Pattern Discussion, While We Catch our Breath

Nov 28, 2024

Daily Snow Stake 

Clean up from yesterday

Around the Mountains

Pattern Discussion

That was an incredible storm to kick off the season and now we are going into a break for the next two weeks. Looking at the charts above, you can see there is not much happening over the next two weeks.  I do expect the Pacific Northwest storms to begin to show up in the next few days.  There should be a storm around the 7th for Whistler Blackcomb and the northern Cascades.  The December 3rd storm is not looking good.  We’ll see how that storm pans out.  There is a wave coming but it is pretty similar to last cycle–I thought it would be bigger this time thru, but we aren’t getting any help from the other influences.  

There is a good chance that there will be a storm around Dec 8th for Utah and Colorado, that looks to be a cutoff storm, so the details and tracking of that system need to be ironed out.  Below are two charts, the first is the last time this storm came thru, the second is the projected map from the GFS for Friday Dec 6th.  You can see the flow is pretty similar, so the models are on to what should be there.

The first time thru the storm stayed up north, we had a tropical storm in the Gulf of Mexico, ridging in the Pacific Northwest and Greenland.  This time thru, there is an area of low pressure in Baja California that draws the storm from the northern flow and creates a trough thru Colorado.  This is still 220 hours out so a lot can change, but this is one of the ways that differences in teleconnections can create differences in the pattern.  

Speaking of teleconnections, we have the Artic Oscillation (AO) that is negative and is projected to head back towards neutral.  The Madden Julian Oscillation (MJO) is currently in phase 3 and is projected to move into phase 4 and phase 5 by the time of this possible storm.  That would be good news to be in phase 5, because phases 3 and 4 seem to draw energy away from the west. 

Luckily for us the MJO is very weak at present, near neutral conditions (center circle is neutral), so there wasn’t an influence on our last storm.  Had the MJO been in a strong position, it likely would have cut the totals in half or more.  Something to watch next time around.

Thank you for reading the blog and as always if you have any questions, please email me at Mike@FutureSnow.co.  We have received many great questions, and it is a pleasure to answer them, so don’t hesitate to ask.