Unpredictable

There’s one way to describe the weather we have seen the last two days and that is unpredictable. You go out expecting stormy skies and it turns bluebird. You see bluebird skies on the webcam and walk out to find gray skies and heavy snow showers. Sometimes it seems to change within a few minutes.

Also unpredictable was the snowfall amounts. The official morning report was that 2-4 inches of new snow fell overnight. But in reality we found everything from dust on crust up to about 10 inches of new snow in wind favored locations. That new snow was also unpredictably light, given that it is April 3rd.

Even though it’s spring break for many schools this week, there was no traffic this morning. There were also no lift lines and few people on the hill. You’ve got to love that. Unpredictable.

What skied best today? That depends a lot on what time of day you were out. In general, north facing terrain skied better than things that have seen some sun.

I felt my run of the day was Shuttle Cornice, where the new snow almost skied bottomless.  Not far away, I found fun but scratchy turns on Sherwood Right Face. It was also fun to look back and see roller balls chasing me down the hill.

With great visibility in the morning, everything opened, including the upper bowls, High T and the Keyhole zone. Several people mentioned Estelle being worth the hike. Others mentioned High Yellow Gully as their favorite.

Weather Unpredictability

Some other popular weather blogger raised people’s hopes for a warm and dry forecast starting Wednesday. That news spread like wildfire across the interwebz yesterday. But less than 12 hours later the forecast changed again, now calling for more storms.

I will remind you that my Saturday report called for a dirty ridge that would allow storms to continue to sneak in through the 16 day forecast period. Some of the models are now calling for periods of snow and possibly rain over  the foreseeable future.

You can see that the little positive blip in the PNA forecast for this week is no longer there, meaning the even temporary ridging is not expected. We’ve slipped from the “dirty ridge” description to the “soft trough” description. Still with no actual storm in the pipeline, we should see sunnier skies for the next two and maybe three days. Temperatures should promote rapid corn formation on south facing slopes. Cold snow in north facing terrain should last a couple of more days. The weekend…well that remains to be seen. I’ll report again on Wednesday.

I’ve seen this graphic from the Scripps Institute of Oceanography pop up in a few places over the last two days. somewhere around 16 atmospheric river events just in California this season. We’re probably not done with them just yet. Hopefully we can catch our breath for a bit.