Winter starting to close up shop

We still have a little bit of snow weather sneaking through but overall we are shifting to a spring weather pattern.

Most of the snow is getting shunted up into the Pacific NW…as well as some of the Eastern Rockies (Utah, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho)…check out the NWS chart.



You can see a little bit of snow around Colorado…but the most intense storms we are going to see this week are stuck around Washington and Oregon. Really only the higher elevation spots are going to see real snowfall…the lower resorts are going to have more slush and rain.

Over the next few days we are going to see the low that is setting up snow for the Pacific NW slowly move over the mountain states…getting a couple of inches of new snow for those areas…but not a really significant amount. Basically we can expect a rather intense…sort of wet storm, typical of the Pacific NW, moving through the region and then drying out as it hits the rockies. Eventually the remnants of the storm move off to the east but it acts as more of a rain/thunderstorm generator than a snow maker.

Long-range is looking a bit sparse right now…there are a couple of lows still roaming through the Gulf of Alaska but most of those are going to blow themselves out before hitting land…either that or give a couple inches of snow to the moose and grizzly bears way up north in Canada rather than any spots in the US. Look for snowfall to get more and more rare as we move through the end of the month.

Where’d the snow go?

Well it looks like the last of the “winter” weather is starting to wind down in the US.

We have definitely slipped into a springtime pattern with just a couple of marginally cold pockets of weather sneaking through. I mean check out the current NOAA national chart…



This is just sad.

It isn’t completely game-over for snowfall…the forecast is still showing a little bit swirling around out there. Currently we have a pretty well-developed storm that is pushing across the NE and Mid-Atlantic States…a few of the forecast points around the Great Lakes area are calling for several inches of lake-effect snow over the next few days. It does start to dry out a bit better by the second half of the week.

Over on the West Coast we are seeing a new low-pressure that will be pushing over California and the Pacific NW…it isn’t particularly strong but it will have a bit of moisture in it as it dredges up some warm-air mass from the lower latitudes. This system will move through Wednesday/Thursday and should drop a couple of inches of new snow on the Sierras through the middle of the week, just in time to put some cover on spots like Mammoth and help us have some decent spring conditions.

Eventually this system moves through the Rockies but it won’t put that much snow at the exposed areas. There may be some marginal levels of new snow in Colorado but the other areas will just get a light dusting.

So that is about all I got for now…as we head toward summer it looks like these forecasts are going to get more and more depressing.