I've been out skiing and lack the time to put together a proper forecast for tomorrow. Below is the winter storm watch issued early this morning by the National Weather Service. This is going to be a statewide storm with significant travel impacts. Plan on a rough commute in the morning, and hope for the best.
The NWS forecast for the mountains looks pretty good as well. This will probably be the biggest storm of the season so far (although that's a fairly low bar, with water totals somewhere in the 1-2 inch range by 5 PM Tuesday.
Enjoy the storm and be careful out there.
I've been watching the forecasts with a certain glee, but I am also curious. The forecast I looked at had significant south winds for today, but it has been very calm. Can you shed light on this? (Did most forecasts call for surface wind, or is it simply common for consumer level forecasts to misrepresent forecast data, or did the expected winds simply fail to materialize?)
ReplyDeleteIf you are referring to winds over the Salt Lake Valley, it's not uncommon for the models to mix out the valley cold pool faster than observed, which sometimes results in stronger surface winds than observed. Sometimes...
ReplyDeleteWe hit gusts of 60 mph near Tooelle, 40 mph in places along the West Desert, 43 mph at the airport and 45 mph down in Cedar City as the prefrontal band started moving through and virga was causing winds to accelerate ahead of the front in those places. So winds did pick up, but only briefly and in the normal trouble spots in the western areas. The forecast you were looking at probably just overdid things a bit.
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