It snowed last night, but the real story was the wind. Paraphrasing Mother Goose,
The west-northwest wind doth blow,
And we shall have snow,
And what will poor skiers do then?
Poor things!
They'll sit in a car,
And to keep themselves warm,
Will hide their heads under their wings,
Poor things!
OK, that doesn't quite work, but the west-northwest wind did blow hard last night. I'll focus here on Mt. Baldy because it has reported quasicontinuously to MesoWest for some time. I just happen to have a plot of the observed wind gusts on Mt. Baldy over the past three cool seasons (1 October - 8 May). Events with gusts in excess of 40 m/s (80 knots or 89 mph) have happened about once or twice a cool season over the past 3 seasons. The peak gust over the past 3 cool seasons was 47.7 m/s (93 knots or 106.8 mph), which occurred at 2 AM MST 14 January 2021.
Observations from that event show it also featured west-northwest flow and saw gusts at or above 99 mph for four hours.
Last night the peak gusts weren't quite as high, but there were six consecutive hours with gusts at or above 90 mph, compared to 4 in the 2021 event (apologies for the different y-axis scale, but MesoWest is being cranky this morning).
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So, a pretty good blow that didn't quite hit the highest in the past 3 seasons but had a relatively long duration. Hidden Peak hit 130 last night, which seems crazy high, but MesoWest hasn't been receiving their data as frequently the past few years and I don't know if all of the work on the tram and summit may have resulted in changes that could affect their readings. The reality is that wind measurements are extremely sensitive to instrument, exposure, and the shape of the topography and buildings.
The wind is a bummer, but no complaining. Have you seen the wind chills on the other side of the divide? True suffering over there.
Great post, love the reliable Baldy data. This was a strong wind event but as you have pointed out there has been stronger. The 130 mph wind gust on Hidden Peak would be a all time record for Utah. I have been looking at Baldy and Hidden Peak winds for 25+ years and have been skiing at Snowbird almost exclusively since 1986. For the first 20+ years at looking at the winds on the two summits on average Baldy winds have been just a little stronger, not always but on average. Several years back the Hidden Peak site went down for some time and when it came back on-line I noticed the winds on average were now strong than Baldy. Something has changed with the Hidden Peak equipment or calibration that makes the observation read higher than reality. My best guess is they have switched to a sonic anemometer that is not properly calibrated???
ReplyDelete...or to expand maybe their new anemometer (assuming they put up a new one) is not sited correctly, as you mentioned exposure and the shape of the topography, equipment, and buildings around the anemometer can make a big difference.
ReplyDeleteI generally don't think about a site being wrong or correct. The siting of an instrument affects what it measures and thus I prefer to think about how representative a site is of the surrounding area. There are reasons why users might want their instruments sited in highly exposed areas.
DeleteI don't find the current observation on Hidden Peak representative of the surrounding area anymore when compared to other observations. I would not be comfortable calling the 130 mph wind gust the new state record. On November 8th 1986 when Hidden Peak reported the 124 mph wind gust to set the sate record the data looked representative of the area and comparable to nearby data. It would be interesting to pull up the November 8th storm data and observations and compare to last night.
DeleteFor anyone interested I went back and looked at past wind data for Baldy and Hidden peak compared to recent data and did a quick blog post on https://utahweather.blogspot.com with my findings.
ReplyDeleteHi WWW - any idea where the dust that coated the range a few days ago with the Big Wind came from? Is it actually “dust” or could it be something else?
ReplyDeleteThanks Tom. I don't have a good hypothesis. I was surprised myself. There is quite a bit of snow free area in the west desert, west of the GSL, and in western Nevada, so given the prevailing flow, those may be the most likely source areas, assuming it is dust.
DeleteThat question was from me
ReplyDeleteThanks Jim. And great wish list!
ReplyDelete