powderfreak

Short term, I wonder if we can start as a very brief period of snow on Monday morning. I’ve seen it on a few models here and there over the past couple days. Soundings look pretty isothermal and it hits at a favorable part of the day around sunrise to 12z from here and points NE into N.NH/W.ME.

Short term, I wonder if we can start as a very brief period of snow on Monday morning. I’ve seen it on a few models here and there over the past couple days. Soundings look pretty isothermal and it hits at a favorable part of the day around sunrise to 12z from here and points NE into N.NH/W.ME.

Pretty crazy that at 5am it was 64F and we slept all night with windows and doors open (almost turned the fan on).... while at 3pm it was 44F. Exact opposite of the normal diurnal swing. It’s been a cold afternoon.

Cold day up high! Wind chill in the teens. Full winter clothing needed at the picnic tables.

Find the cold front. Summer night last night and now temps plummeting.

Yeah, like Phin and Will said, the recorded areas get 700-800”, but the heli-ski operations have estimated 1,000+”. Definitely possible to get those type of forecasts. Not going to happen often but those are the big time storms up there. Lots of moisture.

Summer evening. 64/57 at 9pm. Windows and doors still open. Left work at 3pm and took the dog for a hike. Shorts and t-shirt temperatures to the picnic table level. Torch.

Average of 7-8" per hour for at least 12 hours... that's something we'll never comprehend. And even though the temps are probably decent ratios, it's maritime snow so it's probably still pumping 6" water every 12 hours. Nothing like 0.50+" in the tipper per hour for at least 18 hours straight, at temps in the teens.

It's hard to get anything past you, nice guess man. For me the tell-tale sign is the south winds. Where else are you going to get that moisture at those temps on a south wind? It was west of Valdez, about half way to Anchorage. Just crushed on SE to S flow. That SE flow probably converges and flows into that horseshoe shaped bay, slamming into huge mountains on the coast. What a spot, lol.

Let's just get one of these storms and be done with winter, in a world-ending 24 hour period. Nothing like a routine 79-85" in the afternoon, then another 91-97" overnight.

We cover it all in here. Fears and dreams.

71F at SLK at 1,700ft is pretty torchy.

MVL mixed out to 69F now! Those warm summit temps are finally doing their thing to the lower elevations. Still a BKN cloud cover pretty low at 2-3kft but now getting some sunshine in. The inversion layer moisture seems pretty shallow. Been upper 50s to near 60F at 4,000ft most of the day, nice to get mix that down now.

As far as I know, all of that is getting baked into the capacity limits set. With years of ticket scanned data they have a good database of consumer patterns... when people show up, when people leave, how many people actually ski all day, how many in the morning, how many in the afternoon, etc. All that data is getting baked into the capacity constraints. They know that on average X-number of people can and will show up after 12-1pm, and X-number are likely to leave by 10-11am, so will include that in the daily capacity algorithm. It’s not going to be perfect, but should work.

Oh its for sure full weenie mode. Week away in October. Ain't happening but it was still fun to see some sort of wintry event under Day 10, lol. That's a start.

Congrats Dendrite. Like we said yesterday, ha.

Solid inversion. Cooler, moist layer at 2-3kft and summit ridge looks to be basking in sun and warmth.

Wow, 56F at the picnic tables this morning. That’s like a summer 6am temp. Going to be a mild one today.

Yup I actually have been making that same point a lot lately whenever it comes up.

We were denied the nice mild weather today... But I might need to end the work week a bit early and enjoy a Friday afternoon hike if this happens tomorrow.

This was the event I remember from that February 2011 that had thundersnow where the mix line just barely tickled us. I remember a couple flashes of lightning out walking the dog in the evening and luckily JSpin crushes the record database to record this stuff lol. It was a quick 1.0” QPF event of dense snow. “Also at around 9:30 P.M. we had a flash of lighting; at first I wasn’t sure if I’d seen it, but them my wife, who was upstairs, asked me if I’d just taken a picture and that answered that. And now we just had a long rumble of thunder as well – neat stuff.”

I see JSpin lurking, but I was just looking at his website write-ups for 2010-11 trying to find a Feb event with thundersnow. Anyway, what an extremely consistent winter that was. Oddly enough, March had the biggest event but was the lowest snowfall of the winter months. Doesn’t get much more consistent than that.

Congrats Dendrite!

I’ll gladly ship you this mist/drizzle and -RN that is moving through right now in exchange for partly sunny and 70F.

I’m so jealous.