Thursday's snow didn't quite work out to what I had hoped. We got about half as much as expected got another dose of the southwesterly blues late in the afternoon which warmed temperatures on the lower mountain dramatically for a what amounted to a few hours. When it comes to weather, sometimes the bad news just comes in a big wave and this appears to be one of those days.
The upper part of our mountains have performed just fine this week and for the most part, managed to weather the various warm pushes quite well. The snow stake at Mansfield is basically showing the depth at a peak on 2/27, even as valley areas lost a bit of their snow. We won't see additional losses of snow this weekend and still have some snow in the forecast, yet this clipper is also not materializing into the snow producing weather system that it could have been.
Snow will arrive very late Friday evening and continue into early Saturday, depositing 2-4 inches. Aesthetically, this is a nice looking weather feature, but it simply is taking a sharp left turn into Quebec too early and leaving us in a drier quadrant of the storm; in fact, one would need to travel well north of Montreal to get into the better conveyor of moisture. Expect a midday break in snowfall during the day Saturday aside from a few flurries followed by a round of evening snow showers. With the storm pulling so far to the north and given the amount of ice on Lake Champlain, it is pretty hard to get bullish on the back-end snow. Models do indicate some and expecting an additional 1-3 is not a big ask or an unreasonable expectation. Temperatures will be up around the freezing mark again on Saturday during the day and sharply fall off Saturday night into Sunday. The ski day Sunday looks frigid with single digit temperatures accompanied by 30 mph wind gusts. Most of the day will be bluebird which will certainly help.
The mid-week storm will rank as the most frustrating moment of the season for me weather-wise. We have this beautiful ridge setting up in western Canada and undercutting split flow that in many cases can send a major winter storm in our direction. Unfortunately, it doesn't always work the way conventional wisdom would suggest. The cold late this weekend is poorly timed and we don't have the blocking mechanism to hold it in place. By the middle of the week, a overly mature, severe weather producing storm will make its way into the plains and head toward the central Great Lakes. A weaker, less amplified system would be more likely to transfer its energy to the coast and thwart a warm up and this storm just appears too dominant for such a fate. Unless we see some changes late in this forecasting game which is still possible, we will get an early March thaw and some rain when we don't deserve one. Monday is a bluebird special with -10 degree morning readings warming to 20 in the afternoon, Tuesday we are up into the 30's with early sun followed by clouds and then the mild weather will make its push. There have been some indications of some overrunning snow Tuesday night and although this is certainly possible, Wednesday appears windy and mild with rain up and down the mountain late in the day and perhaps a bit of heavy rain in the evening or overnight hours. Given the depth of the snow, especially over the high country, we really have to hope we can minimize the rain and wind as they are, aside from eating away at skiable snow, present a flood risk for areas prone to river flooding. Wind and cooler temperatures are expected to follow for Thursday with some back end snow likely as the day progresses. There is a 2nd weather feature, also a product of the split flow and this is expected to have some sort of east coast impact Friday into Saturday March 8th.
The EPO is expected to take an adverse turn by the 2nd week of March and this is going to bring us some hurdles for the middle part of March as well. When the Pacific gets a bit angry like this, much of the unsettled weather is focused on the western United States and cold is often bottled up in the northern part of the continent. Weather systems can defy conventional wisdom as the storm next week seems intent on proving, but ensembles are not showing the northeast to be an especially favored location for winter weather in the middle of the month. Overall it's a somewhat surprising turn in the weather pattern, yet the EPO has also been favorable a lot more than I expected given conditions in the Pacific Ocean going into the season.
Lastly, I want to give a shout out to the folks at NOAA and the pain they are enduring from yesterday's firings that were done without cause. There are times I might disagree with a product or a forecast, but that does not suggest I don't respect the work they do. The private sector is not equipped and does not want the responsibility of warning in extreme weather situations and the organization has come a long way over the past decades as to the way it communicates to the public in those situations. Additionally, collecting upper air data, maintaining radar sites, running computer models, providing data that keeps our airplanes from crashing, marine forecasts that keep mariners out of trouble, river forecast centers that monitor flood risk, maintaining our network of satellites and monitoring air quality levels are all pretty vital. Though plenty of tax dollars are wasted, NOAA is a pretty well run outfit, especially considering they make all these efforts publicly available so that stooges like me can blog about it for 20 years specific to our mountains. I wouldn't be able to do it without their efforts.
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