Wasatch Weather Weenies

Forget all of that crap about March coming in like a lion and out like a lamb.  None of that stuff applies this year.  March was off-the-scale and simple sayings don't do it justice.   This is a little premature since March 31st is not in the books yet, but let's look back on what was a remarkable and unprecedented month.   Believe it or not, it did snow some in March.  Per the Alta Snowfall History at https://www.alta.com/weather , Alta actually got 44.5" of snow from March 1st to 6th.  That seems like a lifetime ago given the heat and dryness that followed. With one day to go, the average temperature for March at the Salt Lake City International Airport is 53.4°F, 3.3°F higher than any previous March.  A record for the month is in the bag.   Source: https://xmacis.rcc-acis.org/ But the mean obscures the variability and some of the extremes that occurred during the month.  This March featured five days with a maximum temp...

With my son and his fiancé in town this week, we did a Tirolean ski trifecta hitting the Arlberg on Tuesday, Stubai Glacier on Wednesday, and Ischgl yesterday (Saturday).  All three were bluebird days and snow conditions at Stubai were quite good. I'll focus here on Ischgl, which is located in the Paznaun Valley of western Tirol.  It's a bit of a haul on public transit (for me about 2 hours via bus, then train, then another bus), so I was glad to have a friend invite us to come along with him.  But first we had to play a game of Tetris to get four pair of 92 to 106 mm  waist-width Alpine skis and bindings into the ski slot of a Volkswagen Golf.  Somehow it worked and we were able to add three pairs of ski poles too.  Ischgl is a big place with an abundance of high elevation northwest facing terrain.  There is a relatively flat area for "combat" skiing that seems to be popular with the tourists.   But also some great advanced terrain, which fo...

We have finally gotten a taste of winter here in Innsbruck with a storm that has lasted for a bit over 36 hours in the mountains and has provided a steady snowfall even on the Inn Valley floor.  I had a beautiful walk to the office this morning following the walking path from our flat above town and then across the Inn River.   Explosions from avalanche mitigation work on the Nordkette ridge above town are shaking the windows of my office currently.  Skies are still overcast, so I can't see the results.  I've been here when you can watch the avalanches from town.   The snow was produced by a cold-frontal passage Wednesday evening followed by a period of northerly post-frontal flow, or what is sometimes referred to as "Nord Stau" in which northerly flow impinges on the Alps and experiences blocking and orographic lift.  This is the eastern Alps equivalent of northwesterly flow in the Cottonwoods, although the snowfall is much more expansive in area...

It is snowing today (Thursday) in Innsbruck, the first valley snow since we arrived in late February.  It's just above freezing so that the snow is sticking on cold surfaces, but sidewalks and roads are snow free.  Below is the view from my office.  I haven't thought about the weather in Utah in a few days.  I knew it was going to be hot, but now that I'm checking the numbers, I'm pretty blown away.  Multiple days at or above 80, including an 84(!) on   Saturday March 21.  Let's put those numbers into historical context.  During the 20th century, the highest March temperature recorded at the Salt Lake City International Airport was 78°F, reached on 24 March 1956 and 26 March 1960.  During the 21st century, we have tied or topped that number 14 times.  This includes reaching 80°F for the first time on 31 March 2012 and reaching or exceeding 80°F five times in the current heat wave, including the mind-boggling 84°F. Let's dig a little...

Mind boggling temperatures from the western United States currently.  Even watching from a distance here in Austria, they blow me away.  As I write this, it is Friday morning in Austria and some of the numbers for Thursday in the US are not in yet.  Thus I'm going to use observations from Wednesday to illustrate the scale and intensity of this event before boring into what data I have access to from Thursday.   Below are the rankings for high temperatures on Wednesday relative to prior March 18ths.  Wide spread records for the date across the southwest US but even all the way up into Montana (asterisks indicate a tie for the highest temperature of the date).  It appears every western state had at least one station that tied or set a record temperature for the date.  Washington was the "coolest" western state, but even there, Chelan tied their record high.    Source: https://sercc.oasis.unc.edu/Map.php Departures from average were im...

Call it a guilty pleasure given the industrial-scale nature of the resort development, but I absolutely love skiing from valley to valley and village to village in the Arlberg region of western Austria where lift-served skiing extends from St. Anton to the south to Warth to the north, a distance of 16 km as the crow flies and much farther as the winter-sports enthusiast skis.  I've skied the Arlberg on several days over the years, but yesterday, for the first time, did the full trip from St. Anton to Warth and back.  It was a good day for it with mainly clear skies, a good hard freeze allowing the groomers to hold up well except on south aspects, no lift lines, and relatively uncrowded slopes (by Arlberg standards).  I had enough time to not only get to Warth and back, but also to do some side trips to other lifts and villages. I caught the first Galzigbahn tram at 8:30 and followed the following village-by-village route: St. Anton -> Rauz (not really a village but a p...

The deep valleys of the Alps are great places to learn mountain meteorology. The have somewhat regular thermally forced valley and slope flows when the large-scale flow is weak and fascinating terrain-forced flows when the large-scale flow is strong.  Clouds are frequently present and are useful for understanding local flow patterns. Saturday night bought valley rain and mountain snow to western Austria.  Sunday morning I went for a hike above our apartment to a mountain hut.  On the return, I noticed shallow mid-slope cumulus clouds on the south side of the valley, beneath a more layered stratiform cloud that was hovering at higher elevations close to ridgeline.   The local time was about 1200 so I suspect that surface heating was leading to upslope flow that generated those shallow clouds.  In the wake of the storm, the airmass over the valley was relatively moist and reached saturation with a little ascent to generate the clouds.  Given their shallo...

The models are putting out some remarkable height and temperature forecasts for Utah and the southwest US for March.  I'm even a little late getting to the party given that the NWS issued a statement at 2 PM MDT on March 12th for potentially record-breaking temperatures by the middle of next week.  The synoptic setup is the development of a high-amplitude upper-level ridge over the southwest.  As an example, below is the ECMWF HRES foreacast valid 0000 UTC 20 March (6 PM MDT Thursday) with 500-mb heights above 5940 meters over Arizona and 700-mb temperatures of 10°C over Salt Lake City.  For the southwest, these are exceptionally high 700-mb temperatures.  The highest March 700-mb temperature every recorded in an upper-air sounding over northern Utah is 8.0°C.  We may be above that for a few days later next week and into the weekend.  The 700-mb temperatures over southern Utah and the desert southwest are also at record levels.   The seasonal...

There are a number of "small" ski areas in the Innsbruck area including Glungezer, Patscherkofel, Berger Alm, Mieders, Schlick 2000, Mutterer Alm, Oberpfuss, and Axamer Lizum.  I put small in quotes because many of these areas may have a small number of lifts and trails, but they also have substantial vertical drops, exceeding 1000 meters (3300 feet) in some cases.   The most popular with the locals is probably Axamer Lizum, which "only" has a vertical drop of about 760 meters/2500 feet, but has a good variety of pistes and off piste terrain.  It is located in a beautiful valley just to the southwest of Innsbruck, about a 30 minute drive or 40-45 minute bus ride from town.  We skied it today enjoying the sunshine and spring conditions. It is my understanding that lizum is a Tyrolean word for the end of a valley or high alpine pasture surrounded by a high alpine amphitheater.  I'm not sure if that is an accurate translation, but it is an apt description of t...

Lift-served glacier skiing in Germany will come to an end this year when the Schneefernerkopf lift on the Zugspitze, Germany's highest peak and on the border with Austria, is dismantled. Source: t-online .  Glaciers across the Alps are shrinking and those on the Zugspitze are in rapid decline. The Shcneefernerkopf lift was on the Northern Schneeferner glacier (ferner is a word used for glacier in western Austria and southern Germany).  I took the photo below of the T-bar and glacier in August 2015 and even then it was suffering with essentially no seasonal snow coverage. More information concerning the Northern Schneeferner and the rapidly declining remants of Germany's other three glaciers is available at  https://zugspitze.de/glacier . 

I see that snow has recently returned to the Wasatch.  Hopefully you are getting some freshies in for me. Here in Tyrol, a monster block remains in firm control, with some Saharan dust sprinkled in for good measure.   Saturday I didn't ski, but I did have time for a quick tram ride up the Nordkettenbahn above Innsbruck.  There's a terrain park up there, which on Saturday was supplemented with a DJ, resulting in a crowd of youngsters more interested in dancing than skiing.   The Saharan dust provided a bit of mood lighting.  I didn't stay long.  Today we skied again at Stubai Glacier, which due to its high elevation is a reasonable option for escaping the mild spring conditions and thin snowpack found elsewhere.  You can find what appear to be some good turns in the photo below, but it hasn't snowed here in a long time so the tracks descending from left in the picture below are like dinosaur footprints preserved in sedimentary rocks – evidence...