Weather Guy: Snow Turkeys

Snow over the last few days across the US has been pretty sparse except for the Great Lakes areas that seem to get a near constant level of lake-effect snowfall.

The good news is that we are going to see a lot of new storm activity over the next few days that will be bringing plenty of snow across most of the country as we head into the holiday weekend.

Right now we have a storm pushing over the Great Lakes and Mid-East states that will actually stall in place for a couple of days before pushing up over the Northeast part of the Country. We can expect a few inches of snow across resorts in NY, Vermont, and eventually up in New Hampshire and Maine. Whiteface in NY and Sugarbush in VT are both showing some new snowfall, and it looks like 2-4” more will fall in the next coupel of days.

Check out the current NWS national map…


The biggest white circle is the low-center that is anchoring over the Great Lakes…you can even see the cold font trailing down through the South and over Texas, potentially setting up some wild weather for those areas (but no snow so really I don’t think we care).

The other interesting thing on that map is the second smaller low that is forming off the California Coast. It is this storm (and one to the north) that is going to help drive the snowfall for the next week.

This little storm is a warmer low than something that would form at the higher latitudes. Since it has a wet-airmass it is able to hold a lot more moisture than a colder system would. What ends up happening is that this wet-low moves over the colder drier airmass stretched across the Midwest/Pacific NW areas and starts to take on the same characteristics. As is cools and gains altitude it looses its ability to hold water and since it cools rapidly in the higher elevations…bam!...we start to see new snow.

Since this low moves across the US and eventually links up with another colder low coming out of Canada we can expect more snow for California Resorts like Mammoth and Tahoe during the early part of the week. The Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming resorts will have new snow by midweek and the Northeast areas get more snow by the end of the week. Like I said…lots of new snow…lets cross our fingers that it starts breaking open the resorts so we can get some good early season riding in.

Check out the national weather forecast for the next few days.

Monday Morning

Tuesday Night

Thursday Morning

Just what we like to see…lots of purple and blue in the Mountain areas.

Long-range it looks like a few more storms lining up out the back in the North Pacific. Looks like we could see a few solid snowfalls over the next couple of weeks.

Check back next Monday for the latest update.