Snow clears out early today, with sunshine and fresh snow!/ Mostly sunny Sunday and Monday/ Significant storm possible Tuesday and Wednesday

(Check out our US snow pack - snow depth - snow temperature - new snow - etc. maps!)

Forecast updated for Saturday, March 8, 2014

We expect light snow this morning but clearing fast as a moderate strength low pressure system moves out. The fresh layer of snow comes right before a mostly sunny weekend. High pressure ridging responsible for the sunny weather holds into Monday. A significant storm with snow for all areas of Colorado drops in Tuesday and Wednesday. This storm looks similar in track and snow potential to the storm that just moved through, so it could be a good one! Please be sure to log-in and favorite your resort forecasts so you save time (we fixed the captcha issue, sorry for the trouble, it works now...). CM

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7 day to 2 week+ forecast (since 1998) - 12 to 22 March, 2014 - High pressure ridging aloft becomes dominant across the west through Sunday. Between the 10th and 15th (all next week) we expect some Pacific storms to move in by riding up and over the southwest US high pressure ridge, and Colorado being on the east side of this ridge, we expect regular (possibly almost daily ~ on track) snowfalls across resort areas, favoring the north, all next week. After this time (after the 15th), high pressure ridging over the southwest should break down, and stronger-more moist Pacific storms then move in affecting areas all across the west, including drought parched California again. CM

Longer Range Outlook

As of now, March 2014, we are continuing to be affected by an ENSO-Neutral, or La Nada Sea Surface Temperature pattern across the Equatorial Eastern Pacific (SSTs near to slightly below average).



The larger time-scale SST pattern in place right now is a cool phase PDO, or negative PDO, which stands for Pacific Decadal Oscillation. This is a more long term pattern (decades), and it has made any recent years El Nino SST patterns weaker.

We expect the ENSO Neutral, or La Nada pattern (almost a La Nina) to continue, and in the last 30 days we have seen more of a La Nina pattern develop with colder SST's along the eastern Equatorial Pacific and even the region 3.4 always referred to, though less so in 3.4. We are not seeing the trend toward El Nino yet.

Since we are seeing an actual cooling of the eastern Equatorial Pacific in the last month, and not much change in the 3.4 region, we expect this to not bode well for a shift out of a La Nada pattern, yet. If we start to see warming in the region mentioned, then we expect a potential strengthening jet stream across the Pacific, and increased moisture in general for Pacific storms as they move in more directly off the Pacific (we already got a taste of this with recent very strong but snow-level challenged storms). More of these may move in mainly after the 15th and affect all areas of the west, but for now these Pacific storms mainly affect the northwest US and Colorado (on the east side of a southwest US ridge of high pressure). We will keep this outlook updated as more information becomes available. If you want to know when the snow is coming (and be able to set unlimited alerts for any resort), within 5 minutes or less of us (our our sources) entering the data into any of our forecasts, be sure to download the app.