Snow today; Bigger storm mid-week

TL;DR: Light snow showers today will bring a light refresh to the mountains. A bigger storm with lots of moisture will impact the region starting Tuesday afternoon and lasting through Wednesday.

Nowcast: After the sun briefly made an appearance yesterday, snow has returned to the Wasatch today. Most resorts are not reporting any new snow for the past 24 hours, aside from 2" at the BCC resorts, and 1" at Deer Valley. Light showers are falling throughout the region now, and visibility appears to be a challenge per Alta Ski Area's Superior webcam.

Source: Alta Ski Area

Short-term Forecast: Today's storm is not an exceptional one, but it should provide a few inches of fairly low-density snowfall in the Wasatch. By this afternoon, the University of Utah's GFS-derived forecast for Alta calls for 5" of new snow - a nice Colorado powder day :).

Source: University of Utah Department of Atmospheric Science

Fortunately, winds are not too strong today, with peak gusts around 30 mph from the west at the highest elevations.

Mid-Long Range Forecast: A bigger storm is on tap for mid-week, but it won't contain light, dry powder. Just like our system on Friday, this storm is associated with an inland penetrating atmospheric river with southwesterly flow. This can be seen clearly in the 0600 UTC valid for early Wednesday morning.

Source: University of Utah Department of Atmospheric Science

In the bottom right panel of the above four-panel plot, we can notice the yellow and orange colors penetrating the interior western United States, signifying high moisture transport into the interior from the Pacific. Unfortunately, this is once again a pretty warm system, with 700 mbar (crest-level) temperatures at right around -2 °C (red dashed contour in bottom left panel). This would mean that we could see rain at resort-base level. Expect fairly high precipitation rates in the 0.25-0.5 in. in 3 hr range (upper right panel). With snow-to-liquid ratios around 7 to 1, though, this won't translate to the most impressive snowfall rates. The GFS calls for just over 1.5 inches of liquid precipitation equivalent for the upper Cottonwoods, which would translate to about a foot of heavy snow.

By late Wednesday, we clear out into next weekend.

Snowfall Forecast:

For today expect 1-4" at the resorts with maybe more if one does particularly well.

For the warm mid-week storm, we'll be looking at 10-20" of new snow for the mountains.