Snowfall is looking light this week

The snow/winter season had a good start over the last couple of weeks (Check out the East Coast Shred Report #1) but despite some early snowfalls we are still seeing some large enough gaps between storms that base-depths around the country are still a little sparse.

This week doesn’t look like it is going to help that much either.

Right now we have a broad area of high-pressure that is holding over most of the Southwest Region and the lower portion of the Rockies that is keeping most of the mid-latitude storm activity in check.

There are a couple of colder low-pressures that are slipping through around the Canda/US border that are sneaking some light snowfall across the higher latitudes and the near ever-present lake-effect snow over by the Great Lakes areas but other than those two spots there just isn’t enough dynamic weather occurring that we need to help pour on the snow.

Check out the latest NWS map…you can see those high pressures holding over the Central/SW United States.



The next few days aren’t super promising either…







But as we get closer to the end of the week things do start to improve a touch as more storm activity starts to push in from the Gulf of Alaska



The long-range forecast is looking a bit better…in particular there are quite a few strong storms brewing up in the North Pacific right now, (cranking out some large surf for exposed areas as well).

I know, I know…Adam, why should we care about something happening way out over the ocean?

Well it comes down to atmospheric circulation…the storms that occur over land generally don’t just spring up all by themselves, they are always influenced by the storm track as a whole, not just one little section of it. So if the storm track, even several thousand miles out to sea becomes more active it means that more energy for storm development is available to the “whole” storm track, which eventually will translate into more unstable weather over your favorite resort, which equals snow and fun for us.

With what I am seeing in the North Pacific right now and the way that the forecast charts are starting to behave waaaay out at the end of the GFS wind model run, I think that we are going to start to see a couple of stronger systems lining up for the US mainland by the middle of next week…how much snow remains to be seen but at least the storm activity will be more favorable than what we have right now.