Another storm moved into the Pacific NW yesterday and the moisture has now started to move East into the Northern Rocky Mountain ranges. It will continue to push South down towards Colorado by Thursday night into Friday. Overall not a big storm but enough to bring several inches with up to a foot of fresh snow for some locations.
The pattern has been active with most areas picking up the snow in feet over the past week, especially Northern half of the Rockies. Jackson tends to pick up some of the highest amounts and they are not afraid to post the comparison on their site. They now sit at 188 inches on the season.
The storm track has shifted a bit North up the West Coast so the next storm moving in now through Friday will hit hardest in up North in Idaho and Wyoming. Here is the total precip map off the GFS model through Friday. You can see the only places that will break an inch of liquid are Northern Idaho and near Jackson in Wyoming.
That translated into snowfall looks like this. You can see that the heaviest snow will fall in Central Idaho to the Northwest of Sun Valley with 6-12 inches and then in Northwest Wyoming around the Jackson region. Jackson will have the best chance of breaking a foot of snow. A few inches are possible as far South as Salt Lake and Park City.
That map only goes through early Friday morning so here is a look at specifically Friday’s snowfall. You can see that in Colorado the highest amounts of up to 6-8 inches are up near Steamboat down to Vail with lesser amounts elsewhere.
After this storm moves through the ridge off the West Coast expands North shutting off the storms for the weekend. Then it retreats back to start next week allowing some more storms into the Pacific NW. We could see a few shots of lighter snows next week across the Rockies as the storms dry out heading East-Southeast, espcecially across the Northern zones of Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming.
The unreliable long-range forecast models hint at the possibility of bigger storms returning to the West Coast for the 2nd week of February. If that happens the bigger storms would return to the Rockies. We will have a better idea by this time next week. BA