Thursday – Saturday Weather:
The sunny days and mild weather continue through Saturday, with highs in the 50s and 40s for the higher elevations.
Small Sunday System:
The snow showers could reach the mountain around 1-3 AM. The winds don’t look that strong but could gust up to 20-40+ mph from the SW over the ridges. Highs drop into the 30s as colder air works in.
The track of the low form north to south, west of the Sierra, and a lack of strong winds, will limit the precipitation and snowfall totals. The snow levels look to start near the base before falling lower into Sunday night, so we are expecting all snow with this system.
Scattered snow showers are possible on Monday but the sun could also peek out as well. Highs in the 30s. I’m expecting most of the snow with this system to fall by Monday morning when we could have totals of around 1-4 inches near the base, 2-5 inches near mid-mountain, and 3-6 inches up top.
Wednesday – Thursday Possible System:
On Tuesday we will see a quick break between storms with partly-mostly sunny skies and highs in the 30s, to near 40 degrees down at the base. Then the next storm could move into SoCal between Wednesday-Thursday.
The latest model runs either stall the system off the coast and have it falling apart, or have it tracking inland to our south with a low chance of being brushed by snow showers. We’ll continue to watch the trends to see if we could see any snow from this system.
A Break in the Storms:
We could see high pressure build in over CA from around the 6th-8th bringing a break in the action.
Storms Return?
The long-range models continue to show the eastern Pacific ridge shifting out to south of the Aleutians with a broad trough over the West Coast around the 9th-11th. That trough could be associated with a bigger storm swinging into the West Coast around the 10th.
We’ll continue to watch this period to see if we could see a bigger snowstorm.
Long-Range Forecast:
Beyond the 11th there is still a trend toward the Eastern Pacific ridge shifting east a bit closer to the West Coast. That could bump the storm track to our north starting around the 11th or have drier storms dropping down from the north.
The ensemble mean models show the wetter pattern shifting into the Pacific NW through the 2nd week of March up to mid-month, but still near average precipitation for the northern Sierra. Hopefully, the door stays open to at least small storms that continue to bring snow every few days.
BA
