Now the weather picture turns into a clear, calm and warmer pattern as a ridge of high pressure builds back over the Great Basin. After some below freezing mornings, sunny skies will bring our high temperature into the low-60s on Wednesday, the mid-60s on Thursday and up into the upper-60s Friday and Saturday. Another weak system will bring some clouds and cooling temperatures on Sunday, but at this point probably not any valley rain.

Yesterday I mentioned that while here in Reno we fell just short of a record October precipitation, the mountains didn’t fall short. According to Jeff Anderson at the NRCS, October precipitation set new records at many of the SNOTEL sites, with nearly all of them getting at least seven inches of precipitation, several getting more than a foot of water. At Ward Creek, on the west side of Lake Tahoe, they recorded a whopping 19.5 inches. As of now, these amounts already equal around a quarter of an entire snow year, although most of it fell as rain.

And while this still doesn’t mean we are in for a wet winter (we’ve seen the taps turn off before), it’s an awful nice start.