The Winter Solstice occurred yesterday and the Earth is going to start tilting its Northern Hemisphere back towards the Sun for the next 6 months, but the peak of winter is still a month off and peak ski season has only just started. You might wonder why this is the case as the Sun's energy hitting the Northern Hemisphere will increase by the day, and the reason is "Thermal Inertia" of the atmosphere, the land, and the water. Those things cool more slowly and even though the Sun is now providing more energy by the day, those things are still warmer in general than the direct energy of the Sun can support and will be until late January when they start to warm again overall.
Translation: We're only about 30 days into the coldest part of winter, 15 days into the snowiest 90 days of the year, peak ski season is just starting, and Santa hasn't even slid down your chimney yet.
So let's take a gander at the next 6 days to set up the week from the the GFS.
We have 2 or maybe three big weather events this week:
1) TUESDAY-WEDNESDAY STORM: I've already covered this once in Minor Storm Update #1 and will cover again later today after a brief review here.
2) FRIDAY STORM: The next storm is on Friday which just a day ago looked like a cutter but a broken connection means that it won't amp up as it pushes through the region. It still looks like a moderate intensity event with a tight boundary where there's a pow party to the north and gnar to the south in the form of a swath of freezing r@!n.
3) SUNDAY-MONDAY STORM: We have something that the GFS currently sees around Sunday that is starting to look like a decent opportunity, though definitely still in the transitional range from fantasy to realistic, so cross your fingers on this one.
I'm going to dive into a bit more detail about each one of these storms but first I'm going to start with a quick note about Holiday Traffic Patterns and then look at the Temperature Outlook before diving into the three storm events.
