Fresh Tracks.....

Snow showers began this evening and will continue overnight. There will also be quite a bit of cold air coming behind the cold front, so temperatures behind the front tonight will drop down into the teens. That is making the snow very light and powdery on the mountain.

The storm weakened slightly as it came onshore and the cold front didn't bring a solid burst of heavy snow.  Instead the snow has been showery with some heavier bursts of snow.  I am now expecting 1-3 inches at the base and 3-6 inches at the summit by Saturday morning.

We begin to dry out on Saturday and it stays cold over the weekend with highs only in the 20's Saturday and 30's on Sunday and lows in the teens. There is an area of low pressure cut-off from the main flow moving down off the coast over the weekend. Almost all of the weather models keep it off shore but the Euro keeps showing it coming down over land and bringing us a few more inches of snow. That scenario is not likely but we will have to keep our eyes on it over the weekend.

Things are quiet to start next week with temperatures warming back up into the 40's. The high pressure ridge out in the Pacific is going to retrograde back out to around 150-160w which will allow the trough to dig off the West Coast. A large area of low pressure is going to setup in the Northeast Pacific and drive a cold front and strong jet towards the West Coast. This has been advertised by the models for a while now and it makes sense with the position of the teleconnections.

There will be a strong storm approaching the West coast on Thanksgiving bringing snowfall but a few model runs have hinted as a possible splitting. This can happen when the ridge to our East over the Rockies is a strong one and hard to move. The storms will sometimes split as they hit the back of the ridge. The GFS did show this but today is back on track showing the strong jetstream making a direct hit on us. Either way we should be picking up snow but a split could turn a couple feet into a couple inches.

Right behind the Thanksgiving day storm is another strong storm that would not split since it is right on the heels of the first storm. This storm should push in sometime on Sunday and bring us more cold and snow. Stay tuned because the potential exists for these two storms to bring significant snowfall over the 4 day holiday period and I will be trying to fine tune the track and snowfall amounts all week. BA