Wasatch Weather Weenies

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 su...

 It's looking like this past season was especially dismal for seasonal snow in the eastern Alps and I suspect by the end of summer it will have been one for the glaciers as well, if it isn't already.   The Zugspitze on the border of Germany and Austria is my bellwether as there's a very good web cam there and it is at an elevation where there once was a glacier, but no more.   This year looks to be a double whammy due to a "meh" snow season and the damage being done by Saharan Dust that was deposited onto the snowpack a few weeks ago.   Below is the view looking south from the Zugspitze yesterday.  The snow cover is already spotty and covered with the Saharan Dust, which increases the absorption of solar radiation and the snowmelt.   Source: https://www.foto-webcam.eu/ Below are images taken on the same day or prior day back to 2016 (also from https://www.foto-webcam.eu/), showing the especially poor snow coverage this year.  O...

When I first moved to Salt Lake City in the 1990s, purpose-built mountain-biking trails didn't exist near town, with the exception of the pipeline trail in Mill Creek Canyon, which I'm not sure was truly designed for mountain biking.  There was no Avenues Bonneville Shoreline Trail (BST).  I used to ride the fire road above Terrace Hills Drive and then hike a bike to the top of the Avenues Twin Peaks.  One could descend via that route or down the Bobsled or the Agony Escalator.   In 1998 a friend and I had been looking at topo maps and decided that we should ride to Rudys Flat above  Bountiful via ridge thats west and north of City Creek Canyon.  Looked "doable" on the map.  There was to TrailForks or other app to give us a trail report.  We left after work.  We road up the Ensign fire road past the various comms towers, which beyond the first set of towers was as bad then as it is today.  Then we started working our way out the rid...

It's prime season for biking and hiking in the Avenues foothills.  This year it seems especially lush and the vegetation is filling in nicely around the recently constructed trails. There could be more trails available to hike and ride, but trail construction was halted in May of last year .  This was allegedly a "pause" that would last until that fall.  Then it was extended to this summer.  In April, the city council further extended the pause until at least spring 2023 .   My views align with those of Ashley Patterson's in her op/ed in yesterday's Salt Lake Tribune .  The Foothills Trail System Plan included three years of public input.  Those surprised by the construction successfully pushed the city to pause completion of the project.  Some legitimate concerns were raised and the trails community supports addressing these.   On the other hand, we do not want to see trails construction stopped permanently or delayed significantly...

 There's a pretty good cold surge expected to push into northern Utah later this week.  By Friday afternoon, yesterday's high of 88˚F will be long forgotten.   Below is the GFS forecast for 2100 UTC (3 PM MDT) Friday showing a short-wave trough moving through northern Utah with 700-mb (10,000 ft) temperatures near -8˚C.   The GFS-derived Little Cottonwood forecast shows temperatures on Mt. Baldy dropping from 43˚F tomorrow afternoon to 13˚F Friday morning.  Your Friday morning dawn patrol will feature slide-for-life conditions in the Baldy Chutes.   Right now, the system looks fairly dry.  The GFS produces only 0.13" of water equivalent with it on Friday at Alta.  There are a few members of NAEFS (11 out of 52) that produce more than 5" of snow at Alta Collins, but most are under 2".   Unless a low-probability snowfall occurs, the best recreation options later this week and weekend are probably at lower elevations.

Pretty good analysis of the mountain snowpack in the southwest relative to median this morning if you are into red.  If you are into a fat spring snowpack and a good runoff, not so much.   Source: NRCS There are a lot of SNOTEL stations that are at or near zero already in the region.  If you want to see how Mother Nature snatched defeat from the jaws of victory this water year, check out the numbers from the Kolob SNOTEL on Kanarra Mountain near Zion National Park in Southern Utah.  On January 1, the snowpack sat at 13.3 inches of water, or 180% of median for the day.  After that, flatline.  Absolutely nothing through February 21.    Source: NRCS Even after that dry spell, it was just a little below median, but the late winter and early spring storms didn't do the job, snowpack crested below median, and it was gone by May 6, about 2 weeks early.   The best snowpack relative to median is in the mountains of northern Colorado.  F...

Spring precipitation in northern Utah is often highly variable in space and time making generalizations difficult.  Below is the departure from average precipitation over the past 30 days (through 1200 UTC/0600 MDT this morning) over northern Utah and the surrounding regions.  The central Wasatch are running above average and The Salt Lake Valley near or slightly above average.  Other areas are drier, such as the Uinta Basin and West Desert south of Dugway.   Has the past 30 days been wet or dry?  The answer to that question clearly depends on location, location, location.   By and large, the Salt Lake Valley, however, has seen near average precipitation and weather that's "good for grass."   For soils and plants, precipitation amount can be important, but also frequency.  If most of the precipitation we received fell in a big storm in mid April, we'd be seeing lots of brown lawns by now.  Instead, we've had fairly regular prec...