A sunny and mild Saturday will give way to an Easter Sunday that will likely stay dry, but will start to get windy in the afternoon ahead of a series of moderate storms coming in early next week. High temperatures Saturday will drop a bit but still reach the low 60s before warming into the mid to upper 60s Sunday. But late Sunday night into Monday morning, an “Inside Slider” type of storm will drop out of the north, bringing a chance of snow all the way to the valleys perhaps in time for the Monday morning commute. These types of storm system are notoriously difficult to predict, but can put a quick inch or two down if they hold together. Unsettled and cool weather sticks around through mid-week before things warm back up by the weekend.

 

Jerry asks: “How far west do you look to get a handle on upcoming weather? It does appear that as weather moves east the highs and lows don’t disappear… they just sort of dance around each other. So it seems reasonable that looking west like at China or Russia and looking at their stuff you might see what’s soon to be in our back yard.”

If you really want to get technical, I look all around the globe (at least the entire northern hemisphere), since the whole atmosphere is interconnected. But I look most intently at what is going on from here out into the central Pacific, and less so at the rest of the Pacific.

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.

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.