TL;DR Atmospheric river continues to bring lots of moisture from the PNW maintaining a very active pattern. Heavy snow all today into Thursday should be a nice addition to the 114 inches provided from the last ten days of snow.
Nowcast: With overcast skies this morning snow has returned to the mountains. Temperatures in the upper teens to 20s this morning but expected to warm through the day due to warm air advection from the 20-30 mph winds from the west-southwest. As a shortwave trough comes from Oregon moving eastward it will bring some vorticity max's over southern Idaho and northern Nevada. Pre trough precipitation started to occur over the forecast area brining from trace amounts to an inch depending on where in the valley you are located with totals looking they were about 3 inches at Alta so far. As there is a short lull in the precipitation around 9 am the storms are only expected to get more intense being coupled with isentropic ascent. That is looking like potentially another couple inches of snow in the valley unless temperatures warm too much making potential for freezing rain or just rain, as well as what I think will be about 12-15 inches in the mountains today with more on the way over night.
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| Some warming predicted could turn the snow in the valley to rain. |
Short Term: Some more vort max's expected to move through the area starting around 8pm tonight and lasting into early tomorrow morning as the winds shift back west-northwest. Hopefully bringing another 5-10 inches overnight to the upper cottonwoods. After that the precipitation should cease for a while with slightly warmer and drier conditions move in along with the strong building ridge forecasted to be directly over us Friday night to Saturday morning.
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| SREF Pretty decent agreement with both forecasting between 10 and 20 inches for today |
Long Term: With ridge moving out Saturday evening it should be a nice day to get after it. A series of short waves is on the way behind probably to affect us later Saturday night into the next week. These short waves are following a bit of a different pattern than we have been seeing from the previous storm cycles though. These are seeming to come from central California tracking from the southwest to the northeast to get over us and having some split flow starting over central Nevada come Sunday. This different track seems to be favoring southern Utah/Arizona more than the previous storms not meaning dry conditions for up north but just meaning that there will be much more uncertainty forecasting for central and Northern Utah.
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| Todays forecast with storm coming from the northwest, see the isobars slant down towards SLC |
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| Compared to the beginning on next weeks storm where isobars slant up from the southwest towards SLC |
Backcountry Comments: Persistent dangerous avalanche conditions continue with a considerable danger and with heavy snowfall rates expected to hit 2 inches per hour at times it is a good day to lay low in the backcountry. What to do? Stick to slopes less than 30 degrees today and avoid anything conected to steeper terrain. Check out the full avalanche report at Utah Avalanche Center
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