Snow - Will it stick?

[grahampa]

I'm hearing reports of decent amounts of snow up high, but I'm worried it's just a tease and we'll have another dreadful winter for snow. I will be doing my snow dances daily! According to the farmers almanac Colorado is in a slightly different climate than before, one with less snow and more rain.

[thurs]

Well the farmer's almanac really shouldn't be treated as anything more than a novelty.

Nobody has any good idea what the forecast for this winter is going to be. We don't even know which type of El Nino we might see, not that we can even all that reliably use El Nino types to determine how the winter will shake out.

As we head into the winter months which analog years start to take over. A lot of this depends on how the El Niño evolves (or doesn't). For now a weak to moderate Modoki Niño continues to look probable, but the devil is in the details. A true Modoki usually isn't all that favorable for snow around here (at least during the core winter months), but a hybrid can be okay for us as we've seen.

Even looking at the analogs there are a VARIETY of possible scenarios and they average out to...well, a pretty average snow season.

Remember, here in Colorado, just missing or hitting a few major snowstorms accounts for a large percentage of our overall snowpack. Everything could be in place for a decent snow season, and then we miss out on a couple large spring storms and all of a sudden we're way behind.

Thinking about how the season might pan out is a fun exercise, but ultimately pretty pointless.

Of course the snow right now is just a tease -- just standard swirling of the upper atmosphere, very early in the season. It has zero correlation with what might be happening in November or December. At best, it will stick around long enough to help create our standard dangerous, unstable snowpack.

And yes, as the climate warms, Colorado will eventually be seeing more rain instead of snow.

[CheapCigarMan]

....And yes, as the climate warms, Colorado will eventually be seeing more rain instead of snow.

....And yes, as the climate cools, Colorado will eventually be seeing more snow instead of rain.

[stoopdude]

....And yes, as the climate warms, Colorado will eventually be seeing more rain instead of snow.

....And yes, as the climate cools, Colorado will eventually be seeing more snow instead of rain.

Ha what

[thurs]

....And yes, as the climate warms, Colorado will eventually be seeing more rain instead of snow.

....And yes, as the climate cools, Colorado will eventually be seeing more snow instead of rain.

You know, I see what you're trying to get at here, but I pointed it out for a reason. In some areas of the globe, as a result of the climate warming, they get MORE snow (due to, for one, the atmosphere being able to hold more moisture) -- The Alaskan interior mountains and Antarctica come to mind. The fact that Colorado would likely get more rain and less snow in a warmer climate is not a gimme but in fact something that had to be more carefully determined in scientific papers. For instance -- more available energy in the upper atmosphere might cause deeper troughs to swirl down and produce more powerful snowstorms. It's an interesting topic and not a totally straightforward correlation as might be suggested.

[Exiled Michigander]