Tahoe Daily Snow

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By Bryan Allegretto, Forecaster Posted 7 years ago October 17, 2016

A White Morning...

Recap:

The storms over the weekend were quite impressive with the rainfall and the wind along the West Coast of North America.  It is estimated that over 16 trillion gallons of rain fell, and we saw winds over hurricane force over large areas.

We don't have the final numbers yet for the area since as of this post we are still getting some showers.  But as of yesterday we already had numbers of 2-5+ inches of liquid that had fallen before the rains we saw overnight.  We are already in line with the wettest Winter on record here with this impressive start.

water

I will get the final numbers over the next couple of days.  

We also saw some snow.  Snow levels came down near 6000 feet by early this morning behind the cold front.  You can see it just above the tree tops in Martis Valley which sits near 5900 feet.

martis

It will be hard to get snowfall amounts on the mountains as only a few ski resorts may try to post some numbers.  Even harder to get will be the amounts that fell above 9000 feet where it snowed throughout the entire event.  There should be at least a foot of snow up there if not more, but it was also very windy.

It looks like about 6 inches at the top of Northstar at 8600'.

northstar summit

The web cams at the ski resorts this morning are either not working well, or the ones up top have the lenses caked in snow, so it's hard to get an idea of snowfall amounts.

There are a few inches of snow on the ground over Donner Summit at 7000'.  Here is a shot at the base of Boreal.

boreal

Mt. Rose, Heavenly, and Kirkwood are the tallest ski resorts and should have the most snow up top.

mt rose

heavenly

Kirkwood

kirkwood

The Forecast:

We will clear out today with temperatures staying in the 40's.  Then plenty of sun through Sunday with temperatures in the 50's by tomorrow and into the 60's by the end of the week.

Here is a look at the pattern this week with the ridge building over the West.

ridge

Long-Range:

That may not last long as the forecast models are in decent agreement we could see a pattern change by the beginning of next week.

They show a trough digging off the West Coast and then pushing inland by the middle of next week.

trough

The details this far out are still a little fuzzy.  The GFS is showing a deeper trough that pulls up some warmer subtropical moisture at first, and then pushes the trough in with colder air by midweek.  

The European model runs don't pull up the warmer moisture and push in the trough faster.

Either way we could see more rain and snow next week so we will keep tracking that.

Out in fantasy range the models show a cold trough possibly dropping down from the North around Halloween.  We are used to seeing snow on Halloween.  We'll see what happens.

Overall the weather is not boring the next few weeks.  The Western Pacific is very active with typhoons which can make for active weather in the Eastern Pacific, like we saw this weekend.  

Stay tuned...BA

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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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