We got our first big dump but now we have finished off January and will start February on a dry note. There are some signs the pattern could change beyond the 10 day forecast but that is a little too far out to look at accurately right now.
Currently we have a flat ridge off the coast keeping the storms just to our North the next few days. After that the ridge builds in over the West and it looks like it will be dry until the middle of next week. Even the Pacific NW will get a break as the ridge amplifies pushing the storms up into Canada.ย Here is the NWS 6-10 day precip outlook.
What we can hope for in this pattern is for the jet stream to eventuallyย come underneath the ridge in to the West Coast. There is a weakened subtropical jet stream during La Nina so not much help there for undercutting the ridge. Our hope is for the ridging to be in the North Pacific to force the polar jet stream underneath like it did a week ago, or something to strenghten the subtropical jet stream like the MJO.
The MJO is a tropical wave of convection that circles the globe along the equator and when it moves through the Pacific the subtropical jet stream can tap the energy strengthening the jet and sending it towards the West Coast. We picked up 100 inches last December from this type of scenario.
The forecast for the MJO on the GFS model is for it to get quite strong and moves East through the Pacific into phase 7. The last few times it moved into the Western Pacific this season it weakened, most likely because of the cold La Nina water along the equator. So we will watch to see if the convection can continue through the Pacific over the next week.
I don’t want to go too far out in the long-range because the forecast model accuracy beyond 10 days is not good, but we need some sort of hope. This is the GFS model for the latter half of next week showing the ridge building North up over Alaska and Western Canada and the storm door is open underneath. This similar to what happened prior to the the storms we had a week ago.
And here is what one of the runs of the GFS had for the 13th.
Other runs of the forecasts models have shown storms trying to return the latter half of next week. For now there is some hope but we will have to keep a close eye over the next week. Hopefully by the next Tahoe post next Monday there will be some better signs.
Don’t forget last year Squaw only picked up 15 inches in January and it didn’t snow at all the first 2 weeks of February. Then the last 2 weeks of February 150 inches fell and that continued right into March. So there’s alway hope here in Tahoe. BA