Weather Patterns and What’s on the Ground

Is this a drought year?

Season SWE as of 01/08

Season

SWE

1976-77 ? 10 in.

1986-87 4.5 in. 28.36 in

1989-90 7.1 in. 24.5 in.

1990-91 4.5 in. 28.36 in.

1995-96 5.9 in. 64.8 in. (6th biggest winter on record

1999-00: 3.44 in. 49.09 in.

2000-01 6.2 in. 35.45 in.

7 drier winters as of 1/8/2006 (8.57 in SWE):

Snow Depth 1/12/06: 102 in.

Running SWE 1/12/06: 29.55 in.

Steenburgh et al in “One Hundred Inches in One Hundred Hours: Evolution of a Wasatch Mountain Winter Storm Cycle” (2003) describe the intrusion of low equivalent potential temperature (e) air aloft in advance of a surface based cold front.

Vertical motion maxima accompany the low level zone of warm advection.

Forecasting

"A computer lets you make mistakes faster than any other invention, with the possible exception of handguns and

tequila." - D. W. McArthur

Photo from Dragon’s Tail 2: 1/6/2006

Striations!

Cornice 2.0

Nearest Neighbors Forecasting System.

Plots meteorological variables in a multidimensional space. Variables are scaled (0-100) to take into account differences in units.

A genetic algorithm then assigns weights to each of the variables used, since certain variables are more important than others.

Historic morning observations for Main Lodge which most closely resemble today (neighbors) are found and ranked according to a Euclidean distance.

Today’s forecast consists of today’s observations plus the previous three days. Neighbors are found based on closest days and previous three days to that day.

MESOWESTUniversity of Utah Department of Meteorology

(http://www.met.utah.edu/mesowest/)

- allows us to easily view and plot current and historical weather data for our 5 weather sites

- data comes directly off our patrol page

- >10,000 actively reporting stations located throughout western US