As expected, we've been dry and calm for the past week since last Monday's storm.  Inversions have strengthened and it has been warm and sunny on the mountain and cold and hazy in the valleys.  I spent most of the weekend at elevation, out of the inversions.  The forecast for the rest of the week is continuation of the same through at least Friday.  Here is the NWS forecast for Salt Lake Valley...

There is somewhat good news.  On Saturday I wrote a post mentioning that we have something to watch for next weekend.  Well, that is still in the cards.  The ridge is going to retrograde and weaken just enough for a system to drop into the northern Rockies.  A lot of questions still remain about just how far south the moisture will make it.  Right now it looks like it could be far enough to at the very least scour out the valleys, and perhaps it will bring us some light snow to the mountains of far northern Utah next weekend.  The Euro keeps most of the moisture to our north from Saturday-Monday of next week (Dec 16-18), but does allow a bit in far northern Utah: 

The GFS is a little bit deeper and brings more precip to the region and farther south: 

Either way, it doesn't look like anything major, but it's definitely better than zilch.  At least I have something to forecast!  

After the system for next weekend, models have a tough time figuring out what happens next.  Some look runs/models reestablish the ridge.  Others continue to break it down with storms dropping into the west.  It does look like the ridge will amplify up into Alaska which could open the door for the westerlies to undercut the ridge as we head toward the new year.  The CFS model, which is not very reliable typically, has been very consistent showing a pattern change heading toward January.  Right now, this is its next 10 days: 

As expected, the next 10 days is pretty dry with only scant amounts for far northern Utah.  Now let's look at the subsequent 10 days (Dec 21-31):

The west coast starts to light up with precip and that translates inland into Utah.  Much better! Then, the following ten days after that (Dec 31 - January 10):

Very very wet for the west coast and interior west for the first 10 days of January.  Yes, this is a long way out and yes it needs to be taken with a massive grain of salt.  However, the CFS can be effective at showing the large-scale evolution of patterns.  This would also seem to coincide with the PNA going negative, which makes sense.  Fingers crossed! 

Just to show you how early it is in the season, I wanted to also share this graph.  It shows the current snowpack at Snowbird, which is running at 56% of average currently.  It then uses projections of the rest of the season to show what our snowpack would look like if various scenarios played out.  

The bottom red line is if we were to see our worst season ever from this point forward.  You can see that we'd set a new record low total snowpack.  If from this point on we saw about 10th percentile in snow, then we'd also have a near record bad year.  30th percentile would be below average substantially, but not record bad.  50th percentile is middle of the road snowfall from this point onward.  We would finish about 4-5" of liquid below normal, which is about what we are at now.  No surprises there.  Although not shown, 60th percentile would actually put us right around normal peak snowpack.  70th percentile would put us about 5" over normal and 90th percentile would put us 10" of liquid above normal.  

What this tells me is that because of this poor start, if things don't improve, we could set new records for low snowpack.  It's also basically impossible for us to have a record high snowpack this year after such a poor start.  However, it also tells us that it's not really that hard for us to recover and even have an above average snow year.  If we can get a pattern change into the area by the end of the month, then have above average snowfall for January-March, we can easily finish the season with an above average snowpack.  

Evan | OpenSnow