Mountain West- Winter

[Mercurial]

6 hours ago, Chinook said:

Torchuary. For everybody who reads this forum except Mercurial

KGPI is at -3.6 so far this month.  We finish with big negative anomalies for each of DJF.  Nice to finally pull off a winter with way below normal temps.  

[Chinook]

Denver has a pretty good chance to get 1" of snow tomorrow.

[mayjawintastawm]

On ‎2‎/‎25‎/‎2017 at 3:57 PM, Chinook said:

Torchuary. For everybody who reads this forum except Mercurial

Now let's hope we don't have a Morch to follow Torchuary. The trend toward colder and wetter some talked about earlier this winter doesn't yet look like it will materialize soon.

[mayjawintastawm]

A bit west of here, but as long as we are still thinking about snow... haven't seen this combination before.

URGENT - WINTER WEATHER MESSAGE
National Weather Service Honolulu HI
350 AM HST Wed Mar 1 2017

...BLIZZARD WARNING NOW IN EFFECT

Of course it's for the Big Island summits, but still...

Might as well plan to plant a palm tree in my front yard. What will my water bill be this year??

[raindancewx]

Here is how the winter looked overall - I condensed the two maps into one.

I'm reasonably proud of my October outlook - had the West Coast wet with it trending to average for the interior West, the East dry and warm. It ended up being super wet (x4 in CA to x1.5 in NM) instead of just say x2 to x1. Didn't have the Cold centered far enough to the West, I thought it was Montana to Minnesota, instead it was ND to WA.

Certainly never bought the "dry & warm" in the West BS for a La Nina. In a lot of ways La Nina Modokis have pretty similar effects on the East / West as East based El Ninos since Nino 3.4 < Nino 1.2 in terms of temperature anomalies. My ocean analogs, based on a warm AMO, neutral PDO, weak La Nina, Dry Monsoon, Modoki (warmer East, cold Central), after double El Nino, had the correct "West is cold", "East is warm" idea, but with the PDO being warm, the cold shots came in a bit further West then I thought.

[Chinook]

I have been checking the GFS 384-hour snow totals. Many of the runs show 0" or 1" for the Front Range cities. This is quite discouraging. I have resorted to this. The average March-to-May snowfall here is 18.8".

[raindancewx]

CPC has the 6-10, 8-14, and week 3-4 outlooks dry/warm for the West save WA/OR. Not sure I buy it for mid-month. Organic Forecasting has been showing the period around 3/13 to 3/22 cold for quite a while, and there is probably a storm in there. The MJO jog through phases 1-2-3 has made us a lot colder than much of February in recent days too.

 

 

[Chinook]

It would appear that a ridge near the Aleutian Islands all winter drove the negative PNA pattern to develop cold and wet weather near the West Coast and Northwest.  I think it is rather odd that this significant negative PNA pattern helped bring about the very wet weather in California. Negative PNA patterns happen during many strong La Nina winters. Meanwhile, last year, there was a strong El Nino.  I, (as well as many others,) thought that -last- winter would be the big wet winter for California, particularly southern Cal.

[raindancewx]

Weatherbell (on a public video) listed their current Spring & Summer analogs -

He has the SW hot for the Summer, but the selected years would actually be a bit cooler than last Summer here by mean highs. The selected years also have a huge August for precipitation in NM, which is typically a strong signal for a wet winter in the West. Historically, El Nino with a wet August + October is a strong indicator of a Wet / Cold / Snowy March for the SW, which hasn't happened in ages - the years he selected had 3.19" precip in Aug+Oct, +39% against the long-term mean. Would imply a good March. Every El Nino with a wet Monsoon here has seen at least average snow - including the last two El Ninos (2014-15, 2015-16). The JJA years work out to ~5.82" rain from June 15-Sept 30. The Spring years imply ~1.1" snow here in the Spring.

Spring 2017 (MAM)
1966
1974
1974
1998
1999
2002
2002
2011
2012
2013
2016

Summer 2017 (JJA)
1992
2002
2002
2006
2006 
2006
2010
2011
2012

[Chinook]

Seeing as how the West got about 150% of average precipitation for DJF, what type of year would be the best analogy, looking back? Certainly with ENSO, the tendency is to have either the NW be wet or the SW be wet, but not both.

[raindancewx]

Isn't it really just driven by where the Pacific blocking is and how quickly the Atlantic forces storms N/E out of the West? The Eastern Atlantic is starting to go into an AMO- look, it's just going to take a while for it to spread West towards our shores. In a solar sense we're kind of like the 1920s/pre-dust bowl pre super-solar max 1930s (pre-1933), but you have to blend it with the right AMO/PDO phases, which are like the 1890s/1950s but a bit warmer. Pacific individually isn't super dissimilar from the 1920s/1980s either.

It's hard to get the entire West wet in a winter but look at these winters - almost the entire West is wet.

1931-32

1935-36

1936-37

1937-38 (this was one of my "ocean analogs" - very wet almost the entire West)

1939-40

1942-43 (one of my "weather analogs" - warm/wet winter sw, cold/wet NW)

1951-52 (similar in Nino 1.2)

1968-69

1977-78

1979-80

1982-83

1992-93

1996-97

2007-08 (one of my "weather analogs")

A blend of 1937/1979/2007 is a damned good match for the West this winter.

[Chinook]

Hey Mercurial - the 00z GFS has 1.8" to 5.0" of water equivalent near Kalispell MT, in your back yard, (depending on elevation) in the next 10 days. Glacier N.P. in Montana may see 100" of snow out of these 10 days.

[raindancewx]

The DJF ONI value came in: -0.4C.

[Chinook]

We have had 3 out of the last 4 days (Mon, Tue, Thu) with wind gusts of nearly 60mph at the foothills here and easily 40mph+ gusts in the middle of town. At least today, it is warm.

[Mercurial]

 

Hey Mercurial - the 00z GFS has 1.8" to 5.0" of water equivalent near Kalispell MT, in your back yard, (depending on elevation) in the next 10 days. Glacier N.P. in Montana may see 100" of snow out of these 10 days.

Yep getting crushed right now with snow.  Looks like we flip over to rain next week unfortunately -- rain on top of all this snow is going to be pretty disgusting.  Oh well; it's inevitable.  

 

[Chinook]

For those of you using GRLevel3 software, there is now a version 2.60 Beta 3 which has shows different colors for rain/snow/sleet/freezing rain. Radar out of New York. This is kind of beautiful. I think the NY area will get a lot more snow next week...

[Chinook]

GOES 16 Geocolor visible satellite for our region. This image is from March 1. There is new snow in Wyoming and Nebraska. Just trying to show some of the new GOES 16 capabilities that will be operational later this year.

[ValpoVike]

Latest drought monitor is no suprise, but if we don't get our big March/April storm wildfire season may get ugly this year.

[raindancewx]

Was playing around with ENSO blended by solar-setting the other day. Results are pretty interesting. The maps are by July-June monthly sunspot mean from SILSO. I split the ENSO base states into thirds from 1931-32 to 2016-17 by whether sunspots where top third, middle third, or bottom third. So you get nine patterns of 9-12 years for the past 86 winters.

If you split the US into six regions, there are clear patterns to which of the nine splits are hottest/coldest:

Southwest (NM/AZ/W. TX/S. CO./S. UT/S. NV/S. CA): Coldest w/ El Nino + Low Sunspots (<55) - Potentially winter 2017-18.

Northwest (WA/OR/ID/MT/WY/N. CO/N. UT/N. CA/N. NV): High Solar La Ninas are cold, High Solar El Ninos are warm

Northern Plains (MN, IA, ND, SD, NE): Neutral w/ Normal Sunspots are very cold.

Southeast (E. TX, OK, AR, MO, LA, KS, MS, AL, GA, FL, NC, SC, VA, KY, TN): La Ninas with low or high sunspots or high are warm. El Ninos with low sunspots are cold.

Lakes: (WI, MI, IL, IN, OH): Neutrals with Normal Sunsports are cold.

Northeast: (MD, PA, WV, DE, NJ, NY, CT, MA, RI, NH, VT, ME): El Ninos with High Sunspots are very cold.

Actually, the El Nino with high sunspots is probably the most surprising thing to me - those are very cold years on the East Coast.

[mayjawintastawm]

4 hours ago, ValpoVike said:

Latest drought monitor is no suprise, but if we don't get our big March/April storm wildfire season may get ugly this year.

 

I'm going to change my screen name to Droughtman. Mayjawintastawm likes to have things to talk about near where he lives. Droughtman doesn't even show up for work most days.

[ValpoVike]

6 hours ago, mayjawintastawm said:

I'm going to change my screen name to Droughtman. Mayjawintastawm likes to have things to talk about near where he lives. Droughtman doesn't even show up for work most days.

Well said!

 

[raindancewx]

Do you guys have the same issues with March in near-solar minimum years that we have? It's very very rare for NM to get above average snow in March over the last century or so when we get near the minimum.

"Near the minimum" being an average of <=55 sunspots per month from July-June on an annualized basis.

We're at maybe ~28 for July 2016 to June 2017 by SILSO data.

[snownut]

Yes being in Central OR first hand truth on this .. Lately has seen typical to above normal and most of my 90" of snow is gone. 

 

Certainly a winter I will not forget. 

 

http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-coldest-winter-in-generation-for.html

 

[Chinook]

I just went out on a snowshoe trail. A couple of pics. The first is near 10276 ft Cameron Pass, there's a front-end loader fitted with a snow-clearing device. The second is close to 9000 ft, just a few miles east/northeast. Where's the snow? It has been too warm below 8000 ft, for sure. There was at least 49" of snow near the parking lot of the snowshoe trail at 9400ft. I would say a good 4 to 6 ft on the ground there.

 

[Mercurial]

Watching the the east coast system tonight.  So grateful we don't typically have to fret over rain/snow lines, sleet bombs, etc., here in the Rockies.  

[Chinook]

Maybe I'll spice up the conversation here. I found an old CDROM with my backed up files. Here is my first good close-up picture I took of Long's Peak in August 2006. I think it is a pretty cool picture. I did not hike to the summit that day. It was too hard for me; I was a newbie at class-3 hiking. But I summited Long's Peak in 2007.

By the way, models/ensembles have a decent 500mb trough around here on next Wednesday and Thursday, so we may get some pretty good mountain snows.  I may even dare to say that we will get upslope rain at elevations of 5000 ft. The 00z GFS has 984mb in southeast Colorado at 18z Thursday of next week. Well, we can use the moisture, whether it will be rain or snow. A low of 984mb -ought- to destroy us with snow. But don't get your hopes up yet, that is still a week away. And so many storms have missed us; the models just tease us. In Fort Collins, we are quite a bit below normal snow for the season. I canceled my Eurowx.com subscription today. I was going to spend the extra $9.95 to get the Euro data until April 16th. But I figured, there has been last two months of Euro runs that didn't show any snow for Fort Collins. Why bother.

Fort Collins was 77 and sunny today.

[raindancewx]

The more I look at it, the more it seems like the might of the sun determine whether the mean trough comes into the East, the North, or the West in March. 

La Nina + low solar looks similar to this March so far, especially if you use a longer era than 1981-2010 on the maps below. May change in H2 March. Cold North, mild/hot Southwest/Southeast is pretty evident using 1951-2010..

 

 

 

[mayjawintastawm]

14 hours ago, Chinook said:

Maybe I'll spice up the conversation here. I found an old CDROM with my backed up files. Here is my first good close-up picture I took of Long's Peak in August 2006. I think it is a pretty cool picture. I did not hike to the summit that day. It was too hard for me; I was a newbie at class-3 hiking. But I summited Long's Peak in 2007.

By the way, models/ensembles have a decent 500mb trough around here on next Wednesday and Thursday, so we may get some pretty good mountain snows.  I may even dare to say that we will get upslope rain at elevations of 5000 ft. The 00z GFS has 984mb in southeast Colorado at 18z Thursday of next week. Well, we can use the moisture, whether it will be rain or snow. A low of 984mb -ought- to destroy us with snow. But don't get your hopes up yet, that is still a week away. And so many storms have missed us; the models just tease us. In Fort Collins, we are quite a bit below normal snow for the season. I canceled my Eurowx.com subscription today. I was going to spend the extra $9.95 to get the Euro data until April 16th. But I figured, there has been last two months of Euro runs that didn't show any snow for Fort Collins. Why bother.

Fort Collins was 77 and sunny today.

Really cool picture. Too bad the glaciers took too many bites out of Longs... it would be a much easier hike if they hadn't.

Longs is one of the few I'd consider NOT hiking, mainly because of the crazy exposure between the Keyhole and the summit.

[Mercurial]

77... what I would do for temps that warm.  lol.  The warmest temp so far this spring at KGPI is 48, so at my elevation it's possible we haven't even surpassed 45.  Snowpack has taken a beating however and is definitely looking pretty haggard.  Can't wait for fishing season.  

[Chinook]

The 00z GFS had 2.0" to 3.5" QPF for the Front Range cities within the full 384 hour run. That is not all snow. Actually this is getting to the time of year when we could get an upslope rainstorm. Hopefully the mountains will get at least 2.0" liquid equivalent of snow over the next 2 weeks.