The Weather Guy – A Busy Week of Weather

Wednesday:

The first of a series of fronts will move over the Snowy Mountains on Wednesday drawing cool air over the region allowing temperature to gradually drop. Initially, snow flurries will be confined to the peaks during the morning but the freezing level is expected to drop to around 1500m into the afternoon.

Up to 5cm of snow is expected, with some models suggesting slightly heavier totals, but as usual the upper slopes will see the most action due to the colder conditions at altitude (70% chance).

A weak high should build briefly on Thursday allowing the sun to make an appearance before the moisture makes a come back in the evening.

Friday:

With a cool airmass and moisture in the air, we can look forward to snow falling to around 1500m for first lifts on Friday morning, most likely easing as the morning wears on. Again, totals are in the order of up to 5cm, with one model calling for a touch more (70% chance).

Conditions should dry out into Saturday with gusty and fairly warm northwesterly winds filtering over the region ahead of the next cold front. This is pretty typical, you tend to see the warmest and windiest conditions directly ahead of a front, followed by a distinct drop in temperatures as the front moves overhead.

Sunday:

Sunday’s system is looking like the most significant of the coming week and should deliver a good amount of moisture as the airmass cools.

Timing is everything though. At first, as precipitation is falling, the temperature only looks cold enough for snow above 1700m but as conditions cool off the freezing level will drop to around 1400m-1500m.

All up, the peaks have the potential to see up to 10cm, potentially more if the moisture from the western slopes can make it up and over the ranges. Obviously the lower slopes aren’t likely to perform as well as a proportion of this moisture will fall as rain, but at least we should see some good consolidating snow falls on Monday to low levels (60% chance).

By this time next week we will be…

In the classroom:

The snow level dropped lower than forecast this week… why? 

It’s a really good question that could be put down to a few things: Firstly, poor performance by temperature models could be to blame, but I think that’s a bit of a cop out. Local effects can come into play with local topography wind direction over expanses of snow on the Kosciuszko Plateau having a pretty big influence. Most of the time, global forecasting models don’t pick up on these small scale intricacies that are unique to our corner of the world. Otherwise, diurnal temperature fluctuations (the variation of temperatures between day and night) could be the culprit, for example if precipitation was to fall in the same conditions during the very early morning, it would have more chance of falling to the village compared to mid-afternoon.

Perhaps it could be a combination of all of the above, but in all honesty it comes down to experience as a forecaster and I’m glad to say that I’m learning a lot!