Stop your snow dances and start the sacrifices
Friday, January 23, 2015
Your snow dances have not been working. Please escalate the rituals to sacrifices immediately!
A wave in the western Great Basin will drop southward and form a cutoff low around the Baja peninsula this weekend. Additionally, a wave traveling over the top of the west coast ridge will pass to our northeast mid-weekend, dragging some cool air and the possibility of showers over our area for Sunday. There is uncertainty as to how far west the wave will travel so the there may be no snow or optimistically an inch or two during the day.
Temperatures will warm dramatically early in the workweek at all elevations, making the weather for those days feel almost springlike. The cutoff low loitering near Baja will have entrained substantial subtropical moisture and is forecast to move northward back into the Great Basin around Wednesday as some Pacific energy approaches from the west. Models are struggling with the track of this storm as it moves underneath the dominant west coast ridge, and our precipitation will be dependent upon how far east the cutoff low is from us.
Unfortunately, this will be an unseasonably warm storm, meaning any precipitation we do receive on Tuesday night or Wednesday will be rain below 9000 feet or so. But there may be some cooler air on the backside of the storm if the track is in our proximity, so that storm is a bit of a wildcard.
The weather looks to clear after the midweek storm as another Baja cutoff low is forecast to be established, leaving us in the quiet weather between that storm to our southwest and the arctic air to our north and east. Some longer term models show Pacific energy eventually moving over us after that weekend, but there is too much uncertainty in the medium term to have much confidence in those solutions.
