Some snow lingers across mainly Silver Mountain to lookout and east to Whitefish today, but clears out in dry northwest winds across eastern Washington, 49N and Mt Spokane, to Schweitzer today. High pressure ridges in across the region this week.

GREAT START AND WHAT IS COMING THIS WEEK:
-What a season start! The snow and conditions have been very nice! This week: Some snow lingers across mainly Silver Mountain to lookout and east to Whitefish today, but clears out in dry northwest winds across eastern Washington, 49N and Mt Spokane, to Schweitzer today, then, No storms, chilly, sunny, and becoming milder this week as high pressure ridges in across the region, sunshine for the mountains, but good snow-preserving COLD air to start the week, along with a predominately north/ northwest flow of winds overhead and across the mountains...

Here is Lookout Pass with a 12" base, as of closing on Sunday...


Here is the snow outlook from the GFS, for this coming week and coming weekend of December 3rd - 9th... Notice the snow clipping Whitefish MR/ Glacier NP around Wednesday (Tuesday night through Wednesday night), otherwise no precipitation is expected.



LONGER RANGE:
It looks like El Nino is not an official anomaly yet, as I expected in my September LR forecast, so we are in an ENSO Neutral phase, though in the latest update from NOAA, we are seeing warming waters, still a weak El Nino at best. The developing storm track and recent storms are showing signs of an El Nino effect, tracking to the south. CM

Next week, 10th onward, we expect a couple of snow storms and light to moderate snowfall, as it looks like the trend with this pattern is for storms to split (upper-level high pressure ridge anomaly over western Canada) as they move into the west coast, sending energy south into the United States (but more toward California this time), but because these look like strong and cold systems (ask Niseko, Japan) they are still capable of moderate snowfall across the region, mainly early and late next week. It looks like 2 storms total for next week (10th - 15th), with the last one toward the 14th-15th (Next Friday and the weekend) possibly the strongest.

Here is that period represented by the GFS: 


(NO CHANGE from the last LR update) : We expect a slow down and more sunshine as we approach the Christmas and New Year holiday period, but not before some snow shows up through and past mid-December (until the 20th at least)... There will still be some storm energy at times for some fresh snow during the holiday break. In January storms should kick in again on a more regular basis. More updates are coming. Do you have any ideas on what you want to see in our discussions? Please contact through the site! We do not charge for any of our info, and have been providing it since 1998, "Predicting Sick Days since 1998"! CM