South Rockies

We do not have much information from this region. If you have been out in the mountains, please send your observations to [email protected]

Poor - Due to the number and quality of field observations

An upper trough has been moving from Northwest to Southeast across the interior ranges today. This trough is expected to exit into the prairies overnight after leaving about 5-10 mm of precipitation. The precipitation should be snow to the valley bottoms at the beginning of the storm and become rain or freezing rain up to about 1500 metres. A ridge of high pressure will move in behind the trough bringing gradual clearing and cooler air for Sunday. The next system is forecast to move onto the South coast from the Southwest on Monday. This system looks wet for the lower mainland, but so far models do not show it pushing very much moisture into the interior. Areas in the South along the US border, and the Southeast corner near Fernie may get the most out of this system, but so far that is only expected to be 5- 10 mm of rain at lower elevations, or about 5-15 cm of snow at higher elevations. The Southwest flow looks like it will become more intense on Tuesday; warm, wet, and windy is the word so far, stay tuned for more info.

No avalanche activity reported. Have you seen anything recently?

There is at least one, maybe more, problematic layers in the South Rockies snowpack. Last weekends 30 - 60cm of storm snow buried a weak layer of facets over a crust which formed during November's dry spell. That interface is probably around a meter down now. Not much is known about the reactivity of this layer, nor the slab above it. But, it doesn't take much of a leap of faith to understand that a meter deep slab sitting on a persistent weak layer is a potentially bad thing.