Hey guys I wanna check out those mysterious mountains to the west sometime soon but I cant find any weather info on them. Anyone got any idea where to look? Any weather stations up there? Or do you just extrapolate info from the wasatch/lehi/tooele?
Yes, MEJ, Mesowest is the best :headbang:, but for some reason the SNOTEL at Rocky Basin in Settlement Canyon (Elev: 8900 ft; Latitude: 40.44; Longitude: -112.22 ) doesn’t show up using Mesowest. It’s been doing that for a while so I just bookmarked the link I shared.
Edit: Looks like it’s working today 😳
FYI I had to play with the overlays and refresh a couple times to get it to show up.
The Settlement Canyon SNOTEL gives one a pretty good idea of what to expect in the upper reaches of Ophir Canyons. There’s some good skiing in the Middle and Southern Oquirrhs but lots of private property :ninja:
The key to getting the SNOTEL’s to show up is to click on “Time Options” on the left side of the page and change the “Reports in last:” tab to 3 hours or so. The reporting delay on the SNOTEL’s seems to be irregular and can cause them not to show up with a 1 hour window.
The Oquirrh’s got pounded last week with 3-4 inches of water equivalent. Way more than any station in the Wasatch. That seems to happen a time or two per year, not counting lake-effect events. If you really want to nerd out on snow data, this is the place to go, if you haven’t been there before: http://www.wcc.nrcs.usda.gov/snotel/Utah/utah.html
I’m a PhD student in Atmospheric Science, so I just make my own 8). I think the best regularly issued forecasts are the Wasatch forecasts here: http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/slc/snow/
So dr mej, it looks like since this last storm started sunday night, the rocky settlement station received twice the water eq as the brighton station(1.1 vs 0.5). They are both at similar elevations and experience similar temps during that span, although rocky settlement trended a bit higher. Can I assume that the oquirrhs received a similar amount, if not more snow that the cottonwoods/brighton?
I’m not a doctor yet. The Brighton SNOTEL has a reputation for being unrepresentative of what falls near Brighton. It often under-reports. The Collins site at Alta, the Snowbird SNOTEL, and the Brighton Crest weather station all indicate that the upper Cottonwoods got close to an inch of water. I think the snow amounts in the Southern Oquirrhs and Cottonwoods are probably comparable. I don’t ride in the Oquirrhs enough to know exactly how representative Rocky Basin-Settlement is of the snowfall in the area, but it seems quite accurate. It seems to correlate well with what the NWS radar indicates over the Oquirrhs.
Well for what its worth, I checked out Ophir canyon today. Whatever snow fell this week had settled to about 6-8 inches on WNW aspect I rode. It was still dry down to about 8500 ft though.
Cool place but you definately need to work a bit harder for your turns than in the cottonwoods.