bainbridgekid

Well timed organized blob of moisture comes through Thursday night on the WRF with 925mb temps around -1 and 1,000 foot temps below freezing despite strong Southerly flow. Interesting setup.

WRF snowfall through Saturday afternoon.

This peaky guy's gonna be tough to track Friday night. Could see some very unpredictable small bands of heavy snow rotating around it depending how it holds together and tracks. Or it'll dissipate and stay offshore and be a non factor.

Still mostly low to mid 40's halfway up Vancouver Island though. Cold front will be pretty slow to move in this evening since the axis of the trough isn't sliding East hardly at all. Close to an anafront setup.

Not out far enough to know where it goes, but that little low is back Friday night on the 18z. That's what previous runs had giving Seattle 1-4" of snow but was taken away on the 12z. Tracking that pesky guy is gonna be really hard since it kinda spins up in the middle of a general area of low pressure and is disconnected from the jet stream.

Brief band of heavy wet snow Thursday night in the Central Sound. The orientation of that band extending straight West through the Olympics and out off the Coast looks really weird though.

What a thing of beauty. I don't remember ever seeing such a large area of continuous cold cumulus in the entire Gulf of Alaska. Looking at that you'd definitely think we'd be in for potential CZ snow in the next couple days.

Fitzgibons. Goes from the village up to 3,400 feet and that was near the top. The main runs themselves had plenty of snow because of snowmaking but the area in the trees and under the lifts were completely bare below about 3,500 feet. I had to ski that lower run because the upper lifts where the good snow was were closed due to 90 mph winds up top.

Whistler got 18" of snow in the last 12 hours with lots more to come. I took this picture on a lift there this weekend, so definitely much needed.

12z Euro gives 40" of snow in the next 96 hours over the ocean West of Portland. Boats better start evacuating now. There has to be a way to fix this nonsense.

39 mph gust earlier at SEA. Seems like a decent chance they break 40 mph at some point today.

I swear they changed some parameter that completely messed that up. It never used to throw out massive foot+ snowstorms for the Coast and lowlands but now that happens regularly when nothing close to that has any chance of happening. I wonder if they adjusted some boundary layer issues in an attempt to improve snow forecasts in continental climates but it messed up snow forecasts here near the Coast. Seems especially egregious in cold onshore flow patterns like this where the models just assumed nearly all precip in the mid-upper 30's will fall as accumulating snow.

He does this to a lot of people. He just enjoys being a pest. Best to ignore him.

Total snow combining the Thursday night and Friday night events. Fascinating cutoff between the West and East side of Puget Sound. Can't say I've ever seen that happen before.

And that first map doesn't include this other snow Thursday night. The timing on these maps don't overlap.

WRF drops the hammer Friday night. Widespread 3-5" East of Puget Sound in Snohomish and King Counties. This would require perfectly threading the needle for both timing and strength of that band but nice to see the top end potential.

And in the opposite direction snow immediately started sticking even to roads here yesterday afternoon while the temp was still 38 degrees because the upper levels were very cold (850mb temps near -9) and snow was heavy and a bit groupely. Flakes must have been well below freezing till the lowest 1,000 feet or so.

Not sure your first sentence is true if the DP remains below freezing. I've seen relatively dry snow fall with zero melting while the temp is 33 plenty of times if the air starts out fairly dry in evaporative cooling events. Forecasting snow amounts is so fascinatingly difficult because there are so many factors to nail down (exact temp and humidity through the air column and exact location and strength of every band of snow.) Crazy how much harder that is to forecast than rain.

I find when accumulating snow actually happens it tends to be relatively close to 10:1 here. But the 10:1 map way overestimates how often that happens and shows lots of phantom snow that never happens at all. Kuchera ends up being closer in borderline setups not because the accumulating snow all falls at Kuchera's low ratio but because it eliminates a lot more of the phantom snow.

Widespread overrunning snow Sunday night too on the 00z GFS.

Fun little guy Friday night on the 00z GFS brings some bands of moderate to heavy snow through especially in the South Sound.

He must have been looking at an old run or different night. This is lows tomorrow night when the snow supposedly falls.

3km NAM flips King County to heavy wet snow tomorrow night with decent accumulations South of I-90 and East of 405.

Friend in Mill Creek got 5" just NW of Clearview, but there was a very sharp cutoff on both the North and South side of the CZ. On my drive to work in Mountlake Terrace this morning it went from snow covered roads to zero snow on the ground in a couple miles.