Weekend Best Bets: Dec 16, 2011

Recent Storm Cycles

Here's a quick overview of the recent storm cycles in the past week: 

1. A storm came in from the North across Alberta dropping snow to the east of the mountains, and catching resorts on the Eastern edge of the Rockies. This provided quite a bit of snow at Nakiska earlier in the week, with smaller amounts of snow making it as far West as the Banff area at Sunshine, Lake Louise, and Norquay.
2. A second storm formed off the coast and as it moved across southern BC, dropped snow at resorts like Red Mountain, Apex, Fernie, and at Castle. This storm is still making its way across with some more snow expected at Revelstoke, and coastal precipitation is still expected through Saturday night.

Here's a little chart we've been working on. It provides a 48hr snowfall forecast based on data from Environment Canada's high resolution (15km) GEM model.  We're not sure how well it models snowfall at elevation, especially since the elevation would be averaged over roughly a 15 km^2 area, but it should be a good indication of whether significant snowfall is expected... 

If it's useful, we'll consider making this an automatically updating chart on our site!

Here's a chart showing probability of total precipitation greater than 5cm for the same period from the Environment Canada website:

Resorts Opening this Weekend:

1. Castle Mountain opens Today (Dec 16) for full winter operations, and has reported that the red Tamarack chair will be running.
2. Red Mountain opens Saturday Dec 17th, with 9cm of snow on Thursday to build the stoke.
3. Kimberley opens Friday Dec 16th for full winter operations.

Details about the Snowfall Forecast Chart:

For those of you who like the gory details on the snowfall chart: this chart takes the total precipitation over a 48hr period (kg/m2) and then filters based on areas where snow is expected instead of rain. Finally contour lines are generated for 1,5,10,15,20, 25, & 50 kg/m2. Luckily, this easily converts to mm of precipitation, which can then be converted to snowfall using an approximation (e.g. 1mm rain ~ 1cm snow). The forecast model is run by Environment Canada at 0:00 UTC (or Z for Zulu), and provides a 48hr forecast.  The forecast model takes nearly 3 hours before it is available since a numerical model is calculated over the entire globe to create the forecast model, using 15km^2 blocks... Anyway, suggestions are welcome!