Wasatch Weather Weenies

Apologies for light blogging during this stretch as I'm in Innsbruck this coming week for the International Conference on Alpine Meteorology, which meets every other year to discuss the latest and greatest research pertaining to mountain meteorology.  Thanks to substantially lower hotel costs and conference fees, I can go to this meeting for only $200 less than the latest meeting I attended that was hosted in the U.S. by the American Meteorological Society (including airfare).  Clearly my professional society has something to learn from our European friends. Prior to the meeting, we spent a day in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, host of the 1936 Winter Olympics and the capital of winter sports and mountaineering in Germany.  Towering 2200 m above G-P is the Zugspitze, the highest peak in Germany. Like many resort areas of the Alps, a remarkable infrastructure of rail, cog railways, and aerial trams services the high mountain areas.  Below is the end of the cog railway...

What would the media do without short-term market and meteorological variability?  On slow news days they could attempt to cover substantive issues in depth, but that would require investigation and analysis.  Ignore the media hype and separate the short-term variability from the long-term signal and life will be better. From a meteorological perspective, both the short-term variability and long-term signal are looking pretty good right now.  Yesterday's high was 98ºF, but today will be much cooler.  A potent monsoon surge has pushed into northern Utah.  Check out the rise in precipitable water from ~1.5 cm yesterday morning to over 3 cm this morning.  Looks like they need to reset the scale on the plot below! Source: ESRL It's cool and comfortable out there this morning and today's high will probably be only in the high 70s, not much warmer than it is right now.  Showers and thunderstorms will abound.  Enjoy.  This short-term var...

Today is the first day of classes at the U.  Insanity will prevail.  Mother Nature is already stirring the pot.  She produced a stray shower on campus just before 8 am that produced a direct hit on the new northwest parking garage.  You could barely see it on radar as it was only a few pixels wide and it was over as fast as it started. Yup, Mother Nature is not too happy about these new parking garages.  There are two more opening up this semester, the central parking garage in the business loop and the aforementioned northwest parking garage next to my building (INSCC).  The latter, which is still under construction (although it appears they are allowing some people to park in it), is pictured below. I have great disdain for these parking garages for a variety of reasons.  They are expensive.  They encourage driving to campus.  They block the sun, the sky, and the views of the mountains.  Did I say they are expensive? In ter...

I woke up this morning, looked out the window and lo and behold there were the mountains.  It wasn't clear, but it was less hazy than I've seen it in the morning in a few days. I decided to get out for a quick hike while the getting was good.  I opted to hike up Hidden Peak to take advantage of the tram on the descent as my knees have been feeling tender of late.  Up high it was actually fairly nice.  Smoky, but not terribly so.  If you look carefully at the photo below, you can see considerable layering of the flow with a nice clear layer near crest level. Things are, however, deteriorating again, at least in the valley.  The trace below shows the PM2.5 concentrations at the University of Utah over the past five days.  There was a brief drop to just below 10 ug/m3 at about noon yesterday, followed by another bing increase, and then the drop overnight to the lowest values we've seen since the 18th.  Unfortunately, PM2.5 concentrations have ...

The NOAA/NWS Climate Prediction Center (CPC) issued their latest three-month outlooks yesterday and they give northern Utah skiers no love. For December through February, they give northern Utah slightly elevated chances of above average temperature and slightly elevated chances of below average precipitation. Source: CPC Source: CPC Does this mean we're in for another warm winter with bad snow?  No.  In the images above, equal chance (EC) areas in white are not projected to have an average winter.  Instead, EC means that the likelihood of below average, average, or above average temperature or precipitation does not differ from their climatological odds of 33.3% each.  In other words, the tools available for seasonal forecasting do not allow us to anticipate a strong loading of the seasonal climate dice one way or the other.  Areas in red (temperature) or brown (precipitation) are areas where the likelihood of above average temperature or below aver...

No surprises here.  The National Centers for Environmental Information issued their monthly summary for July and the globally averaged temperature was the highest for any month since the start of records in 1880.  Their full report is available here . Meteorologists typically present temperature trends in terms of anomalies (i.e., a departure from some long-term average).  For July, the globally averaged temperature anomaly was 0.81ºC (1.46ºF), the highest on record.  In 2nd place is 1998, also a strong El Nino year. Source: NCEI Since July is also the warmest month of the year globally (this reflects the greater fraction of land in the Northern Hemisphere), this July was also the warmest in the entire 1627 month record going back to 1880.  Yup, Earth has a fever and the only prescription is more cowbell. Or, more accurately, the only prescription is less carbon. It is the combination of long-term global warming with the strong El Nino that is...

Smoky sunrise over the Salt Lake Valley this morning.  Note the faint outline of the Wasatch Mountains on the left side. Over the past three days, air quality over the Salt Lake Valley has deteriorated as smoke from fires to our west and northwest is transported into the area. This morning, hourly averaged PM2.5 concentrations sit at 32 ug/m3 and are approaching the transition from moderate to unhealthy for sensitive groups.   Source: DAQ There was a spike to even higher values the day before yesterday, but I'm not sure if I believe it.  We didn't see it in our data from the University of Utah, which shows we're currently sitting at the highest PM2.5 concentrations of the entire event.   Source: MesoWest Making the situation even more miserable is the ozone.  Ozone is photochemically produced (i.e., produced by sunlight) and thus tends to reach a peak in the afternoon.  We've been topping out each afternoon at about 70 parts per billi...

Generally clear skies over the northwest U.S. enabled an excellent perspective on the smoke from the MODIS sensor on NASA's Aqua satellite.  It seems pretty smoky here, but it barely shows up in this image.  Conditions are far worse to our west and northwest. Source: NASA Some of the fires have devastated communities.  Here are a couple of photos of damage near Lake Chelan, WA from KING TV.  The bottom one is from Lake Chelan State Park. Source: KING-TV Source: KING-TV The National Interagency Fire Center currently rates the national firefighting preparedness level at a V, the highest possible, which indicates that major incidents have the potential to exhaust all agency resources.  Yesterday the center called in 200 active military troops to help with wildfire fighting efforts across the west.  This is the first time they have done so since 2006, although 200 seems like a small number and I wonder if more will be called soon. Here are s...

Given all the smoke that was around today, my son and I decided to explore some of the mining history in upper American Fork Canyon's Mary Ellen Gulch.  AF Canyon is a beautiful place and a huge canyon.  It's also hard to access via car unless you have an ORV, high-clearance vehicle, or huge heart–lung capacity.  I have none of these, so we elected to access it via the Snowbird tram.  It's remarkable how few people do this and we had all of upper Mary Ellen Gulch to ourselves and saw only a couple of ORV groups down near the mines. The route is pretty easy to follow.  From the Snowbird Tram you just head out the Bookends Traverse until you hit Sunday Saddle, the pass to Mary Ellen Gulch.  Follow the various roads down wherever your whims take you. Here's the view into Mary Ellen at the end of the Bookends Traverse.  Our objective was an area marked as "Globe Mines" on the USGS topo.  You can just make out a cabin in that area (just to the...

For a time yesterday I could smell smoke in the Salt Lake Valley and its certainly smoky this morning. Where is the smoke coming from?  A possible local source is the Berry fire, which has burned 175 acres in Tooele County (fire 78 in the map below).  There was also a small fire in Parley's yesterday, but I doubt that's a contributor.  More remotely, there are a number of large incidents in northern California and the Pacific Northwest.  Source: NIFC This morning's sounding provides some hints at the smoke source, but not unambiguously.  We've had a weak trough passage that's resulted in a shallow layer of northwesterly flow at low levels.  Above this layer, however, the flow is southwesterly.  Thus, I'm inclined to go with the view that the trough passage has ushered in smoky air from either northern California or the Pac NW, but there is a possibility that smoke from the Berry fire is being carried into our area by the SW flow aloft. ...

It is nearly a virtual lock that this coming winter will be an El Nino winter and most indicators are suggesting it will be a strong event (see the El Nino advisory issued by the Climate Prediction Center yesterday ).  Given that we've been talking about this event for several months, this will either be the most anticipated event of all time or a colossal forecast bust.  Apparently one NASA scientist called the event a Godzilla El Nino , with the phrase going viral now in the media.  You'll see all sorts of hype and hyperbole in the coming weeks with regards to what kind of ski season to expect.  Here's a survival guide for Wasatch Weather Weenies. 1. Don't worry, be happy .  The correlation of Wasatch snowfall with El Nino and La Nina is so low that there's no point worrying about it.  The graph below shows the Alta Guard snowfall vs. the El Nino phase, as we've discussed in previous posts (e.g., El Nino Likely for the 2015–16 winter, 12 June 2015 ). ...

Modis Image of the Great Salt Lake taken 9 August 2015. Based on historical levels, the Great Salt Lake is going through an especially low period.  Is it, however, a record?  It turns out this is a surprisingly difficult question to answer.  What could be so hard about measuring the elevation of a lake?   The Great Salt Lake is a terminal lake (i.e., it has no outlet) and thus the surface elevation and area of the lake fluctuate with variations in inflow and evaporation.  The former plays a primary role with long-term wet periods leading to high stands and long-term dry periods leading to low stands.  High stands occurred in the 1870s and 1980s, with a record minimum of 4,191.3 feet in 1963. Source: USGS We are currently in a long-term dry period and the Great Salt Lake levels are relatively low (note that the graph above ends in 2006, so don't use it for the recent past).  As shown below, the USGS guage at Saline is presently sitting at ...