January 4, 2024

Outlook:

The ever evolving weekend system continues a trend downward on the expected snowfall tallies. With the main system Saturday, across most of the Alleghenies its looking like a 2-5″ event, with a 4-8″ swath possible on the east side of the Alleghenies, especially near the Mason Dixon like and points northeast. There is almost always a overperforming zone that sets up somewhere just east of the Alleghenies with the setup.

As that system heads northeast and deepens off the coast, then the uoslope zones will kick in their round 2 feature late Saturday night through Monday a.m where an additional 2-5″ of fluff, that will become windblown fluff can occur. Overall multi day tallies look like they should fall in the low to mid range of those combined amounts, and maybe some areas max out on both.

The 12z GFS which is the lowest of the group comes in with these tallies on Saturday

below is the 6z ECMWF, which is a bit more amped up. The 12z ECMWF will start coming in, in a hour(1pm)

the 12z Canadian, which the Canadian has repeatedly held the highest amounts run after run comes in like this for Saturday

Again those tallies are part 1, then the upslope side part 2 that should add similar tallies on higher ratio snow across the upslope areas.

Eyes then go to the bigger system that looks like will be a snow to sleet/freezing rain to rain to backend snow event. That system potentially could trend colder, or at least entrench cold air at the surface for a longer duration. The GFS often warms things up too fast. I’ll post the 12Z ECMWF a bit later here.

While mentioning colder. Skies clear tonight, high moves over, winds go calm, very dry air mass in place , watch those valley temps plummet overnight. Maybe squeeze out a below 0 reading in the coldest spots.

Review of January 4, 2024

Forest Service Cam offline since 6/24/21

Jan 4(Thurs)

Last Night freezing mist to snow by a.m. Areas of snow in to the early afternoon, clouds broke late

Bittinger 2nw Valley

Dyacon data below – the date marked red as battery issue early day, and dyacon does not backfill data the the mesowest graph has. My manual graph, will continue so there is no data loss, just the Dyacon graph will be a few degrees off for the date and have little effect on the monthly.

Garrett County Airport

Top of Wisp

Canaan Heights/Davis 3SE

Climate Reference Network Station

Atop Canaan Ski area

Cabin Mt at Bald Knob

no data

Cabin Mt-Western Sods

Spruce Knob

Canaan Valley Refuge

Mt.Davis

Snowshoe

Petersburg Grant County Airport

Elkins Airport

SITE COMPARISON

Dy007-Canaan Valley Refuge 3150′, Dy008-Bittinger 2nw Valley 2600′, Dy002-Cabin Mt at Bald Knob 4350′, Dy003-Cabin Mt-Western Sods 4035′, Dy004-Spruce Knob 4820′, Cvpw2-Climate Reference Network Canaan 3380′, KW99-Petersburg Grant County Airport 961, K2G4 Garrett County Airport 2933′, KCBE Cumberland Airport 774′, KEKN Elkins Airport 1985′, KMGW Morgantown Airport 1227′, PMN16-Mt.Davis 3038′, KDCA-Reagan National 15′, G1472 Snowshoe 4500′, F0183 Burkes Garden 3050′