Sunday – Tuesday Weather:
We still have some clouds around early Sunday morning along with mild temperatures. We will see partly-mostly sunny skies each day with a few clouds through Tuesday. It will be mild with highs in the 50s for the lower elevations.
Wednesday – Friday Storm:
The next storm will be moving into the West Coast on Wednesday, but with the splitting of the system and the southerly flow, the precipitation will be slow to reach the Sierra. We will have mostly cloudy skies with winds from the south gusting up to 70-80+ mph over the ridges by afternoon, likely closing some upper mountain lifts.
The latest model runs show the precipitation reaching the mountain sometime between Wednesday afternoon and evening, with steadier precipitation into the day on Thursday. Behind the front, scattered snow showers could continue from Thursday night into Friday, and then finally clearing out Friday night.
The snow levels will start high Wednesday afternoon – evening, up around 8000-8500 ft. Then falling Wednesday night down to around 6000-6500 ft. by Thursday morning, and hovering in that range during the day. That is right near the base. Then dropping well below the base Thursday night into Friday.
The trickiest forecast will be for the base areas where we could see a mix still on Thursday and then all snow with scattered showers Thursday night into Friday. It will be colder with lighter winds for Thu-Fri, with highs only in the 20s on the upper mountain and 30s near the base. We could see around 3-7 inches of total snowfall at the base by Friday night, and 7-15 inches from 7000 ft. up to the peaks.
Saturday Weather:
The latest model runs show a break between storms for Saturday but cold behind the storm. We could see some sun for Saturday but with highs only in the 20s down to the base.
Long-Range Forecast:
The cold trough is forecast is still forecast to be centered over southern California through the 8th-9th of February, keeping temperatures on the colder side and the storm door open, but the high-pressure ridge over the eastern Pacific will block wetter storms from just moving across the Pacific into the West Coast.
Storms will have to squeeze underneath or over the top into the trough, and once they do they’ll be drawn into the base of the trough over SoCal and the southwest. That is why the precipitation anomalies through the 9th continue to show above-average precipitation to our south over the Southwest and below-average to our north.
For the northern Sierra, we could see weak systems move through over the period, or catch the northern edge of storms spinning up through SoCal. We could see a storm bring steadier precipitation, but the pattern leans towards cold air and weaker systems, with snow showers possible through the period.
We’ll watch the trends of each storm that shows up on the models to see if any could bring more than just light snow showers.
BA
