Snow Update

A soggy Sunday has settled in over northern Utah.  One could complain given that it is the holiday weekend, but we need every soaking we can get in these droughty times.  

Alta is beginning to look wintery this morning.  

Overnight temperatures fell at Alta-Collins to 31˚F as of 7 am.  Water equivalent precipitation since midnight is about 0.5", with no accumulation so far on the interval stake, although how well it is being maintained is unclear.  

The web cam shows perhaps two inches.  

Call it cream on crust.  

The GFS has been pretty consistently calling for significant accumulations today, totaling 1.2 inches of water and, based on our snow-to-liquid algorithms, about 14 inches of snow from midnight last night to Monday afternoon.  

There's a certain amount of crapshootedness to these spring storms given their scattered, convective nature, but perhaps we can get one last day of fresh out of this event.  I suspect snow densities will be even higher than indicated above, which may limit accumulations to less than indicated above if water equivalents don't go big.  There will also be a sharp increase in accumulation with altitude as the transition zone is sitting in that 8000-9000 foot elevation range.  Late may snow.  Don't complain :-).

weather.utah.edu

Our Center for High Performance Computer performed a major software and hardware upgrade of our computer systems from Wednesday to Friday.  Things are up again, but some weather.utah.edu products are still not available.