Update 5 PM:

Here is today's forecast video from Homewood.  Watch over my shoulder around the 0:46 mark, photo bomber.

Snowfall Report:

We saw some additional snow showers Wednesday morning before the storm shifted south bringing an end to the precipitation.  It is cloudy today but as the storm shifts further south we will see some sun going into the weekend.

 

I'll be heading over to Homewood today for their passholder opening day.  If you have never skied Homewood you should put it on your list.  It's the only mountain that feels like you will ski right into the lake.  It's not a big mountain but usually bigger than people think, and has some nice off-piste terrain and snowcat skiing on the upper bowls.

Yesterday I had a chance to ride Sugar Bowl.  Most of the off-piste terrain was open with good coverage, especially after the fresh 6 inches.  The mountains are in decent shape for the first week of December.  Off-piste you do still have to be careful of objects sticking out, but there's enough coverage on the upper mountains to go off trail if you are paying attention.

The ski resorts are reporting anywhere from no new snow the past 24 hours, up to 6 inches.  I don't really trust the 6-inch reports as there didn't seem to be enough moisture from the snow showers for numbers that high.  The only heavier snow bands I saw yesterday were near Heavenly where they reported 4 inches.  I think Alpine was catching up from snow that fell after they measured very early in the morning yesterday.  0-2 inches of additional snowfall during the day yesterday seems about right.

Yesterday I threw in a YTD column really quick.  I don't think I put enough thought into it, so I made some adjustments today.  Yesterday I just made the assumption of a 23 week ski season from the 3rd week of November to the third weekend in April which is the average ski season for the ski resorts as a whole.  I took the stated annual average snowfalls and divided them by the ski season and then multiplied by how far into the ski season we currently are to get the average to date snowfall amounts.  That was a quick way but not the best way.

There are some ski resorts that measure just during the ski season and other that measure all the snow that falls including outside of the ski season.  Today I took the weighted average of the snowfall by month from Sep-May from the Central Sierra Snow Lab.  I took the % of snowfall that falls by today's date on average and multiplied that by the ski resort annual averages.  I think that is giving us a more realistic YTD number.

The storm totals were 2-9 inches (I'm ignoring the 11) on a pre-storm forecast of 2-5 inches.  The model average of every model but the GFS before the storm was 4 tenths of an inch.  Only enough to get up to 5 inches.  The GFS model had up to 8 tenths, enough for up to 9 inches.  As the outlier, I ignored it and didn't average it in with the Euro like I normally do, which would have put the high end of my forecast at 7 or 8 inches.  So we do have some overages again on the snowfall variance report.  The GFS for the win this time! 

My variance average is at 2.5 inches so far this season after 1.6 & 1.8 inches that last 2 seasons.  That is mostly from under forecasting so far this season with these storms squeezing out the high end of their potential the last 2 weeks.  That's a good thing so can't complain.  

The Forecast:

After some clouds and colder air still in place for Thursday, we head into a dry weekend with some sun and temperatures warming into the 40's.

The next trough looks pretty healthy off the coast this weekend with a ridge over CA.

But the trough weakens considerably as it moves into CA on Monday...

We have a split flow next week with one jet stream aimed at the Pacific NW and the other south of CA into Mexico and the southern U.S.  The trough moving in on Monday is going to split over CA.  You can see the heavier precip pushes into northwest CA and then hardly anything reaches the Sierra.

The European model has up to a tenth of an inch which is the total model average.  The GFS holds the system together slightly longer and brings up to 3 tenths of an inch of liquid Monday into Monday night.  So here we go again with the GFS being the outlier.  This time I did average it in for the snowfall forecast, so I have 0-1 inches of snow forecast for the mountains Monday and again Monday night.

The split flow pattern looks like it may stay with us through the end of next week.  After a break Tue-Thu next week, the latest trend on the forecast models is to dig and split the next trough as well as it pushes into CA next Friday.  

With the split flow pattern, the total precipitation forecasts for the next 10 days look pretty meager...

The pattern isn't a ridge with dry weather next week.  It is active even though the storms are splitting and not bringing us much precip. 

The good news is that European ensemble runs have actually been trending towards the GFS in keeping the Eastern Pacific trough closer to the West Coast through the 3rd week of December.

That bad news is that in the split flow pattern next week the storms pushing into CA are splitting.  The fantasy range of the models suggest that the pattern may shift the week of the 17th with the storms not splitting as they move into the West Coast.  The GFS ensemble mean forecast, which is averaging over 2 dozen ensemble models, suggests a wetter pattern going into the 3rd week of December.

The Candian ensemble runs still show the trough shifting west away from the coast with a ridge building over the West Coast the 3rd week of December.  But as I said above, the European ensembles have trended towards keeping the trough near the West Coast.  We have strong MJO activity moving through the Indian Ocean and Maritime Continent the next 2 weeks.  Let's see how that could affect the long-range pattern as we get closer.

Let's hope we can push some storms into CA that hold together over the next 2 weeks.

Stay tuned...BA