Ask the Weatherman. Zoom replay from Tuesday, February 13th, 2024.
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Transcript follows:
All right we're going to start the show, get it on the road here will be a lot of fun we're going to have some entertaining slides and also some good facts on how the season has been going so far also a little bit about atmospheric rivers, a little bit about El Nino and even a hint of what's to come next year. How's that.
I'm joined by Andrea Hamilton. Andrea, please say hi, Andrea is going to be helping us out here, you'll be able to enter your chat questions and then we'll take open season on questions after we're all done Andrea any words. Thanks for coming and later on after I download the list of participants then I'll pick two winners at random. I'll pick a winner for Crystal Hotels for $200 value and Mike from XEVO is pitching in some goggles that's $200-$250, and I'll email the winners. Later on tonight.
How's the season been going so far and what was the forecast. Well, the season so far has been variable. You know we had those warm atmospheric rivers, we had kind of a slow start that's for sure.
We had that one Arctic cold spell and the snowpack is below normal. That said, most of the reports and my own experience is that the ski resorts are doing pretty decently. You know there's not a lot of off-piste or not a lot of powder days, but there's been a lot of good groomer days and sunshiny days as well.
You know the forecast this year was for El Nino. We certainly had this strong El Nino still in progress and the forecast was for below normal snowfall. And I said early in the season, the first powder alert, warmth will cause problems for skiers and it has because of high snow levels and some melting snow.
And the warmth is caused by El Nino, the warm ocean temperatures, and there's background global warming going on for the last 20 years. So that's that's been causing a problem. That two degrees Fahrenheit on average boosts the snow levels just a little bit, maybe 500 feet on average.
But we still get cold storms and we still get mild storms and that's kind of been the same. You know I've been trying to make it snow. You know I'm an old man yelling at the clouds there, but it's a big opponent there on the right.
El Nino, you know back in 1996, Chris Farley was Mr. El Nino. But it's been it's been tough. El Nino has been strong, just like we thought in California.
It's been getting a lot of the precipitations you saw next week and we'll see in the next couple weeks. We're right in the middle sort of of the El Nino nudge, so to speak. But first I'm going to take a look at temperatures right now and temperatures and snowfall for the next few days.
Here's what the forecast is. We do expect new snow, so here's what's going to happen tomorrow. 500 foot snow low.
We couldn't even see a little wet snow down the lowlands, but in the mountains during your ski day, it'll start off maybe even with a little sunshine, but certainly increasing clouds and it'll be snowing by the end of the day. Probably by the time you leave, we're going to get a shot of snow Wednesday night into Thursday. Now this shot of snow is mainly aimed South of I-90, so someone will get some.
Stevens get a little bit bigger. We got little or none. Crystal will probably get the most, but so will White Pass will get a good shot of it too, and that'll be your powder day for Thursday morning.
Expect new snow again 2 inches in the northern Cascades, but 10 inches in the central and southern, mainly southern Cascades, white and crystal. It'll clear up and still be cold. This is good quality snow too, by the way, with low snow levels and just to trace a new snow on Friday.
But those groomers will be absolutely perfect on Friday. And then Saturday, partly sunny, still remaining cold, so good weekend coming up. I'd say Saturday, Sunday and Monday as well.
A lot of sunshine for your holiday weekend, so that's how it looks again. Most snow to the South Summit, Crystal and White Pass. Here's what they forecast for the next.
126 hours. That's through later in February through Sunday. I should say so through the weekend you can see very clearly on this image that shows where the snow is.
It'd be mainly mainly central Cascades, South Bachelor. Some folks were talking about bachelor earlier. You'll get a good dump there.
Sierra will get a good dump, but North like Whistler and Baker. Not much a trace at best. So the snow is going to be a little bit better.
The stuff is going South and that's what we expect during El Nino.
We're going to talk a little bit now that we've covered the forecast for the next few days. And by the way, after that Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday look fairly dry and no significant snowfall coming for at least a week after this round coming up later tomorrow night and Thursday.
So let's call. Let's talk about skiing atmospheric rivers. These are these narrow and warm bands of very moist.
Atmosphere that comes hits the mountains really dumps the rain and snow levels go soaring. So a lot of times you'll have snow, then rain, then snow in the past as it can get really complicated with easterly winds and really cold temperatures and then also atmospheric rivers are tropical and subtropical origins. So you get a lot of fog.
You get wind and with this change in temperatures, you get avalanche problems again. Avalanches are really only out of bounds and not on the roadways and not in the skiers. Not that there's a zero chance on the freeway or the roadways and inbounds, but there's a lesser chance because they do avalanche management in the ski areas and on the roads.
But you're on your own in the backcountry during the atmospheric river. Never a good idea to go backcountry skiing because you've got all these fluctuations of wet snow, rain, rain falling into the snowpack makes a snowpack really unstable. So sometimes there can be deep snow with this.
These A.R.s hit. I'm gonna call them A.R.s, atmospheric rivers. Just before they hit, there's cold air in place.
You'll get some snow and then it'll get scoured out with warmer air. And then after the atmospheric river moves through, you'll get cold air again and it'll start snowing. So there's a lot of things that happen.
Here's an interesting one on December 3rd. You probably remember this one a while back. The atmospheric river would roughly lie where this green area is.
And so that's around this low pressure area and brings cold air behind this front, this weather front, warmer ahead of it. And the atmospheric river resides right ahead of the cold front and really dumps the precip. One good thing you should always remember about these atmospheric rivers is typically when they do move through, you get this cold air right here.
And these spotty clouds, these are called open cell Q and they can produce a lot of snow and good quality snow when they slam into the Cascades. So you can get a real bonus sometimes after these atmospheric rivers. Here's what they look like schematically.
The jet stream is not the atmospheric river. That's way high in the atmosphere, about 30 to 40,000 feet. And think of the jet stream as a stream of air that directs the storms, but also will modify the storms or magnify them sometimes.
It's a stream of air that's really strong, that can exactly essentially exhaust the air upward. And this causes lift and precipitation. And the cold sector is behind this.
Remember I told you about the cold air and the warm sector is ahead of it. The atmospheric river resides right in the warm sector, right ahead of the cold front. So remember, you can get rain going all over the place.
And some of that rain may be snow behind the front and even ahead of the front. But the core of the atmospheric river is usually pretty warm and pretty high snow levels. How high? 5 or 6,000 at least, sometimes 7 to 10,000.
They're usually in my book over 7,000, which puts them above most areas from Whistler all the way to Batchelor, although upper Bachelor probably gets snow in some of these. And so here's how it looks really, how one might look with snow to the north, warm air and rain to the south.
And oh, I wanted to show quickly a couple of things you should consider with these atmospheric rivers is, you know, where is the cold air? Is it in place? Is there cold air in place? Does that mean it has to scour that cold air out to get the mild air? There might be cold air coming from eastern Washington.
Also, these atmospheric rivers do punch over the Cascades into Mission Ridge and 49 degrees north, one of our sponsors, and Silver Mountain and Idaho, another one of our sponsors. So sometimes they get some warming, and since they're colder inland, sometimes they aren't as hammered as we are by the atmospheric rivers. So there are some spillovers.
And remember, north of the AR, it is cold. And so eventually cold air does come in. And oftentimes ARs will decay and move to the south.
Here's another look at what might one might be the low. You can see curled up here. Isn't that fine? That is a fine looking storm brings down this cold air.
So the cold air is coming from right up here up in Alaska and the Gulf of Alaska comes whipping around this low like this. So these are all this is the area. This spotty area here.
This is where you want on top of you. This will produce the best powder days. No ifs, ands, or buts about it.
But you got to get through the AR. Whoops, got to advance there. Remember, warm, secondary, cold air.
So that's where the collector ahead of the AR in the air resides. It's right there. Okay, here's that cold snowy, this spotty stuff behind this AR gets in there.
It's golden. So just remember, ARs can be bad. But afterwards, we saw this about a month ago, the AR scoured out some of the snowpack.
But afterwards, it gained it all back and more. This most recent AR about 10 days or two weeks ago, that scoured out a lot of snowpack and a lot did not come back. It didn't melt the snowpack out completely, maybe in the very low elevations of 2,000, 3,000 feet, but the ski areas survived.
Just wasn't that pretty. Okay, so now we'll get into El Nino a little bit more here. El Nino produces this extended jet stream down to the south.
It produces wetter weather down through Southern California and snows in the mountains of Arizona. Southern Colorado and New Mexico. Arizona and New Mexico had really a lot of snows.
And so they've been doing pretty good and it produced warmer weather for us. This low kicks up these storms from the southwest ARs and other storms make it warmer for us. And then this is exactly what we're seeing.
I mean, this is textbook El Nino. You'll see it again later this week into this weekend. We'll start to get dry again in California.
You're going to hear more about storminess down there and through the southwest. So that's happening. And a lot of people wonder about El Nino.
Look at this. There's no effect in Tahoe, Utah, or Colorado. That's not to say they aren't affected by normal weather.
In fact, Utah and Colorado are having a very good year right now and a great last week. And Tahoe is still a little bit below normal. So they do not have a predictable El Nino connection.
This is a big misunderstanding most people have. They don't understand Tahoe. Southern California does, but not Northern California.
This has been proved over and over again. So some places are not affected at all by El Nino. Remember last year was big La Nina and Tahoe had that incredible snowfall and so did Southern California and so did much of the southwest.
So there can be natural variation laid on top of this.
Also worldwide effects by El Nino. A lot of people think about Europe.
Europe not affected by El Nino. You can see there they had a really good December in the Alps from what I understand, but not as good January. Other places in the tropics like Australia get affected, but not all of Australia.
And so when you hear people blaming everything on El Nino, it's just not true. And there's no such thing as an El Nino storm. There are just patterns like we're going to see in the next week and we saw last week that are conducive.
And that's this wet southwest southwest storm track and warm up in the northwest.
OK, so we have a strong El Nino right now. It's starting to weaken, but it's still very strong and so the impact will remain at least for another two months.
And for us, of course, it means warmer and probably less northwest snow from the warmth and the storm track will be to the South. And this proves that look the last 90 days. You can see up in the Pacific Northwest and this includes the inland Northwest.
The Brown is drier than normal last 90 days. But look at the southwest.
It's wetter than normal. So the pattern isn't completely pure, but you don't have to squint much to see this dry up here and wet down here. Also look at warmth just about everywhere, but warmth up in the northwest here on the warm map or the temperature map is to the right.
So it's pretty good so far. And again. It comes and goes.
You know, there's natural variation on top of this tendency for these storms to happen, so it's it's not. It's not death sentence, but it's really living up to the textbook right now.
Here's peaks and valleys of El Nino and La Nina.
La Nina is to the bottom and El Nino is to the top. The red areas and you can see to the extreme right.
That's where we are, and that shows where the El Nino is now. So we're at one of the bigger ones that we've had in the last 20 years. This is very strong El Nino, but it is starting to weaken, but it isn't down to neutral status.
But wait til you see what's coming.
So here's the precip forecast. The one on the left is for below normal precipitation.
That means below normal snow for February, March and April from the Climate Prediction Center above normal in the southwest. This reflects the El Nino nudging warm for much of the northwest and even parts of California. So they are incorporating that El Nino into their forecast there, and that's why it's balanced that way.
OK, here's what's interesting. El Nino is still going. You can see the red bars graph on the left, so it's going to be El Nino for the next couple of months.
And then look at that. That gray or neutral starts to take hold for March, April, May and look at the blue coming down at you. This is it gang.
This is La Nina and that usually does really well for us in the fall and winter during the for the Pacific Northwest. So next and this map to the earth. This graph to the right also shows we're pretty much at the peak.
Notice all the lines. Those are different models. They're going downward to neutral.
And then they're crossing that 00 line and then going negative, which is La Nina.
So look at that next year. Now this isn't in stone. Things can happen, but right now I think it's pretty likely that will have La Nina. That would be my bet. So La Nina for 24-25 season typically brings near to above normal snow.
Happy, happy skiing next year.
All right, we're going to take a look at the snow pack. See who's feeling the pain and who's not.
The red and and also yellows and orange are below normal snow. So you can see up toward the North Cascades. It's not doing too well.
There's several places in Vancouver, BC that have closed those Grouse Mountain and Seymour have closed. I was just up at Whistler last week. It's 65% of normal, but they're doing really good.
I thought the groomers were in good shape and could ski off piste a bit in the upper bowls. We had some fresh snow.
So I think everybody's managing the snow pretty much, you know. Crystal…I got a good report today, but everybody is below normal. So off piste is limited. It's not recommended for the most part.
There's going to be some thin spots. Be careful. And this extends all the way through much of the West.
But as you get farther South, you notice towards Sun Valley and over here in southern Idaho and parts of Oregon to you start to pick up some mixed a little better. The green is better, more closer to normal 90 to 100% of normal. See, Tahoe down here is still below normal.
I don't have Mammoth, but they're getting closer to normal. Look at these places in the southwest, Arizona and southern Colorado. Of course, all of Utah is doing really well.
So it's been showing that variation, and that's what the forecast shows too.
Here's a look at how it compares. Baker's really struggling with below normal snowpack.
You'll see that those lines below the orange line are some of the worst years, and so they're kind of tap dancing along some of the worst years. Those upper lines are those huge La Nina years. The lower lines tend to be the El Nino years.
Same with Crystal. Crystal's doing a little bit better, and so is White and so are Snoqualmie and Stevens. But they're still below normal.
You can see we'll need several more feet to get there. We did actually lose some snow with that atmospheric river last week or about a week and a half ago, I should say, almost two weeks ago. There was actually snow loss going on there.
So that can happen. It will build back. That's how it looks below normal.
Here's a SNOTEL site, which is an instrumentation site. This is at 6,000 feet, so it's rather high, but it kind of exaggerates or shows some of what's been going on. We had kind of a slow start here, and Christmas was below normal.
Then we had a pretty good run of it right around December, and then we had that atmospheric river. We lost a little bit of snow. Then gained it back really quickly.
Look at how fast we gained it back, and then it kind of stayed steady. Then we had a pretty good gain in early January, and then it's been kind of a steady gain, and then we lost a lot about a week or two ago with this atmospheric river, and then we started to gain it back a little bit. The normal is this green and blue line.
So that's kind of normal. You can see we're still a ways from the end of the season, but we're getting about halfway through there. You can see how much snow we can lose there.
Several inches of what's called snow water equivalent, which is a proxy for the actual snow depth.
Here's another look. This was January 2nd of this year.
You can see we're kind of hurting, but we're still below normal, but we're now closer to normal, but we're still well below normal. You can see the orange areas and the Olympic Peninsula is really hurting for snow over there. It's been hurting for everybody.
We gained some, but we're not quite there. So what are we going to need?
The current ski area depth is about 3 to 5 feet. We're going to need to get near average, We're going to need at least 3 to 6 feet. That'll help the off-piste, too. As long as we keep getting these refreshes, too, the groomers are pretty good.
So the next 10 days, I'd say we're going to see anywhere from a low end of an inch, mainly North Cascades, Stevens northward, to 12 inches southward from Snoqualmie, Crystal, and White southward. We're going to need to get a little bit closer to normal.
We're going to need to get Seattle area, mainly north of Seattle to Everett, and then wind comes through the Strait and goes downward.
So that creates, but you can have multiple ones of these, too. You can have multiple convergence, so you can have one that hits Mount Baker, you can have one that hits Crystal, and they move around, too. But this is like the classic.
When you usually hear it, this is usually the one that's happening. So I would say most of the time, this is the one. When the original paper was done in 1981 by Cliff Mass, he just kind of discovered these things.
He described this one, but he also underlined the fact that there were multiple ones. It's our terrain. I mean, this is an awesome place to live with weather and the terrain does all this wacky stuff.
These convergence zones are really interesting. They can provide for incredible snowfall, because here's the thing. After the front goes through, you get the coldest air, so the snow level stays low, and you get this moisture.
It's aimed a lot of times right at Stevens. They really benefit, but I've seen them go down, sweep down through the Cascades, and then also Baker will benefit, too, sometimes. Here's what they look like on the radar.
You know, they're kind of a cigar-shaped band that kind of goes over from the Kitsap Peninsula sometimes all the way to the southern part of Whidbey over to Everett and then extends into the Cascades. But we love the low snow levels, these things. You never have a high snow level with these.
In fact, sometimes you have these and that brings snow rate down to the ground to Everett, so it brings cold air down with it, with these convergence zones.
So a couple quick questions we had beforehand. I'll answer these quickly.
There was a question about surface snow conditions. Can we predict those? And I think what they meant by this is like, you know, sometimes it's like crunchy, sometimes it's soft. And really, I mean, this is the Holy Grail.
I mean, I couldn't really do it. I mean, the best thing I do is like the day before I go, okay, it's soft today. Is it going to melt tonight and then refreeze? Is it the groomers going to help this? Is a piece already frozen? I mean, I asked myself, what is it like today and what's going to happen tonight? And so what will be back tomorrow? Tomorrow, obviously, when you get fresh snow, you know, it's going to be soft, generally speaking, too.
But it's hard to forecast the surface snow condition. Heck, we have a hard enough time getting the snowfall amount right.
El Nino storm, as I mentioned earlier, no such thing as an El Nino storm or just storms that happened during El Nino years that have a certain track and a certain characteristics.
As I said before, climate change is going to is going to change snow levels. Um, there's what most are saying. Most models are saying in the next 20 to 30 years, they'll probably in generally general go up on average 1000 ft.
And so, but that's not every storm. Some storms might go up a little bit more. Some storms will still stay plenty cold.
So you still get a mix. It's just when you average that mix over a season, you go, Oh, it's no lower average. The season is a little higher than it used to be.
Uh, there will be probably an increase of snow in higher elevations. How high? Well, it's hard to say.
I mean, uh, here's the thing that looks like there's gonna be more precipitation during the core of the winter with, uh, with global warming, and that will put more moisture in the higher elevations, the Cascades, where it will still be freezing now.
So a lot of the ski areas kind of straddle that high and low elevation. So it's gonna be interesting to see how it how it pans out.
Best weather model:
I'm always asked is, you know, you know, you hear all these people. This drives me crazy. You know,
“This models this, this models that…”
And you can do statistical analysis on which model does better. Um, but you know what? You don't know which model is gonna do the best during the storm that you're interested in, and nobody knows beforehand what model is going to.
I've seen plenty of times where supposedly the best model, BUST. But so you don't. Nobody knows. And people that probably pretend that they know what the best model is, they don't know.
What are the best websites? There's a lot of good website. National Weather Service is good.
Cliff Mass has a good website with his blog. A lot of good educational stuff on that. He does some local weather, too.
There's another called Weather West. It's based out of California that has some good stuff once in a while, especially climate related things. There's a lot of good fun websites to look on.
Of course, our own PowderPoobah.com. And thanks for everyone for subscribing.
Okay, we're gonna talk a little bit about the late season.
What is the late season? Well, it's kind of Marchish, but maybe April and May. You know one thing about here in the north that we have the best late skiing season of anybody. We can have terrific.
I've skied a powder day of Mount Batchelor on Mother's Day. I mean, 10 inches of powder and light powder. Now I had to get on it right when the chairlift open because it got mashed potatoes by, you know, 10:30.
But it can happen. And, you know, we've had great powder days in April. And here's another thing.
Our snowpack is usually deepest by April as well. So we haven't really normally we don't lose much snow packs, maybe the very low elevations. But so April our snowpack still is probably the deepest of the whole year. So I like the fact that days are longer. It's light.
You can ski to, you know, in April, and it's still light out it, you know, six o'clock, you know, it's still super light at three o'clock. Well, you're on the slopes. And so that's good.
So visibility is better. Light is better. Snowpack is better.
You still have some good start, but you know, it does get mushy and in the sun, you know, they can get kind of mushy, too. But I love the late season season skiing. We have really the best here in the Northwest.
So that's why I think the second half of the season is best.
And I'm gonna wrap it up right then. And we're gonna open it up to some questions.
And I hope you enjoyed the show. And there was a mixture of good and bad news there. But hang on.
So somehow we've had people stuck in the waiting room. Arnie couldn't get in. He wants to know about Crystal Mountain weather. He wants to know if the potential snow will hold off until three p.m. tomorrow.
Oh, the question is kind of like, when's it gonna start? That's getting close to the edge. I think your first half of your day is gonna be fine. It'll be thickening up.
I think it could hold off till three. But it's there's a chance by afternoon. I think the bulk of it will come well after three.
You know, it'll come really, really Wednesday night into Thursday morning. So I think, yes, there is a better than 50-50 chance of hold off till after three. But I don't think it's zero chance.
All right. Okay that is a really dialed in question.
So Brendan wants to know well about April. Where? Where is? Where is the best April scheme? He's wondering, Is it Idaho? Well, you know, here's the thing.
Anybody that's having a good year usually pushes their year into April anywhere. And I think a couple place to watch for is California is gonna have some good skiing. So some of their areas in California, Southern California and the southwest and parts of Utah and Colorado and Arizona will also have this.
They'll push their their skiing into the into April. For us here in the northwest. My best bets have always been Crystal sometimes stays open a little later. Bachelor definitely does. I've skied almost every year in Bachelor in April or May. It's good.
Whistler, of course, does there. They're really good skiing up there. It's really fun, and it all depends.
Some some areas, uh, you know, will stay open later, and some won't. But I think those are the more reliable ones. I mentioned Mammoth and southern. They stay open. I think they stayed open last year till after the Fourth of July.
Remember, they had this epic year last year. Mammoth tends to stay open. So you folks with Ikon passes, there you go.
Fly into Reno, but it's drive down there. It's kind of a neat drive there in eastern Sierra. Um, let's see.
There's a couple of the Tahoe areas stay open. You know, uh, Palisades or Heavenly sometimes when they have good snow, but they're not. It was not having a great year so far. It's more to the south and are having better here.
Okay, we've got a couple of questions. Someone wants to know:
Where's your hat? Where's my hat? It's at the laundry. It takes months to clean that thing after New Year's. You know, I wore it for New Year's. You know, people are spilling beer. They thought it was very funny, but it takes a while to the dry cleaners to get it all cleaned up.
Scott Ryan is heading to Bogus Basin next week.
Do you have a inland snow chance? Yeah, I mean, I think Bogus and Sun Valley. They'll get some of that action from California. So the brunt of it's going into California, but a lot of it spins up toward southern Idaho.
That is Bogus, McCall and Sun Valley, but also parts of Oregon, too. It just kind of doesn't quite get to us, you know, and so here in western Washington, I'm saying, and our folks to also in eastern Washington to won't get the brunt of it. So, yeah, you'll get you'll get some of this action out of Bogus.
I would. I would definitely dial that in.
Andrea: I will get the replay with the slides and the transcript uploaded to the website by Thursday. I've added the link here in comments, but it will also be on in the next powder alert on Sunday, and I'll put it on social so it will be. It will be.
Louise wants to know how does a La Nina season impact snow in Japan and will next winter be the right time to go to Niseko? Oh, that's a good one. I don't know what the connection is with La Nina in Japan.
I just know with us. My suspicion is La Nina and El Nino are not…they’re opposites in some ways. But think of La Nina is more of an enhanced normal.
So whatever is normal, you kind of juice it up like California is kind of normally a little bit on the dry side. Well, they're during La Nina is they tend to be a little bit more dry. We are tend to be a little bit on the website during La Nina is we tend to be more wet.
So think of La Nina as as an enhanced version of normal. So I suspect it's the same thing in Japan. Go to Japan in January.
That's the best month, by the way, because you have the perfect set up of that cold dryer coming off the Asian continent moves over the sea of Japan and then it dumps like there's no tomorrow.
Mark wants to know, he says El Nino and the ARs seem to be negatively impacting Mount Baker more than any other area. Is there any reason for optimism for March and April?
Well, I wish I could say yes, but here's the yes part of it though. I think we can only see out about 10 days and but but quite frankly El Nino this is although this Mount Baker is taking a beating on this one. Part of it was because a lot of these storms were just coming from the southwest and going along the coast and the ones that did penetrate inland they penetrated more into the central and southern Cascades.
But in the short term I can't say I do and in the long term it's a little more fuzzy but on the other hand El Nino is not kind to them. La Nina is very kind I mean it's at the world's record for deepest snowfall during La Nina.
But here's another thing there's natural even though El Nino nudges things certain way there's natural variation on top of it so things can have just like last year remember that was La Nina in California had one of the record deepest snowfalls and La Nina normally produces dry weather so things can happen and it's not the whole season it's part of the season so that's the only optimistic sign I can give you but I can't give you much in the next 10 days.
Jack he's just back from Telluride last week was very good hoping the next AR drops south again.
Yeah so and it will the AR that's going to be attached to these next there's two more big storms coming for California at least two more that we can see and these will also push into southwestern Colorado, Telluride, northern Arizona, southern Utah and they'll really spread through California too but there is a favor this El Nino storm track does favor this southern kind of tier of Southern California and Arizona and New Mexico so those areas will be hit again and some of that spins up into Utah and in central Colorado too so that's why we're not getting any precip that's where it's all going you know and it just undercuts us and that's it.
John says “Larry you're the best for picking pow days on on Stevens ski on.”
Oh thank you.
Jason asks do you anticipate more seasons that have a start like this one as a result of global warming and climate change?
You know I would think so just because of this background warming but there's a lot of variation in in in the in the beginning of the ski season every year even before global warming so kind of yes and no.
Here's another thing you know during the past like 20, 30, 40 years ago we didn't have grooming or that much grooming we didn't have hardly any snowmaking I mean this resorts really do I was up in Whistler the resorts do an incredible job of buffing out everything I'm sure you had some groomers but you get a lot of fun and you just need a little extra snow on the side so but the answer your question is we haven't seen a trend at least at the end of the season to have earlier melt-offs for the Cascades.
I'm not sure what the beginning trend is because it's kind of variable some areas start with less need more snow to start than other areas some areas have quite extensive snowmaking that helps them out start so it's hard it's you know pinpoint like what's causing them to start or not start the early season if they do not or don't have much snow making or have a lot of it so it's you know Whistler has extensive snow making my god they can snow make that mountain from top to bottom you know you can get it so it's it's um yeah we're gonna have global warm we're gonna have some problems around the edges but early season has always been even in the great years it's always been difficult and or variable I should say you know sometimes it's great I mean I've skied I've skied up at Baker late October early November before early season on natural snow.
Whistler: Paul says in just in December we experienced pouring rain just below Roundhouse on Whistler but it was snowing down to the base on the Blackcomb side he says it's been perplexing me ever since do you have any idea what weather pattern could cause this drastically different snow level between Whistler and Blackcomb?
Where was it raining? Roundhouse and snowing at the bottom and pouring down rain just below the Roundhouse but then into the base at Blackcomb side.
OK, you're right they're so close that is a little unusual. Here's what happens though sometimes in these transitions you remember they get that East, cold east wind coming out of that drainage that drains from Eastern or kind of central BC. When you get a transition of these atmospheric rivers they bring in warm air and then they got the cool air underneath and sometimes you get it layered up warm and cold and it can produce dramatic changes in in really short amounts of space.
I mean you've seen we've seen it you know rain maybe at the top of Alpental and snow at the bottom because it's because it's got that easterly wind out of eastern Washington. So I can see the same thing happening at Whistler too. That it'd be unusual and what would surprise me if it lasted too very long usually in this transition it just takes a while for either the cold air to be dominant or the warm air to be dominant but usually they get scoured out. Weird things can happen when you get these overlying cold and warm air layers and it with an atmospheric river.
Steve wants to know in general what weather conditions favor good snowfall for Schweitzer.
Good snowfall for Schweitzer, well there's a couple of different patterns that will help Schweitzer out, of course any of these specific storms coming into western Washington that breached the Cascades they'll hit 49 Degrees North and Silver Mountain and then of course move up into Schweitzer. And so those specific storms are one track. There are also track comes north from the north down the Rockies that they'll get even though they technically aren't in the Rockies there they're a little west of the Rockies they do get some of that action coming down from the Rockies so it's this balance of kind of colder and drier storms but cold enough to still produce snow from those Rocky Mountain storms and the Pacific storms which are milder and the best thing to have is a little bit of both because you want the moisture coming off the Pacific otherwise those dry Rocky Mountain storms sometimes don't produce much snow quality snow for sure but not as deep as snow as you might get so they tend to get both there at Schweitzer's that's the advantage there Schweitzer and 49 degrees and also Silver Mountain
Question from John: how much snow is predicted for Stevens, Wednesday night through Thursday?
Well yeah, I was trying to sort that out before when because a lot of people right on the edge. I think here's my guess right now I mean Baker will get a dusting to an inch.
I think Stevens might get two to four might be a little optimistic but let's go two to four.
I think Alpental and West will get you know two or three to maybe six.
Crystal will probably get seven to ten.
White pass will do well too and they'll probably get seven to nine somewhere in there.
So it certainly favors the south that's just the way it goes but yeah this storm is really favoring it kind of South.
Thank you very much Andrea and thanks everyone for tuning in here I know the season has been a little variable but there's still good skiing out there.
I mean I just talked to somebody today that was up at Crystal and they said it was a really nice and so get up and go and enjoy the sunshine and it's gonna be a powder day on Thursday morning so enjoy that too so you got a little bit of both but that's a look at the season up to this point and what's up for the next week or ten days so have a good one.
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