Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Wirth

Close to perfection.

I hit up Wirth this morning with somewhat-limited expectations and was very pleasantly surprised. The machine had gone around the course and when I hit the trails around 9 I was treated to virgin corduroy. The trail was firm but with a fine edge, and the snow surface was a mixture of older snow and ice (and manmade on the manmade trails). It's not perfect powder, but it definitely does the job.

The par 3 and back 9 trails were all in fine shape. In the 7.5k northwest of the parkway there were maybe half a dozen dirty spots, all of which could be skied around. It would probably behoove the race organizers to shovel them before the race on Sunday, as the trail is otherwise in fantastic shape. With an inch of new snow in the forecast tomorrow, it can only get better, and new snow should ski in nicely to the current surface.

Headed home, the front 9 looked to be in fine shape as well, and I saw the sled out on the City of Lakes trails south of Glenwood smoothing them out. Hopefully the trails will be this good for the Loppet nary six weeks off.

I can only get to two trails at most, on a good day! Check out all the trail reports at skinnyski.com

Sunday, December 27, 2009

Birkie Trail

Double Birkie report forthcoming—for now I have to go to bed. But, a trail report:

The double Birkie was fantastic. Four or five inches of light, soft powder fell overnight and we went out from Fish Hatchery in the snow, but the groomer came by a couple K in and we had a pretty good classic track and a flat, if somewhat soft, skate lane. I switched to skating at OO and skated in to Telemark, with the groomer having gone through and the trail in very good shape. After lunch, heading south, the trail had firmed up an the skate deck was in terrific shape. Some old snow had been tilled up so it's not straight powder but it's firm and relatively fast (although a bit wet). Some cold nights and tilling should get it in even better shape, but the race could be run tomorrow and it would be great.

I can only get to two trails at most, on a good day! Check out all the trail reports at skinnyski.com

Saturday, December 26, 2009

Battle Creek

I took a couple loops of Battle Creek around midday (too lazy to head out early to Como) today with Double Birkie looming tomorrow. The trail is "relatively okay", by which I mean that while there is good snowcover, there are some icy and uneven spots. The surface is hard and fast, and with a bit more snow and grooming it should give a fine base for weeks to come. Unless you are confident of your downhill skills, I'd stay off the back hills, they're scarier going down in the light today than they were in the dark earlier this week. It's close to being awesome—and it's no fault of the groomers, who are doing yeomans work—but it's not quite there. If there's not new snow this week the classic race next week should be fun and/or carnage.

Friday, December 25, 2009

How bizarre is this storm?

Winds switched from NE to S, and the temperature dropped twenty degrees.

Seriously.

Thursday, December 24, 2009

HAIRIES

There are few things better than hairies. Crust skiing might be, if the conditions are exquisite. But the thought of scraping your skis clean, roughing up the kick zones and striding around is fantastic. And rare. But today, with freshly-falling snow and the temperature at exactly freezing, I got excited—hairies!

I drove over to Battle Creek, strapped on the striders, and went out for a spin. With no kick. Apparently the bases of my skis are not as clean as I thought they might be. So, it was back to the car which is, luckily, a depository for all things ski (I only really use it to go to rollerski or hike in the summer, so it retains assorted ski detritus through the summer.) and the search began for sandpaper. A snippet was found. Then, a kick scraper. I didn't have one, but figured the scraper I use for my windshield (try it, ski scrapers beat the heck out of gas station scrapers) would suffice. Five minutes later, I was ready to go. A fellow walking by said "it seems like a great time to cross country ski." Indeed.

The kick was almost magical. I had no wax on my skis, but was able to stride a lot of the hills. I spent some time skiing in a bit of a track to go back and forth in, and skied around the whole loop. There's about a foot of snow in the open, and the trail has packed down really well—this snow should stick around a while—skating seemed good and a classic track should set up deep and firm. There are no thin or sketchy spots, which happens with heavy, dense snow. I went down the singletrack trail to practice my backcountry tele turning (with varie success) and didn't touch dirt. There's a lot of snow.

If they can roll the next batches of snow as well as the first, Battle Creek will have pretty epic conditions. Perfect timing for a race!

(I took a couple of pictures of the lighted course afterwards)

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Terrace Oaks and Wirth/COLL

Before taking her to the airport (and she got out!) my sister and I took the 5k loop around the outside of Terrace Oaks. This was just after witnessing an accident 200 feet in front of us on 35E when some moron lost an SUV in his blind spot and changed lanes in to him. Fun. The skiing was fine, with some detritus on the trail and a few sections which were a bit dirty, but it's a good base, and it's slated to snow just a bit.

After dropping her at the airport I swung by Richfield and picked up Jakob to go ski. He's back from Duluth via San Francisco and hasn't skied yet. I suggested Terrace Oaks which he pointed out was a bit technical for someone who'd not skied. Terrace Oaks was out because I'd been there and Hyland because, as he said, "Hyland sucks." So it was off to Wirth. We parked at the beach and headed up the Loppet course to 394, where the grooming ends. The trail is in terrific shape save, perhaps, the climb up to the road crossing (but the downhill is fine to go up). And the snow is slow over by the freeway—what's new? It started snowing halfway through and by the time we got to the bridge it was coming down pretty good. Jakob suggested we ski the course backwards (with our headlamps on, we hadn't needed them yet) and we did, and there are a few hills on that course, up and down, which are not meant to be skied the wrong way. We also found out that the snow was pretty thin going up the road to the Flower Garden but, uh, that should be short-lived.

I can only get to two trails at most, on a good day! Check out all the trail reports at skinnyski.com

Theodore Wirth

With my sister in town, I didn't want to abuse her further than the hills at Battle Creek, so we elected to hit the front 9 on Wirth. I did double pole intervals, and she skated, and all was reported to be pretty good. Snow under the train bridges is fine, but over the bridge towards Highway 55 is thin. (Thanks to the shovelers under the bridge! Perhaps the Loppet folks will have some shovel parties once the new snow falls to thicken the usual thin spots.) There were a few grassy areas but nothing too bad; you could probably use good skis but rock skis are advisable.

I can only get to two trails at most, on a good day! Check out all the trail reports at skinnyski.com

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Weather speculation: let the fun begin

I spend way too much time watching as each model run comes in. Ooh, the 12Z GFS! The 15Z SREF! In any case, the numbers are in flux, but a foot looks rather likely. Two feet is definitely not out of the question. The variables right now are whether any non-snow precipitation gets as far north as the Twin Cities (about 50-50 right now) and what the final QPF amounts are. That said, I'd bet someone gets two feet.

Monday, December 21, 2009

Theodore Wirth

It's all relative. The manmade snow is very good, although it seems as though the loop is not completely, well, complete yet. But if you want a solid classic track, uh, Wirth is where it's at. Otherwise, the rest of the back 9 and par 3 is in good shape, although it could use another foot of snow, touch wood.

I can only get to two trails at most, on a good day! Check out all the trail reports at skinnyski.com

Sunday, December 20, 2009

Weather Speculation: Bullseye

During my time in the Twin Cities (since 2002), there's never been a real, proper snowstorm. There were a couple big storms in March (but what good do those do other than melt a week later?) and there have been several which have dumped snow to the east, west or north, but the Cities seem to have been in hole the whole time. As far as I can remember, we've not had a midwinter, foot-plus storm in, well, a long time.

That may change. The latest GFS has a 990mb low pressure center shooting straight up from the Gulf and stalling around La Crosse, spreading heavy snow and wind (all out blizzard) over much of Minnesota. (This is rather in line with the earlier ECMWF run I talked about this afternoon.) The rain snow line would set up from about Sioux City to Albert Lea to Eau Claire. North of this line would see somewhere in the range of 1.5 to 1.75 inches of snow-water equivalent, with a snow:water ratio of at least 10:1 and probably closer to 15:1. The math there works out to 15 to 26 inches, with more in Duluth off the lake. That's a crippling, shut down the highways and ski down the streets, snowstorm. Travel on Christmas Eve would be impossible. Is anyone else excited?


(QPF is shown to the left, with approximate snow amounts; the very-approximate rain-snow line is shown with yellow dots)

Just plain wow. That's the printout from the 00z GFS run for the 60 hours ending 7 a.m. on Saturday (i.e. 7 p.m. Wednesday to 7 a.m. Saturday) and it would snow much of this time. A white Christmas indeed. Things can change and probably will, but if this came to pass, it would be an absolutely epic snowstorm.

One more thing: although the situations are somewhat different—it's not October, and we don't have a cold front having just come through, and there's not a hurricane buckling the weather off the Eastern Seaboard (although Nantucket did have wind gusts of 60 mph this morning)—but this snow map looks almost-plausible given this weather system:


That is, of course, the Hallowe'en Blizzard of 1991. Which was also a low which shot nearly due north from the Gulf of Mexico in to cold air. (There's a great video on MinnPost about the storm, which was overshadowed by the "Perfect Storm" on the East Coast, but the two weather systems were interrelated—the Perfect Storm interrupted the jet stream, allowing a storm which would normally go east to go almost due north.)

Skiing could get very, very excellent soon for a long time to come (the models don't show near-freezing temperatures any time soon). Stay sharply tuned. …

Battle Creek

The new snow overnight skied in quite well and anything in the woods, with a couple exceptions, is in very good shape. The prairie is skiable but with rock skis of course (probably advisable for the whole thing). With light off the clouds, the unlit trails were fine through dusk.

Now, just waiting for the big pre-Christmas dump. Please?!

I can only get to two trails at most, on a good day! Check out all the trail reports at skinnyski.com

What do I want for Christmas?

Well, a foot of new snow would be nice.

There's chit-chat of some sort of storm moving through the Upper Mississippi Valley this coming week, and, well, it's well placed, but I remain somewhat skeptical. Why? Because until three days ago we didn't know if the East Coast was going to get a lot of snow or not. (If you're following along, they did. If you are trying to fly to the East Coast this weekend, well, you probably are still in Minnesota.) The models there bounced around inordinately, and the GFS and the ECMWF, the two longer-range models, had different solutions until about 48 hours before the storm. Washington, New York and Boston all had scenarios where they'd see two feet and other where they'd see sunny skies over the weekend, and the models only resolved in the last couple of days. So, anything put forth is almost pure speculation and while I wouldn't be too surprised to see a deep snowpack by Friday morning, I also wouldn't be surprised if we just had sun and starts (and Santa Claus) in the skies.

Let's go, as it were, to the video tape. Here are the last two runs of the GFS model, each printing out a foot of snow, or so, from Minnesota. Wisconsin gets the jackpot (as usual, it seems) but the North Shore gets hit, too, which they need up there. Either of these scenarios would be fine with me, but the models have been wobbly enough I'm not getting too excited. Yet.


On the other hand, the ECMWF, which doesn't show QPF, is intriguing because it seems to bring the storm up a bit closer to the Twin Cities. The latest ECMWF model run is further to the west of that storm track and could, presumably, shift the axis of heaviest snow in to Minnesota. The printout of the 12Z ECMWF vs the 12Z GFS shows how the models are still quite different.

This map shows the models, with the ECMWF in orange and the GFS in green, at 7 a.m. on the 25th (120 hours out from the model run). I've included the locations of the center of the low on the 24th (96 hours out) and 26th (144 hours out) for comparison. The GFS takes the low almost due north from Central Arkansas to near Milwaukee, and then retrogrades it (retrograding means that does not follow the normal east-west pattern) to near Watersmeet in the UP. This is the scenario which would dump snow heaviest in a Madison-Wausau corridor. But look at the ECMWF. It starts further west, near Texarkana, and goes due north to near Des Moines, before turning to the east. This would seem to throw the heaviest snow from Omaha to Sioux City to Minneapolis and Birkieland.

And I'm inclined to believe this model for two reasons. First, while all the models have been pretty bad this year, the ECMWF has been slightly better than the GFS. In the recent East Coast storm, the EC started with the coastal storm which eventuated, while the GFS was much further east and came back west with time. The second reason I believe the ECMWF a bit more is that it's generally more likely to have a normal east-west pattern than a retrograde, so the west-to-east movement of the GFS seems less likely.

In any case, it will be quite telling in the next couple of days as to what happens—whether we'll have two feet of snow on the ground by Christmas. Okay, that's an exaggeration. Maybe.

(There might be a couple inches before then, but it appears more likely to go south of us.)

Update: the latest Canadian GEM model seems to split the difference, although it has a pretty dramatic precipitation cutoff near the Twin Cities.

Woodland race report

Woodland did the best with what they had for the race, which was just barely enough. It would have been nice to have not been routed on the asphalt, but what are you going to do? With some new snow (check) and a good roll and groom, they'll probably to get it back in good shape, although there is enough dirt at the surface that it'll need a good snow before it is perfect again.

The registration, day-of (because I was way too lazy to register online and don't mind giving Elk River a few extra dollars) was $35, and I had $33 in bills in my wallet. And lots of quarters. I think I started the race with about five Euros and $1.50 in my back pocket (proverbially, my wallet was in the car). I warmed up with Zach Handler to the X and back (skipping Gravity Box) and felt okay, and went and lined up for the start.

Because of the snow, the usual start that I came up with a couple years ago (backwards on the winder prairie loop and through the start to thin the field) wasn't possible, so several dozen of us went, in 100 meters, from a 30-meter-wide course to a 3-meter wide trail, which meant that those folks who got up to the front did well and those who didn't, well, fought it out on the trail for quite a while. About a kilometer in someone fell in front of a pack of us and we all stacked up, which would be a theme for the day. Craig Ruud blamed his wife (nice, Craig) and we strung out along the trail. The skiers were tightly packed and one competitor (who shall not be named) kept yelling at people about watching their poles. Seriously? I mean, either ski further behind us or way out in front, but don't ski where my poles are being planted.

Anyway, the race hit the Stony Rollers which were kind of grassy, and headed back through the rest of the course and on towards the lap, where there were some very thin areas over asphalt. I hit asphalt once and scraped a bit of laminate off my skis, which makes my skis look badass (oh, wood on the side? yeah). Then it was in to a second lap and I wasn't feeling particularly peppy, and finished in 1:07 which is not very good, but whatever. With a lot of kids back from college and some potential olympians leading out (everyone is home for Christmas, although the field is probably not as stacked as next week's Boxing Day Como race, which, at least, is groomed out real wide) I wasn't going to place real well, although I'd have liked to have a better percent back.

Of course, I'm not planning to peak in December. To the rollerboard!

Friday, December 18, 2009

Como

Again to como, same as yesterday. Still quite good with a few brown spots and some cart paths, but they're avoidable.

I can only get to two trails at most, on a good day! Check out all the trail reports at skinnyski.com

Thursday, December 17, 2009

Como

The reports from folks who had skied pre-pub were that Como was quite good. Not wanting to fight the tail end of rush hour over to Battle Creek, I decided to give it a whirl, the first time at Como since October. And it was surprisingly good.

There are a few thinner sections which see some grass and dirt pulled up by the groomer, and the cart path on the last section of the Glacier is showing through, so rock skis are probably a good bet (especially at night). Still, with a bit of shoveling—and there's ample snow to shovel—it should be in good shape for the post-Christmas race.

And it's 7 minutes from my house. Morning skiing much?

I can only get to two trails at most, on a good day! Check out all the trail reports at skinnyski.com

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Battle Creek

The classic tracks do have grass in places, but for my first time striding this year, it was not half bad. Kick was whatever was leftover from last year on my rock skis, and glide was surprisingly good. The tracks are solid, if thin in a few places. Getting the classic technique back will take a bit of trying, though. Note to self: when temperatures are below 0, remember all your pants. Long underwear and spandex won't cut it.

I can only get to two trails at most, on a good day! Check out all the trail reports at skinnyski.com

Monday, December 14, 2009

Battle Creek

Back to Battle Creek, with a couple inches of fresh powdah, for very good skiing. A few thin spots, but mostly over grass or mulch. During the day good skis would be fine. I hit the trails for about 75 minutes and did a few repeats with a headlamp up the big hill on the back loop. Hopefully they'll be able to comb it and set a classic track tonight (it was just rolled) which should set up real well.

I can only get to two trails at most, on a good day! Check out all the trail reports at skinnyski.com

Sunday, December 13, 2009

Terrace Oaks

After not waking up for the early race at Wirth, I headed down to Terrace Oaks this afternoon for a couple hours on snow. Conditions there were good, but rock skis would be recommended. The base is quite firm but there is quite a bit of dirt (and rebar, and manhole covers) showing in places. Tracks are set around, but they seem to see some grass and dirt and are washed out on most of the climbs. They've dug up a lot of leaves, too, although with current cold wax conditions I doubt this would be a major issue. With new snow, however, the current snow should provide a fine base for some good skiing.

I saw Bruce leaving when I got there so I bet he'll have a trail report, too.

(And, yes, 2-4 inches tonight. No real comment here other than it may take some time to saturate the cold air mass overhead, so I'm a tad bit skeptical on these numbers.)

I can only get to two trails at most, on a good day! Check out all the trail reports at skinnyski.com

Saturday, December 12, 2009

Hoigaards/Breadsmith race

The new venue for the Hoigaards race is nice—no more waking up at 5:15 for the race at 6:45—but … well it sure would be nice if MPRB had made a bit more snow. What they've made is very good. Firm, packed, and fast. But it's barely a kilometer long! It's all hills, with some fast and fun downhills and anything else being a pretty good up, but, come on, you can't get 2.5k made in a week in a half with four guns and temperatures generally in the teens or below? Someone really needs to get a lesson from Weston. I talked to John who said he'd be out moving guns around because the parks workers are content to have one blowing at a time. And they have five guns! They really need to work on this.

In any case, I took a couple Macalester skiers, and I skied the first and last legs. A couple fun intervals, and I jumped right in to lactate threshold, getting that race feel. For all of eight minutes around the course twice. It'll be fun to head over there once the snow is in more as the classic track looks solid, and the rest of the course skiable (I might try it out later this afternoon for 20k or so). With decent natural snow, however, the manmade section is not particularly necessary.

I can only get to two trails at most, on a good day! Check out all the trail reports at skinnyski.com

Friday, December 11, 2009

Battle Creek

Same as yesterday—until proven otherwise, we'll stick with Battle Creek. I stayed off the big hills thanks to forgetting my headlamp, but the rest is good. A couple leafy sections on the wooded part of the lit loop, but nothing too bad. A couple inches of snow (Sunday?) would do wonders.

I can only get to two trails at most, on a good day! Check out all the trail reports at skinnyski.com

Thursday, December 10, 2009

Battle Creek

I called Burnsville and they reported that Terrace Oaks was fair. So, I headed over to Battle Creek and it was quite good. The prairie is skiable, but pretty grassy. The woods, however, are very good. With more grooming and cold temperatures, it's much firmer than yesterday with a good skate deck and a definite rock ski classic track (dirt and leaves in places). You could probably get away skating on the wooded sections with good skis during the day, but not at night.

A couple non-prarie sections to watch out on: after the big climb off the prairie and the second half of the big climb on the back hills. However, the main climb up the prairie is in very good shape. The lights are on, but, of course, there's only a couple K with good snow and lights. A headlamp is nice, but it can probably be skied on ambient light. It's exciting to be back on snow!

I can only get to two trails at most, on a good day! Check out all the trail reports at skinnyski.com

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Battle Creek

I was up at 5:45 to shovel HOURCARs today and planned an early ski. Based on prior reputation, I headed down to Terrace Oaks. And, it was ungroomed. I was, well, not pleased. I called the office and was assured that they are grooming this year, but hadn't gotten there yet. Since, when it is groomed, it is very sheltered, and the coverage looks good, once it is groomed it may be the pick of the Cities.

So, it was up 35E, across the Wakota Bridge (inexplicable traffic) and up 61 to Battle Creek which was, well, decent. The prairie was not even worth skiing, but the back woods were rolled and pretty solid. Well, they were soft, but coverage is good and the rolling makes it quite skiable. There are a few leafy sections and a bit of mulch, but the work this summer left the trail in great shape. It's best accessed by going up the sliding hill and then 50 yards behind it to the trail. The sliding hill is wicked fun coming down on the way home.

A bit more rolling and it should set up well in the cold weather. Good job Ahvo and friends!

Also, the lights aren't on. With clouds the ambient light was fine, but real lights would be great.

Oh, and on the way back 94 was a skating rink. Funny, when you don't treat the roads when it's above 0, and it drops close to 0, the roads freeze up. Hmm, I wonder if salting the roads dry (melt the snow which then evaporates under tires) would help with this. Perhaps.

I can only get to two trails at most, on a good day! Check out all the trail reports at skinnyski.com

Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Highland golf course

With the drive to Elm Creek looking like an hour each way, we headed down to Highland for a quick go-round. Had there been no wind, it would have been fine, but with the gusty breeze, there were some small drifts forming. We could definitely get some glide, but wound up doing some technique work. Still, it beats the heck out of dryland. Groomed trails tomorrow!

I can only get to two trails at most, on a good day! Check out all the trail reports at skinnyski.com

Sunday, December 6, 2009

Storm speculation update

With the latest model runs in, everything looks on-target. The Winter Storm Watches are up, and we're looking at 5-8 inches of snow Tuesday in to Wednesday. The NAM, which had been advertising less snow, is trending slightly more, the GFS, which had been higher, going slightly less. Still, we're looking good. Light, fluffy, and not falling too hard, although it will cause some driving nightmares I bet (skiing, on the other hand …). Wax 'em up!

9:00 a.m. Monday: still looking good. GFS and NAM both have the 0.5" QPF (quantity of precipitation) running through the Twin Cities. At 15:1 snow rations, that's 7.5 inches. Pretty good. Pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty good.

2:30 p.m. Monday: the latest NAM has us up to 7.5 QPF, which would be close to a foot of snow. Stay tuned …

The ghosts of winters past

(Click on any charts to view larger versions)

On Friday afternoon, my housemate asked if I could dig up the weather records for precipitation for 2006 to 2007. Surely! I did, and stumbled upon a treasure trove of data—highs, lows, precip, snow and snow depth for every day back to the 1890s. Except for 1913 and the early 2000s, the data are pretty much complete.

This got me to thinking: what is a normal snow year in the Twin Cities? A lot of memories go back to the 1970s when there was a lot of snow, but what was the skiing like before then? Were winters always snowier than now? Or should we stop complaining?

Well, several hours and a 17 megabyte Excel file later (I'd be willing to share it if anyone is interested), I can provide some sorts of answers. During the average winter:

85 days have at least 1 inch of snow on the ground.
71 days have at least 2 inches,
61 days have at least 3 inches,
53 days have at least 4 inches,
37 days have at least 6 inches,
20 days have at least 9 inches,
12 days have at least 12 inches,
3 days have at least 18 inches and
0 (well, 0.3) days have at least two feet accumulated.

Another way to break it out is by the number of days with at least three inches of snow (which generally equates to good skiing). I have all these data by year (and by all, I mean all) but it'd be too long to post. But the decades break out as follows:

Decade
0-39
40-69
70-99
100+
1900s
5
5
0
0
1910s*
4
1
4
0
1920s
3
5
1
1
1930s
4
3
3
0
1940s
4
4
1
1
1950s
4
0
2
4
1960s
3
3
2
2
1970s
0
1
4
5
1980s
2
3
2
3
1990s
2
4
2
2
2000s*
0
3
2
0

(* data not complete for 1912-3 or 2000-1 to 2003-4)

Now to some pretty pictures. First, from Charles Fisk's climatology site, we have a great chart of the mean and maximum snow depth, by calendar date (click to expand):



Fantastic. Here's another: percent of days, by calendar day, with at least three inches of snow on the ground (click to expand):



A few interesting things here. First, note the similarity to the trail-report derived chart from the past seven winters. If anything, winter seems to be coming later and staying later. Also just for some data points, there's a better than 50/50 chance of skiing on any given day from about Christmas to Birkie, and it's a pretty sharp drop on either side, except for some weird blip in early March, where there's a better chance of skiing on March 10 than March 3. The best stretch is January 12 to February 4, with a better than 70% chance of three-plus inches of snow. The single best days are February 2 and 3, which have each been skiable 75% of the time (with at least three inches of snow). There's probably a reason City of Lakes picked that weekend. And if we get to ski this week, we'll be bucking history: there's only a one-in-three chance of skiing on any given day in this week of December.

We can also look at different levels of snow depth. For instance, the year with the most days with at least one inch of snow on the ground was 1964-5, with 137 days.
With at least 2 inches, the winners were 1964-5 and 1981-2, with 131 days (this was the year when the record depth of 38 inches was set after storms dropping 17 and 21 inches two days apart in mid-January)
With at least 3 inches, the winner was 1981-2, with 130 days
With at least 4 inches, the winner was 1978-9, with 124 days
With at least 6 inches, the winner was 1978-9, with 121 days
With at least 9 inches, the winner was 1978-9, with 103 days
With at least 12 inches, the winner was 1968-9, with 84 days (amazingly, there were only 4 other days with at least six inches on the ground)
With at least 18 inches, the winner was 1966-7, with 45 days
With at least 24 inches, the winner was 1966-7, with 11 days

What's striking here is that all of these extreme years occurred from 1964 to 1982. And the data go for 105 years! So there was definitely a snow peak in the mid 1960s to early 1980s.

For low years, 1930-1 had just 19 days with an inch of snow, 1958-9 had but a dozen days with two inches, 1943-4 had only one day with three inches, and 1901-2 and 1930-1 were the only two winters in which four inches of snow depth was not recorded. The data are less telling here, and recent drought winters (2000-1 and 2002-3 come to mind, as does 2004-5) for which the data are not complete may compete, but if the bare ground is getting you down, just repeat to yourself: it could be worse.

These data, too, we can view as charts. First, we have a chart of the number of days with at least so many inches of snow on the ground (click to expand).



Next, we have the same data, but in 11-year rolling averages for each depth, by number of days with at least that amount on the ground (click to expand).



What's interesting here are the peaks and valleys in snowfall, smoothed over the years, as well as the overall, long-term upwards trend (although the 2000-2004 years might pull recent data down, even as 2001-2 would pull it up). There was a peak in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and then a major drop-off before huge winters from the mid 1960s through early 1980s pushed the average number of days with at least two inches on the ground over 100, from below 60. And look at the 6 inch contour—from under 20 to nearly 80, a nearly fourfold difference! The long term variation is really quite amazing.

In any case, there's no telling what the current winter will bring. We're a bit late on setting the one-inch-or-more record (although we do have October 13 in our back pocket) but, with a snowstorm in the offing, we hopefully won't fall in to the wall of shame. We'll take a look back in the spring when we revisit the climate series and look back on the winter that was. Until then, let the trail reports fly!

(And the usual disclaimer: IANAM—I am not a meteorologist. Or climatologist. Oh, and the Excel file is up to 23 MB.)

Saturday, December 5, 2009

Storm speculation

For a while, the models have been hinting at a storm for the middle of next work. A big one. Three feet of snow in the mountains of Colorado, with the low then ejecting east across the Plains. At first, the models suggested that the snow would generally stay south of the Twin Cities, but recent model runs, while not changing the track significantly, have suggested that an inverted trough on the back side of the storm will sit in the Upper Midwest, setting down several inches of snow.

The National Weather Service is excited. With cold temperatures, they are preliminarily talking about seven or eight inches of snow. But they are excited because looking at analog patterns—similar situations in the past—show a storm from January of 1982, which dumped about a foot and a half of snow on the Twin Cities (one of two such storms in a three day period, leading to the greatest snow depth—38 inches—ever recorded, quite literally off the charts). But, even a foot and a half would be exciting enough!

(Again, no guarantees here; the NAM model is not biting to the same degree. We'll see.)

And, no Ironwood

Nine hours of driving didn't seem worth it for rock ski conditions.

Thursday, December 3, 2009

Going to Ironwood

Skiing, skiing and pasties. Saturday. Be there. Or be on manmade snow at Wirth. All is well in skiland, but all will be better if a storm shapes up for next week. Something is brewing on the latest GFS, as a storm is trending further and further west, but we'll watch for some continuity, first. Often, storms will trend west and then go back towards the mean. But not always. This one has potential.