The Long Range is Looking Better

We may actually see a flake of snow with the system brushing by to the North on Friday.  Then the weather is quiet for the weekend and into the first half of next week with highs in the 40's.

The weather models are coming into some more agreement that we could pick up several inches from the storm next Friday.  The ridge look like it will move East and opens the door to a storm briefly on Friday before the next ridge builds back in off the coast. The European forecast model is most aggressive with this storm and the GFS sees it too.  Right now it looks like we could see a few inches of snow so we will watch the progress over the next several days.

So far this month we have been hoping that the strenthening jet stream in the Pacific would at times push far enough South to bring snow by flattening the ridge, or the ridge would pull away from the coast briefly.  That is happening this week but the heavy precip is only making it as far South as Northern CA.

We need to get the ridge away from the coast and out North of Hawaii, and even better would be near the Aleutian Islands. There are a few things that looks like they could come together around the 2nd week of January.    We will watch the ridge retrograding out towards Hawaii, then the cold building over Canada pushing South down the West Coast.

Today's GFS forecast model a blocking ridge forming again from the Aleutian Islands into Alaska and Northwest Canada.  That would force the storm track South into California.  We will watch to see if this pattern continues to develop over the next 10 days.  If a block like that were to develop it could mean an extended period of storms and snowfall.  Stay tuned.  BA