Tahoe.com Staff, 1:26pm, 2/10/2012

Do The Local Thing!

Any snow is better than no snow in Lake Tahoe. We would like to measure a storm in feet, but even a few inches can make the conditions noticeably better on the ski slopes. Well it looks like we might get a few more inches over the next few day with an incoming weather pattern. It’s still early to make solid prediction but tahoeweatherdiscussion.com‘s latest report might ease your doubts:

Lots of hype starting to build over the snow coming for Saturday and Monday. In a normal season we may not even pay much attention to a 6 inch forecast 4-5 days away. But we are snow starved. I don’t want to over analyze this storm too much but over the next several days the pattern will become more active snow wise for us as well as the country as the snow carpet is laid from coast to coast.

Saturday we have a weak system pushing in bringing colder air and light scattered snow showers.  We may pick up a couple of inches on the mountains but it should mainly be a dusting with flakes in the air to tease us.

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What will be working in our favor is the cold nature of the storm that will bring higher snow ratios and more unstable air. That will help to keep post-frontal snow showers going. This is a cold front storm where we should see a burst of heavy snow while the cold front pushes through Tahoe on Monday and then light snow showers behind it. Total precip with this system is low in the half inch range but with the colder air we should do ok. Look for 3-6 inches at lake level with 4-8 inches above 7000 ft. and 6-9 inches along the crest.

There will be another weak storm moving into the Pacific NW on Wednesday and we may pick up a few more inches on the South side of the storm. The stronger storm for next weekend is still on the models. The ridge looks like it will move closer to the coast the second half of next week before retrograding again over the weekend. Still not sure how far South the heavy precip will push with this system and it is still far off so we will have to keep watching the track. The potential is there to get a decent storm.

Keep your fingers crossed!

Photo: weather.gov