Confidence grows for snow Saturday/Sunday – will be updating later – and snowpack!

We are going to get a bit of a break from the wet snowy weather today and Friday but the weekend is still a big question mark.

The GFS out of The University of Washington has been going strongly in favour of heavy snow late Saturday and into Sunday. None of the other models, the Canadian, the NAM or others have shown this, which is why up until today you did not see anything in the official forecast.

The UWGFS has now carried this prediction from its long range into its short range (less than three days) forecast. This gives it a lot more weight.

I’m going to post an image from a new source this morning. This image is still from UW, but it is generated from an Ensemble. That means multiple models from UW, the GFS, Canadian, Japanese, UK and others are all run at once and averaged to come up with a best estimate from all, called ‘centroid’.

They are not as fine grained and detailed as the UW GFS by itself, but they give a good idea of the overall grasp the various computer models have.

Here is the precipitation and temperature map for Saturday from the centroid.

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Blue means at or very near freezing and the precipitation map is self explanatory. As you can see, the conditions are ripe for snow.

I will not be posting the normal UW snow map until the new run this morning. This will be a crucial run as it will be the second of the short range runs and we will get to see just how confident all of the models are.

Take this as a heads up that significant snow could still be in the forecast for the east coast of the island especially late Saturday and into Sunday.

I will update this post later this morning ones the runs are complete.

And oh ya, GO CANADA!

I almost forgot! I wanted to include the latest snowpack graph! It is looking much much healthier. I’m hoping we can breath a bit easier now.

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As you can see it has jumped up considerably thanks to the past few days. It’s still nowhere near normal, but it’s not historically low either. We will be going into another extended dry stretch after this weekend, but it should not diminish too much. As long as we don’t get any early warm rain systems, we are now at least somewhat protected from disaster in the summer. And Mt. Washington is happy too.

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