My Son Clifford reported heavy rain in Mt View in the Bay Area, between 8:00am and 9:00Am this morning, including a nasty traffic accident involving a Greyhound Bus.  The back of this particular storm is currently moving on shore over the Bay Area and should be through Mammoth by this evening…  California Rivers QPF has Yosemite in for about an inch and so amounts of about a foot are expected over the upper elevations, while 4 to 8 inches in the Town of Mammoth Lakes by tonight.  Snow showers will end over night and Wednesday is expected to be dry into Thursday.  The last in the series of storms will be worth watching a bit more in detail and it has a deeper surface low and thus has the ability to generate additional QPF.

For the folks coming up for the Weekend, at this time the majority of the Friday/Night storm should be over by Noon Saturday with just some lingering showers possible in the afternoon.  There will be a nice long break between Sunday and the middle of next week….    High this weekend will be in the 40s with lows in the 20….  It looks quite breezy over the Crest Saturday, but the winds will gradually diminish into Sunday

 

This next series of storms are expected to begin about the end of the month of January…There are some big ones with a lot of energy touted by the longer range models in Week two for the Central Sierra. However, at least some of the runs are tracks that are closer to the west coast with a lot of meridial flow.

 

El Nino:

El Nino as peaked and will slowly weaken this Winter with more rapid weakening this Spring…

 

So Far, the response has been quite disappointing to the Southern Sierra and the Southern CA region. The Dweebs have had some head fakes both in December and January in the longer range models which have panned out little.  Even more interesting is the current distribution of the Precipitation along the west coast which by now should become more focused along the southern half of the west coast instead of hammering the Pacific Northwest and Northern CA.  If this were to continue through February and March, This would be the first time that I can see through the data that such a strong ENSO event favored The Pacific NW and Northern CA.   With that said, we have a lot of time left in this winter which astronomically goes thorough the 21st of March.  The Dweebs will add that they have experienced a whole winter’s worth of precipitation here in Mammoth Lakes in just 2 (10 day) periods…

In the long-range; The climate models are showing a major change in the pattern the end of this month into at least the first week of February. I am looking at the week two ensembles and the CFS week 3.  It looks wetter for Southern CA.

 

In the meantime, Skiing has been just fabulous on Mammoth Mt. Some of the best snow in 5 years!.. If you have not come up yet to make some turns…do so soon…Life is short! 😉

 

More Later……..

 

Dr Howard and the Dweebs………………………….:-)