US and Canada Daily Snow
By Joel Gratz, Founding Meteorologist Posted 8 years ago November 16, 2016
Legitimate snowstorms are in the forecast. It’s about time!
Summary
The warm weather pattern that we’ve seen during much of the first half of November will be reversed during the last two weeks of the month. A cold storm will hit the Rockies and New England late this week and weekend, with more snow likely during Thanksgiving week.
Short Term Forecast
The best snowpack in North America is in western Canada, where most resorts, cat ski, and heli ski operations are seeing base depths that are right around 100% of average for this time of the season.
Here is the scene at Lake Louise, in Alberta, Canada. It looks like winter!
Elsewhere in the western US, it doesn’t really look like winter. The numbers on the map below show the percent of average snow depth. Lots of low numbers and red coloring means ‘little snow’.
Across the US and Canada, the map of current snowpack shows that most areas have little to no snow on the ground (except for western Canada and parts of the northern Rockies).
Thankfully, good will triumph over bad as multiple storms bring snow during the next week.
Look at the circled areas of the map above. Then look at the circled areas of the map below, which shows the forecasted snowpack on Thanksgiving Day. There is hope!
The Rockies will see a cold storm on Thursday, Nov 17, and the southwest and Southern Rockies will likely see another storm on Monday, Nov 21 and Tuesday, Nov 22.
In the northeast, the story is equally encouraging as a storm will stay over the region late this weekend into early Thanksgiving week. This stalled storm will bring in much colder temperatures (which means a return to snowmaking) and also accumulation of natural snow.
While this change in the weather pattern from warm and dry to cool and snowy is a good thing, many ski areas are still struggling to open terrain after 4-6 weeks of above average temperatures. To really help, we will need a multi-week period of cold temperatures and snow. Will it happen?
Extended Forecast
Thankfully, the 10-20 day forecast is very encouraging.
All long-range forecast models agree that the western US and Canada should trend toward a cooler and snowier weather pattern during the week after Thanksgiving through the first week in December.
This gives me confidence that many areas in the west will have a respectable amount of terrain open by mid December. And, if we get a little bit of luck on our side, there could be a lot of terrain and good conditions during the busy holiday time of late December. Let’s hope this happens!
Check back on Monday, Nov 21 for an updated Thanksgiving forecast as well as a more confident outlook out to early December.
JOEL GRATZ
About Our Forecaster
Joel Gratz
Founding Meteorologist
Joel Gratz is the Founding Meteorologist of OpenSnow and has lived in Boulder, Colorado since 2003. Before moving to Colorado, he spent his childhood as a (not very fast) ski racer in eastern Pennsylvania.
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