Wasatch Weather Weenies

In an effort to improve the snowfall situation in the Wasatch Range, I have left Utah for the rest of the cool season.   I'm serving as a guest professor at the University of Innsbruck for their so-called summer semester, which actually runs from March to June.  We arrived here on Wednesday.  It's been mild and sunny here with high temperatures above 10°C (no °F here) in Innsbruck each day.  Today I skied with some friends at Stubai Glacier, which reaches over 3000 meters elevation, to escape the heat.  It was a spectacular day.   Like Utah, Austria has had a largely crap snow season and the current warm spell isn't helping.  The snowpack on south aspects is pretty much non-existent below 1500 meters and in some areas much higher than that.  The snowpack is meager where it exists, even at the highest elevations.  Glacier-mounted lift towers today were on large domes of ice.  These are usually covered with white blankets (I'm no...

It felt a good deal like spring yesterday with the sun now higher in the sky compared to its winter solstice minimum and mild temperatures from the valleys to the mountains.  Yesterday's high of 55 at the Salt Lake City airport was not exceptional, but combined with the brilliant sunshine, it was a beautiful day to be outside.   We have one storm on tap for the coming week and it's looking like a warm, wet, and juicy one.  It is associated with an inland penetrating atmospheric river.  The ECMWF HRES forecast valid 0000 UTC 25 February (5 PM MST Tuesday) shows the atmospheric river (bottom right panel) over the Bay Area curving clockwise through northern Nevada and Utah.  Integrated vapor transport (IVT) values in our area are > 250 kg/m/s, which puts is in the low end of atmospheric river categories, although that's a fairly high value for the western interior.   It's a relatively slowly evolving pattern. As can be seen above, the ECMWF puts o...

When I was growing up and cross-country skiing in upstate New York, Bill Koch was a legendary figure as the only US male (and at the time only US skier ever) to win an Olympic medal in Nordic Skiing.  It's been 50 years since his 1976 silver, so it was great to see Ben Ogden win a medal in the Classic Spring and then for the US to win silver again in the Team Sprint.  On the same day, Mikaela Shiffrin, who really has nothing to prove, exorcised her Olympic demons too, resulting in an extremely satisfying page of headlines in this morning's Salt Lake Tribune. Having sworn off social media, I've actually watched the replays of many races without knowing the winner.  Last night I had no idea of the US silver in the Team spring when I watched it at 7 PM, making it even more exciting.   And of course there are the other great Olympic stories.  Breezy Johnson's gold.  I guess she is the new Julia Mancuso, coming up big in Olympics and World Championships (sh...

Going out on a limb here, but I predict tomorrow will be the greatest case of powder panic in the history of the Cottonwoods.  Let's see.... No significant valley snow this season until today Few powder days this season No parking reservations required at Alta, Snowbird, Brighton, or Solitude It's a holiday week

After suffering through weeks of drought, we've been getting great data for the SNOWSCAPE2026 field campaign during the storms last week and this week.   Today we're sampling the cold-frontal system as it is moving through northern Utah and across the northern Wasatch Range.  Below is a video from our causeway radar site during the frontal passage this morning.  Hopefully Blogger won't mangle it too much.  Having radars on both the western (windward) and eastern (leeward) sides of the Wasatch allows us to examine how precipitation features are affected during transit over a narrow mountain barrier.  In particular, we have the Snowbasin area heavily sampled by ground instruments and now scanned by the radars.  As I'm writing this, we're tracking a strong cold-frontal band as it approaches the mountains (left-hand image below, Snowbasin indicated by SB).  This band just produced lightning in Layton.  With the radar on the causeway, we can obser...

 Pretty good round of snow or should I say graupel overnight and this morning.  Accumulations in the mountains vary substantially and I'm not sure if Alta wiped their interval stake this morning or not as it looks like 4" on it, but the total snow depth is up 5 to 6 inches and the resort is reporting 8" as of 10 AM so I'll go with that.   Gauge measured water total is about 1.2".  I'm hearing rumors that's high, but anyway you cut it, it appears to be a high-density graupelfest up there.  Sounds like a good day of skiing in my book. Forecasts are still on for a colder storm tomorrow that will bring the Greatest Snow on Earth to both the mountains and the valleys.  Timing varies, with the HRRR bringing in a commuter special and the GFS a bit slower.  Strongly recommend that you check forecasts later today if you are commuting in the morning.  Quoting this morning's 5:23 AM issued Area Forecast Discussion from the NWS:  "Locally higher sno...

I've been waiting all season to say that, but the models are trending and trending in a way that it may actually snow, not only in the mountains, but even, dare I say it, at low elevations.  Let's break things down into pieces.  I'll use the Euro and hit some of the highlights.  Overnight tonight, a strong mid-level cold front pushes through northern Utah, bringing our first round of precipitation in the form of mountain snow and valley rain.  This front is the band of heavy precipitation extending from SW Wyoming through central Utah and Arizona in the Euro forecast below valid 0900 UTC (0200 MST) tonight.   In the way of that front, moist, unstable southwesterly flow predominates late tonight, tomorrow, and tomorrow night with periods of mountain snow and snow levels near the valley floor, although official NWS forecasts are for less than an inch through Tuesday night at the lowest elevations of the Salt Lake Valley and a bit more on the benches. ...

This post is dedicated to friend and long-time Wasatch Weather Weenies reader Kevin Moore who passed away yesterday after a multiyear battle with pancreatic cancer.   Kevin was a devoted husband and father, avid biker and skier, and lover of life.  He set an example of how to live life to the fullest when facing the greatest of challenges and uncertainties.  

We're operating radars and collecting sounding's of today's storm as part of the SNOWSCAPE2026 field campaign .  The data coming in from the Huntsville radar is spectacular.  Below is what is known as an RHI (Range-Height Indicator) scan, which involves rotating the dish vertically rather than horizontally to take a vertical slide through the storm.  This RHI essentially represents a vertical cross section taken toward the WSW from the Hunstville radar (bottom left) across Snowbasin, and eventually over the Great Salt Lake lowlands upstream.   The radar can't see through mountains, which show up  below as pink and white color fill due to their high "reflectivity".  I've highlighted Snowbasin where the terrain slopes up from about 1.5 to 2.75 km in heght.   Evident in the RHI are four generating cells that extend to near or above 5 km above sea level.  These are moving across Snowbasin and then downstream into the Ogden Valley where they ...

Clouds and precipitation are back in the forecast, but unfortunately it's yet another warm event.   Below is the ECMWF HRES forecast for 1800 UTC 11 Feb (1100 MST Wednesday).  A weak, decaying atmospheric river extends across the northern Baja Peninsula and up the lower Colorado River Basin.  Elevated (but atmospheric river level) integrated vapor transport extends into northern Utah with south-southwesterly flow at 700-mb.  The 700-mb temperatures at that time are forecast to be about -3.5°C, which would likely a snow level near or just above the base of Park City (7000 ft).   A look at the HRRR-derived guidance for upper Little Cottonwood shows some dribs and drabs today, but periods of precipitation overnight, tomorrow, and tomorrow night totaling a bit over an inch of water and just under 10 inches of high-density snow through 5 AM Thursday at Alta-Collins.  The middle-left panel shows the wet-bulb zero height and our estimated melting layer i...

Pretty dismal snowpack numbers westwide now.  Not a single basin has an above median snowpack as of February 4.  Missing on that plot due to the late arrival of California snowpack data is a basin in the south Sierra, but that was below median too as of February 3.    Source: NRCS In the Wasatch, many sites are at their lowest levels since the start of the SNOTEL record, in some cases extending back more than 40 years.  Every site is below the 25th percentile, meaning they are all in the lower quarter of prior snowpack water equivalent on this date.   There will be no Steenburgh winter this year.  

Snow crystal photographer extraordinaire Doug Wewer will be giving two talks on  snowflake photography in the coming weeks.  One is this weekend at Powder Mountain (free).  The other is in late March at Alta ($5): Sunday, February 8th, 3pm-4pm at Powder Mountain’s Timberline Lodge.  Address: 6624 N Powder Mountain Rd, Eden, UT 84310.  Free. Info at  https://powdermountain.com/events/passholder-weekend-1 .  Wednesday, March 25th, 6pm-8pm at Our Lady of the Snows Center.  Address: 10185 E Hwy 210, Alta, UT 84092.  $5/person. Tickets and Info:  https://events.humanitix.com/snowflake-hunting . You can check out Doug's photos at  https://desertsnowphotography.com/ . 

Our run of dry weather looks to continue through this coming weekend.  Since January 9, Alta Ski Area has recorded only 2.5 inches of snow.  If we make through Sunday, February 8 without any more snow, that will be 2.5 inches in a month (31 days).   The models are showing some signs of life next week.  The Euro, for example, has a cold front moving into northern Utah Monday night and Tuesday.  That's still a ways away so I'm not betting the farm on it, but a look at the Utah Snow Ensemble shows some signs of life in a number of the members.   If you are a glass half-full type, half the members produce 1.02" of water and 14" of snow by 11 PM Wednesday 11 February  If you are a glass half-empty type, half themembers produce less than that.  More than 90% of the members produce more than 2.5" of snow, so there's a better than 90% chance that we will better what we got over the past month!  So exciting! But for now and through the weeke...