Tuesday – Saturday Weather:
The sunny days and mild weather continue through Saturday, with highs in the 50s and 40s for the higher elevations.
Sunday – Monday System:
We are still tracking a storm for Sunday that could continue some showers into Monday. It could move in as early as Saturday night. It’s not a strong storm and should bring lighter amounts of precipitation and not overly strong winds. But it will bring in colder air. The latest model runs show up to 0.5+ inches of total precipitation over the mountain.
The snow levels could start in the 6000-7000 ft. range Sunday and fall below the base into Monday. That could bring a little rain near the base, but right now it looks like mostly snow up on the mountain. Highs drop into the 30s and near 40 degrees down the base.
As of this morning, for the 2-day period, we could see around 1-3 inches at the base and 3-6 inches up top by Monday night.
Active Pattern Could Continue:
The Sunday-Monday system starts the pattern change as the mean high-pressure ridge position shifts north towards Alaska opening up the door to storms underneath into the West Coast.
The latest operational model runs show the chance for another storm next Thursday – Friday. Some models show a very wet storm, some similar to the Sunday storm, and some have it falling apart before it reaches us. We will continue to watch the trends on this system.
Long-Range Forecast:
The long-range models continue to show the pattern opening up a bit more to wetter storms as we go into the 2nd week of March, from the 8th-10th, as the ridge shifts southwest to south of the Aleutians, and a large trough over the West Coast for storms to spin up into.
Some of the long-range models show this pattern reloading through at least the 13th-14th with a wet pattern for the 2nd week of March. But others are starting to show the ridge building in closer to the West Coast beyond the 10th.
That could start to bump the storm track farther north. We’ll continue to watch the trends to see how long a more active pattern could last.
BA
