I’ve lived in the foothills a vast majority of my life and the rule of thumb I’ve always had in most of these setups is that sleet overperforms and saves the day during a transition. Let’s hope that rule of thumb continues but I definitely think my area spends more time as snow, snow/sleet than much else. The warm nose is prevalent on the sounding but it’s not honking at Zr.
The trend with Zr in the Euro is highly concerning. Gives me 7 inches of wet snow and over a half an inch of ice. Cut that in half and it’s still lights out.
The cutoff is going to be gnarly on the east side. If you look at the town by town probabilities, it’s even more evident. https://www.weather.gov/gsp/winter
Seems like it’s had really bad feedback issues the past several runs. Not sure what’s up with it but it also performed miserably with the storm a week or so ago if I remember correctly.
Diving into the 850s on the GFS, it looks good for almost everyone, including most of the foothills after a brief trip to the 1-2 degree mark. Let’s hope it continues at 18z but like we said earlier - wildly consistent.
The eastern slopes are going to be absolutely buried with upslope flow. I’ll be shocked if there aren’t a few major over performances along the escapement. That’s gotta be a nice treat for folks who typically miss out on NWF
CAD always seems to come in stronger than modeled. That’s why I won’t buy the complete takeover by sleet east of the mountains just yet for any period of time.
Hate the look of that dry slot on the NAM in WNC. Hopefully there will be some back building but that can always be the fly in the ointment for these setups.