Tahoe Daily Snow

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By Bryan Allegretto, Forecaster Posted 7 years ago October 21, 2016

More Wet Weather Ahead...

Summary:

We have nice weather ahead for the weekend with sun and highs in the 60's.  Then we have some cooler weather coming next week with a chance for rain several days.

Details:

I am going to throw up a bunch of images today and less words to show the scenario for next week that the forecast models are trending towards.

We will see a trough dig off the coast by Monday with a ridge over the Central U.S.

gfs pattern 1

By Wednesday you can see that the trough doesn't push inland but deepens off the coast.

gfs pattern 2

and by Friday it is still sitting off the coast.

500 1

That creates a pattern where low pressure systems continue to dive into the trough but don't push inland.  Here is a look at low pressure off the Pacific NW coast on Sunday night starting to push precip into NW CA.

gfs mon

But by Wednesday the center of the low moves North not East and the band of precip is still only into Northern CA.

gfs wed

The updated model runs show that we may only get cooler temps and maybe some clouds and wind, but no precip early next week.

gfs precip 1

Another area of low pressure dives into the base of the trough off the coast by Thursday.

gfs thu

This time the low is far enough South to start drawing subtropical moisture up from the South into Southern CA by Friday morning.

gfs fri

and then into Northern CA later Firday into next Saturday...

gfs sat

The European and Canadian forecast models are now similar to the GFS forecast over the next 7 days.  By next Sunday we could have precip totals like this.

gfs total precip one week

The Euro pushes the trough inland next weekend unlike the GFS and has heavier precip.  Snow levels look to be around 8000 feet currently.  

Recap:

So we will continue to watch the trend but right now less of a chance for rain on Monday-Tuesday, and more of a chance Friday-Saturday.  It will be interesting because if we see 2.5 inches of rain on Donner Summit next weekend that could mean the wettest October in over half a Century.

Week 2:

The pattern week 2 in the forecast ranges from the European and GFS ensemble mean runs looking like below with a trough in the North Pacific and storms staying well to the North, to the Euro and Canadian ensemble control runs showing the trough pushing Southeast into the West Coast and bringing us some snowstorms by the first week of November.

gfs week 2

La Nina:

We are still watching a weak La Nina develop even though the SOI is dropping, and the European seasonal forecast shows it disappearing by Winter.  So we are still on the fence a little with the weak La Nina.  Also, we are seeing varying signals on where the PDO goes by Winter.  So the forecast is tricky this fall.

We will keep watching a few more weeks before tweaking the season forecast.  I showed the weak La Nina seasons snowfall in the last post.  It showed fairly consistent 88-95% of average snowfall for Tahoe.  I thought today I would break that down by month for those seasons.

la nina by month

So for now plenty to talk about.

Stay tuned...BA

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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