The dry weather will continue through the weekend, with variable amounts of cloudiness throughout. Temperatures will climb into the low 70s on Friday with increasing clouds ahead of a dry cold front which will drop the highs back into the 60s on Saturday and Sunday. Another moderate storm system could dig down far enough on Monday to give us about a one in three chance of getting some rain showers in the valley with high mountain snow likely at the same time.

Yesterday, I mentioned that I look most intently at the weather in the central and eastern Pacific when trying to get a take on what’s coming our way. There are some exceptions to this: The far western Pacific can be of great interest. Often when we get a deepening low pressure over Japan it foretells a storm dropping over us about four days later. It doesn’t always work, but it’s not a bad rule of thumb. Back during the Nagano Olympic Games in 1998, it worked very well. I’d watch the live broadcast from the slopes, and if it snowed there, four days later it was snowing here. Surprisingly accurate and consistent.

I learned that trick from Tom Cylke, now retired from the National Weather Service. Tom wrote in to tell me that this method dates back to the 1950’s from a meteorologist named Hovmoller. It is only effective if the global long wave pattern is set up a certain way (which can be a challenge to determine in itself), but was quite a tool in the days before computer models and satellites.