The great winter that wasn't?

Thanks for all the replies and the excellent info -- I'm now counting on the storm track sliding North and dumping snow soon, hopefully in the Kootenays in the 3rd week of March.<br><br>I think what I was trying to express about the past couple of months is what Bigsnow said so clearly in his post above.<br><br>It just kinda feels to me like the season has turned pretty strongly to spring in the past 3 weeks, and the really good snow dumps are already behind us this year.<br><br>I'm sooooo hoping to be completely wrong!<br>

One can think of the jet stream's position as being dictated by something called thermal wind balance. Essentially, north-south gradients in temperature are translated into vertical gradients in wind speed, or shear. The strong winds in the upper atmosphere are what we commonly call the jet stream. Imagine two wrestling giants - the cold, polar air and the warm tropical air. Heave, ho, they push against each other, battling back and forth, always trying to gain a little ground from the other. The battle line is marked by the jet stream.<br><br>As fall transitions into winter, the low sun and precious few daylight hours allow the polar giant to gain strength. He gradually creeps southward, displacing the jet stream and the most vigorous storms south into California. As spring approaches, the sun begins to climb higher and gives the warmer, tropical air a boost. He pushes back and by mid-summer banishes the polar giant to the north, ushering in consecutive weeks of cloudless skys.<br><br>The last few weeks have seen storm after storm drive south into California, but it appears as though we will soon start the transition back to summer weather. It looks like the jet stream will start to move north again by the middle of the week and our familiar routine of storms every other day with ample, deep fresh powder will return. California, well, they'll live up to their nickname, the "Golden State."

Very eloquent, Matt.<br><br>This is a link to one of my favorite weather forecast tools-<br><br> squall.sfsu.edu/gif/jetstream_pac_loop.gif

-a three day loop of the jet stream for the Eastern Pacific. I believe this would be a pretty fair visual representation of the phenomenon you so vividly portray.

Thanks for the link Michael. UW Atmospheric Sciences has a nice weather page set up with links to all sorts of model output, UW weather loops Towards the bottom of the page is a link to loops of 500 mb Heights from the 7 previous days plus the next 6 days of forecasts. 500 mb is about half way up in the atmosphere. 300 mb (in the link you gave, and closer to the top of the atmosphere) is probably better for the jet stream specifically, but 500 mb is just fine. At these levels the winds follow the pressure contours, so you can think of the tightly packed lines as the jet stream.<br><br>One day I got curious about animating an entire year's worth of weather. I had access to archived 500 mb height maps so I pieced them together into a several minute movie. Watching an entire year you can really see the gradual transitions as the seasons change, quite interesting.

Here's another link for tracking snowpack and snow water equivalent at all SNOTEL sites in WA state.<br><br>The southern half of the state seems to be above normal, while the northern half is below normal at most sites.<br><br> www.nwrfc.noaa.gov/snow/snow.cgi

Thanks, everyone, for all of the links. The amount of weather/snow data on the web is so vast that even though I do a fair amount of looking I hadn't come across many of these. The SNOTEL link Juan provided is great. I discovered that you can browse the current data by simply mousing-over the sites on the map, and then read the data out of the URL which appears at the bottom of the browser window (IE, anyway), without having to load each site's page.<br><br>I'd have to say that I have also had the impression that the low elevation snowpack west of the Crest seems to be quite low. With the cold and snowy early winter, I have been surprised to see so little snowpack these past few weeks. Oh well, maybe the spring skiing access season will start early this year.