Friday – Saturday Weather:
Partly sunny for Friday with a chance for a few scattered snow showers around by later in the day. Highs in the 30s for the lower elevations and 20s for the higher elevations.
Saturday we should see mostly sunny skies and highs in the 30s. The one change this morning is a tightening pressure gradient over the area that looks to increase the northeast winds, with ridgetop gusts up to 40+ mph. Possibly a bit higher at times.
Sunday – Friday:
High pressure will be over the West for most of the upcoming week. That will bring a drier pattern for most of the week and milder. We should see mostly sunny skies each day through Wednesday. Highs into the 40s for the lower elevations and 30s for the upper elevations.
The GFS model still tries to brush us with a few showers from a weak system to our north on Thursday. The other models mostly keep it to our north. We could see partly sunny skies with some clouds around Thursday into Friday.
President’s Weekend:
We are still watching the trends for a pattern change expected to occur during President’s weekend. Confidence is pretty high that we will see storms over the weekend, but low in the details for precipitation amounts and snow levels. But we have an entire week ahead to iron out the details.
There is pretty good model agreement that the first storm will reach the Sierra by Saturday the 17th. Then another storm could move through on Monday the 19th. These systems will be tapping into some subtropical moisture so we’ll have to see how well they hold together by the time they reach the Sierra.
The latest GFS model run is showing snow levels low enough for mostly snow on the mountain with some mix possible near the base. They definitely aren’t cold storms, but hopefully not overly warm either. We’ll be watching the trends closely for the holiday weekend.
Long-Range Forecast:
The long-range models show the trough and active pattern near the West Coast through at least the 21st, possibly a bit longer. The ensemble mean models show above-average precipitation for most of CA from the 17th-23rd.
Going into the last week of February the jet stream is showing signs of weakening and retracting, and high pressure may start to build in near the West Coast. The best window for the wetter storms currently looks to be between the 17th – 21st, and then possibly less of a chance beyond that with any storms being weaker.
We’ll continue to watch the trends through the end of the month.
BA
