Beautiful Spring Weather

If you look carefully, you can see a couple of clouds in the Mt. Baldy web cam from Alta Ski Area this morning.

Source: Alta Ski Area

Those are not enough, however, to mar the incredible run of beautiful weather we have had since the demise of the easterlies on Saturday.  

Indeed, that run will continue today with clear skies and temperatures into the upper 60s in the valley.  If we can't have powder, this is a pretty good alternative.  

A weak short-wave trough will come through tomorrow and bring in a few more clouds and maybe a spritz of a shower or upper-elevation snow shower for the mountains tomorrow.  Significant weather will hold off until the weekend when a cold front is expected to push across northern Utah on Saturday.  Current forecasts suggest that the front will arrive in the afternoon.  Below is the ECMWF forecast valid 2100 UTC 23 March (3 PM MDT Saturday) with the front approaching Salt Lake City.

A real question mark for skiing will be whether or not that storm produces enough snow to bury the coral reef from the warm sunny weather this week.  We shall see.

I used the ECMWF above because I just upgraded the graphics produced for it on weather.utah.edu.  While I was in Austria, ECMWF opened up more of their data for free access.  We are now getting higher resolution data (0.25 degrees instead of 0.4 degrees), radiation fields that allow me to put together a synthetic cloud image (see upper right), vertical velocity (see upper left...smoothed to show the large-scale vertical motion), and additional wind and humidity information that allows me to better calculate integrated vapor transport (lower right).