12:30 pm

Thanks for the encouraging words after my post yesterday regarding the new radar facility. Based on some of the messages, comments, and emails I must not have done a good enough job explaining the situation, so let me clear a few things up.

1) This is not a “job” and it has no effect on me keeping you updated on the weather nor does it affect my job as a realtor at Durango Mountain Realty. I will be providing input as they ask me to. I feel they reached out to me as a well-known citizen of the community who understands the weather here. More of citizen representative for lack of a better term. I am not an expert on radars, power requirements etc. They have an impressive list of people working on this project and don’t need my input whatsoever, the fact that they reached out was very exciting and I am happy to volunteer as much time as they want from me.

2) I will not be doing the weather from the facility or manning the facility, although  I hope I will get a tour at some point. The data flowing out of the facility will go to the National Weather Service. One of the people on the conference call yesterday was from NOAA’s National Severe Storm Laboratory in Oklahoma you can’t get any more qualified than those people in determining the best place for radar from purely from a weather standpoint. Once complete the radar will be tied into the national network of NWS radar sites and you will be able to view it on whatever app or website you use regularly.

Thank you for letting me clarify.

Friday-Saturday

This little system is still evolving, the Euro has been leading the way with it, the US models are starting to address it as well. There is an outlier, the Hi-Res Canadian (RGEM) going crazy with it, I would say it has less than a 20% chance of being accurate, but we will see. In the meantime here is the Euro and this is through Saturday morning. The models are starting to see a second feature develop right over  La Plata County on Friday night. As we have seen anything can happen.

 

Next week

Once we get past this weekend things get exciting as I see most models indicate the storm train rolling back in. It is difficult to rely on the weather models 6-10 days out but what is apparent is the opportunity will exist for some of the moisture headed in from the Pacific over the next 10+ days to translate into accumulating snow for our high and low elevations. As I mentioned to someone this morning it is inconceivable to me that we won’t get something decent out of it. Out of what you ask? All of the models show the Sierra getting absolutely hammered over 10+ days. This is snowfall at 10-1 ratio.

That is Mt. Shasta showing 102″. I have seen higher totals for Mt. Shasta summit in 4 days so that is not particularly unusual. The Sierra can gobble up nearly anything you throw at it and leave virtually nothing for anyone to the east, so this by no means says we will get this much snow. What it does say is that there will be moisture and instability and unsettled weather that can trigger events in our area. That has been the story here all winter so far. Every event has had some type of secondary component that developed or redeveloped or retrograded that we had not counted on “the leftovers” as I have been calling it for the last few years. So I will take each potential event as it comes in, I can’t even tell you when the first will start yet, but it should be after Monday. I should have some better insight on that by the weekend.

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