
Summary
A cold front will bring cooler weather along with a chance for some showers to the mountains Wednesday night into Thursday. A return to nicer weather for the weekend. More unsettled weather is possible later in the month.
Short Term Forecast
We have a change in the weather coming Wednesday night into Thursday. A trough will be digging into the West with a slowing-moving low-pressure system that will spin across the Pacific NW and will drag a cold front through northern CA later Wednesday night into Thursday morning.
Here is our forecast radar image showing the best chance for showers in the early AM hours Thursday into Thursday morning.
Earlier this week some models suggested that the low could dig farther south and bring a bit more precipitation into the northern Sierra. Now it looks like just some scattered showers that could diminish later Thursday. Here is a look at the total precipitation forecast through Thursday.
Enough for a few showers and maybe a few snow showers above 8000-9000 ft. If we're lucky we could wake up Thursday morning to some dustings of snow on the highest peaks once the clouds clear out. Highs are only expected to warm into the 50s at lake level.
The Weekend:
Heading into the weekend the pattern shifts with a deep trough developing off of the Pacific NW coast and a ridge building in over the Rockies with the trough slowly digging southeast into the Pacific by early next week.
That should bring nicer weather to the region for the weekend with high warming into the 60s each day. Beautiful fall weather.
Extended Forecast
The week of the 25th, the trough in the Pacific NW will continue to dig deeper and the pattern looks to become quite active for them going forward. That is common during the fall. We could start to see some clouds and maybe get brushed with some showers as early as Tuesday from storms moving through to our north.
By the end of the week/month, the long-range models suggest that the trough is more established over the West.
That should continue the active pattern for the Pacific NW across the northern Rockies, and it could bring a better chance for some cooler weather and some precipitation reaching the northern Sierra. Looking at some of the precipitation forecasts on the long-range models, they suggest some light amounts of precip for our area, with quite a bit to our north.
It wouldn't take much for one of the storms to dig a bit farther south. We'll watch for that to see if a storm could bring us some measurable snowfall on the mountains by the end of the month or the first week of October.
For now, the long-rang snowfall models show a chance for a few dusting of snow in the Sierra for the highest peaks over the next 2 weeks, and a bit more fo rthe northern Rockies.
Winter is getting started to the north. It's a reminder that winter is not far off. If you missed it I posted my first look at the upcoming El Nino season in the last post, which you click back to below.
Next week is our OpenSnow employee conference in Boulder. I'm posting weekly now and around any storms. My next update will likely be from Boulder around the middle of next week.
Stay tuned...BA