Tahoe Daily Snow

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By Bryan Allegretto, Forecaster Posted 9 years ago February 26, 2015

Fun & Games

Summary:

Sunny skies today will give way to clouds and snow on Friday.  A cold system is going to spin across the area over the next 2 days bringing colder air and several inches of snow.  We could see 3-6 inches of snow around the lake and 6-12 inches on the mountains by Saturday night.  The cold air sticks around Sunday with sunny skies.  By Monday afternoon the next cold system could have snow falling over the area.  This storm will bring more cold air and possibly several more inches of snow to the mountains.  Then we have a break for about a week before we could see more storms beyond the 10th.

 

 

Details:

Not much change today in the forecast.  The storm is still on track to arrive tomorrow.  The gusty winds from the North will subside tonight before they pick up out of the West tomorrow to around 20-30 mph up high, not the crazy strong winds like with the bigger storms.  The snow should begin to fall from North to South during the morning Friday, with the snow lasting into Saturday as the low pressure spins up to our Southeast and then pulls away by Saturday night.

The easier part of the snowfall forecast is the general amounts of snow that should fall as the system moves across the area.  My snowfall forecast has been the same the last few days with 2-5 inches at lake level, 4-8 inches above 7000 feet, and up to 12 inches on some mountains above 8000 feet.  The models have been pretty consistent with a half to three quarters of an inch of liquid.  

What I spent extra time on this morning is looking at where the deformation zone may setup on the Northwest side of the low on Saturday and drop additional snowfall.  Each model and model run is placing it someplace different, so this is where the fun & games come in.  Someplace may get bonus snow but where we may not know until it is happening.  For a general reference on deformation zones that we talk about with these types of systems click here, and an example is in the image below.

 d zone

This process can setup a band of snow that sits over an area and brings more snowfall than to the rest of the region.  The forecast models are seeing this take place but are putting the band all over the place on different runs.  

Here is the 6z GFS showing the heaviest snow to the South side of the lake with up to 1.5 inches of liquid which could drop over 18 inches of snow in that bulls eye on the mountains.

gfs

The latest 12z run is further North an so is the Canadian model.

canadian

The 0z Canadian run last night had the bullseye over the lake.  The NAM shows some enhancement NW and SW of the lake...

nam

The WPC's blended forecast still favors areas South of the lake.

wpc

It's nearly impossible to pinpoint where this may happen so for now I'm only expecting 6-12 inches of snow on the mountains in total over 2 days, which is very light snowfall for Tahoe standards.  We will be watching for a band to setup on the North side of the low on Saturday to see if we can get some more for someone.  

The next storm drops down from the North Monday afternoon into Tuesday.  This storm is similar but looks like it could drop down a little further East making it slightly drier.  We will have to keep watching the track.  We could see several more inches on the mountains from this storm if the track stays West enough.

Then high pressure builds in closer to the coast and then over the coast starting next Wednesday for a week.

Long-Range:

The ensemble runs of the models still show the trough backing into the West again beyond the 10th.  The interesting thing is the control runs don't show it on each today, but the blended ensemble runs of the GFS, Canadian, and European models all look similar by the 11th.

gfs

So the dry spell may only be a week this time after we get through these 2 snow storms.  

Stay tuned....BA

PS - We're giving away a ski jacket from the company NWT3K. You can customize the jacket's colors and zipper layout. Click here to enter the contest through Friday: http://opensnow.com/contest

 

About Our Forecaster

Bryan Allegretto

Forecaster

Bryan Allegretto has been writing insightful posts about snow storms for over the last 15 years and is known as Tahoe's go-to snow forecaster. BA grew up in south Jersey, surfing, snowboarding, and chasing down the storms creating the epic conditions for both.

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