With an emphasis on little. But with most of the ski resorts in the country snow starved we’ll take what we can get. There will be a weak storm hitting the Pacfic NW on Friday bringing a few inches to the cascades. That storm will quickly drop South and East into Colorado on Saturday and moving out on Sunday. The storm will not have much moisture to work with but with the snow falling Saturday night and temps in the teen on the mountains the snow ratios will but high.
Here is the total precip forecast from the GFS model.
And here is the European model
The dark blue is a quarter to a half inch of liquid. At 30 degrees that would be around 3-6 inches of snow, and with temps in the teens you could double that with the high snow:water ratios. You can see that the Euro is a little bit more aggressive than the GFS with a wider swath, a few inches around Salt Lake, and some lighter blue near Steamboat which would mean a few extra inches. Not a big storm but 6-12 inches up in the upper elevations will help a little.
Here is the 48 hour snowfall forecast from Thursday afternoon which would not include what will fall Saturday night.
Behind the storm the ridge quickly builds back in with warming temps to start next week. The next cold trough drops down next Wednesday and could bring a similar storm to the one this weekend with several inches of snow for Colorado. Behind that the ridge looks like it will build back in the end of next week and into the weekend.
Meanwhile next week out off the West Coast the ridge will be shifting North and then a new ridge rebuilding out South of the Aleutian Islands. Forecast models show the ridge then building up over Alaska around mid-month and beyond. This would be a much different pattern then what we have had so far this Winter. We would see lots of cold pour into the Rockies beyond 10 days and storms finally begin to hit the West Coast and then progress into the Rockies. Should have a much better picture of what will happen next week. BA