are still quite troubling. Hopefully we can make some sense of it in the coming days.

We have a system impacting Northern California starting Thursday and that system will drop down towards SoCal, but we are going to be on the warm side of it. I've been saying that for a while now, with snow levels likely over 8K FT most of the time. 

So in terms of a snow forecast for most of this time period, I really don't need to have one. There is a chance we could see a couple inches up around 8K FT and above and certainly more snow at the 10K FT level but no resorts have terrain that high. So this is going to be a much more significant rain producer than anything else.

There will also be plenty of wind on Thursday night into Friday with gusts up to 40 MPH out of the Southwest. Winds will ramp up again on Saturday into Saturday night with similar gusts. 

So let's look at the precip totals through Saturday night into early Sunday morning since that's within the 5 day window.

Let's start with the Euro:

NAM

WPC

And Finally the GFS

So... what do we see here. The GFS barely has any storm at all! What gives GFS?! The GFS scenario basically brings in light precip through this time period, while every other model is brining in multiple inches of water to the whole region. This is the same thing I was showing yesterday though... so clearly the GFS is just not buying this wetter solution the other models are. 

Since I like to average in all the models I want to temper the precip amounts with the GFS. So instead of 2+ inches we might see closer to 1.5 inches of liquid. It's still not entirely clear to me which scenario is truly going to win out and I believe we need another day or so to fine tune that detail. 

Either way the temps will be warm. That part has remained clear. 

Here's a GIF of the NAM's temps for the 10K FT level:

The Euro shows similar temps that are mostly above freezing at this level. This is from Thursday morning through later Friday afternoon. The bulk of the precip on quite a few of the models falls on Friday. The Euro continues to show warmer temps into Saturday as well. 

I'm still hopeful we could get a little more model consensus in the next couple days, since it's hard to know which way this storm will go with one major model showing lots of precip and another showing hardly any. 

 

Extended Forecast

Sunday into Monday the GFS touts more precip, but not a significant amount. The Euro on the other hand shuts off most of the moisture after Sunday morning. 

You can see that there how the red bars are higher than the blue ones after the Thursday - Friday time frame. So, while the GFS brings in more precip later in the weekend it's not likely it will get anywhere near as wet compared to the Euro. 

We'll just have to see which way the models trend in the next few days. It's likely that after Monday we'll see a period of dry weather. 

You can see the position of the ridge should keep us cooler rather than hotter:

But also drier. Plenty of fun to sort through before then. I'll keep updating on the potentially wet weekend daily. 

Till the next one... Mike out. 

About Our Forecaster

Mike Korotkin

Meteorologist

Mike graduated from UC Berkeley with a Bachelor’s in Atmospheric Science and received his Masters in Atmospheric Science at the University of Nevada Reno. He grew up in Southern California by the beach, but quickly realized he loved the mountains, so his first memories were of the SoCal mountains where he saw snow for the first time. He started skiing in his 20’s and is now an avid skier and backpacker at locations up and down the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

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