Chatting with folks back home we’ve heard more than one comment about the (relative) lack of snow so far this year.

The past couple of winters have brought heavy, lingering snowpacks that changed the fly fishing dynamic throughout much of the northern Rockies and with another La Nina in place this winter, the forecast has been for more of the same.

A friend from Bozeman has been banging around in the hills after mountain lion this past week and told Jake there’s been very little low and mid-level snow around for weeks now. Southwest Montana ski resorts are partially open with skimpy bases (Bridger is reporting 25” of settled base this morning with an opening temp of 34 – impressive).

We hadn’t taken a look at any of the more detailed weather / climate predications in a while, so I did of bit of digging today.

First question – is La Nina still in place? From the NWS’s Climate Prediction Center, yep, it is, though this season’s La Nina ain’t as robust as last year’s. From their 8 December 11 (the most current) update:

A majority of the models predict a weak or moderate strength La Niña to continue through the Northern Hemisphere winter (Fig. 6) and then gradually weaken after peaking during the December – January period.  The models are roughly split between those that predict La Niña to remain weak (3-month average in the Niño-3.4 region between -0.5 and -0.9oC) and those that predict a stronger episode. Over the last half-century, La Niña events that were preceded by ENSO-neutral conditions during the Northern Hemisphere summer (May-August) were less likely to attain strong amplitude (stronger than –1.5oC) the following winter. This observation, in combination with the model forecasts, favors a weak-to-moderate strength La Niña during the Northern Hemisphere winter, likely weakening with the onset of northern spring.

As to current snowpack / snowcover, here’s the snapshot for today….

Here’s the precipitation and temperature forecast for January / February / March…..

And the precipitation and temperature forecast for March / April / May…..

There’s still a lot of snowpack build yet to come…..

Tags: Weather

Back in the office after an early morning strategy meeting with some of our real world business team and lo and behold, there’s some weather moving in.

There’s even a little lightning starting to pop and thunder rolling…..a longer post about fishing (and other) news from Yellowstone will have to wait….our power tends to fail when it’s too hot, too windy or raining.

Jake’s headed out on Thursday with some of the Orvis crew to fish the Guadalupe; it would be ironic as hell to have the biggest rain event we’ve seen in months put fishing off for a few days…..

Tags: Weather

A few days ago I mentioned how impressed we were to see the amount of snow still down in the southern part of Yellowstone over the past few days.  South of Old Faithful bison were still choosing the road to mosey.

Looking at today’s snowpack maps from NOHRSC there’s still a hell of a lot of snow down in the western half of Montana, the Yellowstone area (bottom right hand corner of the maps) and northern Idaho.  Wow.

Flows are gonna be humming along for some time.  Deep sigh.

Tags: Weather

Overall things look a bit better than a week ago.

While river flows are screaming, the widespread, heavy soaking rains haven’t been falling lately. Even with showers forecast for much of the area the next few days, most folks don’t feel like they need to finish the ark they started a few weeks ago.

Snowpack numbers remain damned impressive as you can see from the graphics compiled this morning from the NOAA site. Still lots of water in the hills, though they now have a melt rate graphic available (the third image below) which shows that with summer sun (well, sort of) the melt is on.

The snowpack depth and water equivalent is damned impressive in and around Yellowstone (the lower right hand corner of the next three images).

River flows are screaming as you’d expect given the warm up in temperatures.

Missouri River sources are really cooking right now – the Jefferson is running at record flows as is the Madison above Hebgen and the Gallatin is running quite high but not at record rates.

Flows on the beloved Firehole are running away yet again.

Those in the know continue to suggest we’d better get used to it for a while.

Tags: Inquiring Minds Want to Know

Speaking with friends and enemies back home in Montana, it’s painfully clear that winter was painfully long for most of the state (you can see snow is still falling this morning in some areas).

It’s also crystal clear that flood waters are doing much more than inconveniencing fly fishers;  parts of the state are being battered and damaged by rising water.

Many of the old timers we’ve spoken with lately are impressed with how widespread the flooding has been;  there’s been a lot of head scratching at how many rivers in the state and region are busting at the seams right now.  You can access the portal below here and click on any river gage station (each colored dot) for a more detailed reading of flows, depths and other time-wasting nuggets of minutiae.  Dark blue dots represent rivers running at “much above normal” and black dots represent “we’re gonna need a bigger boat” water.

Ran across this interesting graphic / portal this morning while digging up information for this post….here’s a portal that allows you to develop an animation to look at recorded river flows around the country.  Impressive technology and fascinating to see flows change over time.  The Mountain West and the land of the Californicators are particularly impressive when you look at the past few weeks.  The animation packet isn’t exportable so I can’t plug one into the blog here, but it’s easy to set up if you want to run one yourself.

One of the hot topics of interest, besides how much more rain might fall over the next month or so, is how much snowpack is left up in them thar hills?

The short answer is a hell of a lot, and not just in the Greater Yellowstone Region.  The snowpack is astoundingly deep for this time of year in the neighborhood, the intermountain west and even along parts of the left coast.  From May 1, the next graphic shows an impressive late season snow pack;  it’s even more impressive to consider that feet of snow have fallen since then (1 May) in the Greater Yellowstone region and in much of Montana.

There is not a snowpack map formatted with all the pretty colors like the one above available for any time interval after 1 May (that I can find this morning anyway), though I did find current maps of snow depth and more importantly snow water equivalent as of today.  (Useful though not as pretty / graphically clean as the graphic above.)

Bottom line, lots and lots of water in the hills yet to come out.

There will be lots of fishing to do this year, tailwaters will of course recover first (and aren’t fishing terribly right now), and insect seasons in years past after flood years have been astounding.

Tags: Inquiring Minds Want to Know

Rain and snowpack melt are starting to make things interesting……

Tags: Weather

The runoff season begins in earnest….

Tags: Weather

Gina Loss, a National Weather Service hydrologist in Great Falls, projects that this year’s runoff in Montana, at least Western Montana, will be “sensational”.

A potent weather system has pounded southwestern and southern Montana this weekend with rain and snow. The pic to the right from this morning’s NWS forecast site out of Missoula confirms that a winter storm is pounding the high country in southwestern Montana today.

Summer can be a long time coming.

Digging a little deeper into the snowpack data, here’s an interesting graphic below from the NRCS site detailing snowpack around the state – updates from this weekend’s storm may not be included as of this morning. (SWE is snow water equivalent.)

Weather over the next few weeks will be key; a rapid ‘warm-up’ or lots of rain will be messy; a cooler late spring will ease the flood risk but prolong runoff high water for weeks.

Tags: Weather

The Greater Yellowstone area has been a magnet for the world’s fly fisher folk for decades.

We’d probably go as far to agree wholeheartedly with our friend John Juracek that the area serves as a mecca of sorts in the fly fishing world – at some point in their life most fly fishermen are moved to visit the place and fish its waters.

(If John’s name doesn’t ring a bell, he co-founded Blue Ribbon Flies with Craig Matthews in West Yellowstone, is a master at the vise and even more so behind the camera.)

Over the past few years we’ve had the pleasure of interacting with folks from every continent about fishing in the area.  Damn, who knew that posting random thoughts about fly fishing on a blog would bring the world knocking?

Most folks fire a casual email with a question or two and we never hear from them again; now and again we’ll find someone with whom the conversation stretches out a bit longer.

One such newfound friend has been Peter T. from Brisbane;  he’s a photographer we interacted with on a project a couple of years ago.  We’ve continued to correspond over the ensuing months  and still chat about fishing together ‘some day’.

Peter bristled a couple of years back when I posted a somewhat lighthearted post poking fun at anthropogenic global warming (AGW) ‘believers’.   (Posted on our old site – no link!)

Peter was much more polite than the scores of other critics that crawled out of the woodwork to bash my opinion – he said I was another typical American dumbass, blah, blah, blah – and regurgitated fairly typical and unscientific blatherings about the theory of AGW.

Peter pointed out that several ‘sophisticated’ blog readers had commented that the debate over AGW was done and settled as the New York Times had posted the definitive opinion on the matter – no further consideration required.

Turns out Peter has a bit of a science background and appears to have been using it to sift through some of the factual data available.

His climate perceptions have changed 180 degrees – he sent a link to this article from yesterday’s Sydney Morning Herald.  He went on to relate he’d been following the scientist referenced in the article, Piers Corbyn, for some time and suggested I give his website a look.

Here’s how Corbyn was introduced in the article -

Actually, they did. Allow me to introduce readers to Piers Corbyn, meteorologist and brother of my old chum, bearded leftie MP Jeremy. Piers Corbyn works in an undistinguished office in Borough High Street. He has no telescope or supercomputer. Armed only with a laptop, huge quantities of publicly available data and a first-class degree in astrophysics, he gets it right again and again.

Back in November, when the Met Office was still doing its “mild winter” schtick, Corbyn said it would be the coldest for 100 years. Indeed, it was back in May that he first predicted a snowy December, and he put his own money on a white Christmas about a month before the Met Office made any such forecast. He said that the Met Office would be wrong about last year’s mythical “barbecue summer”, and he was vindicated. He was closer to the truth about last winter, too.

He seems to get it right about 85 per cent of the time and serious business people – notably in farming – are starting to invest in his forecasts. In the eyes of many punters, he puts the taxpayer-funded Met Office to shame. How on earth does he do it? He studies the Sun.

Corbyn’s site – WeatherAction – is an interesting read.   He’s been astoundingly accurate in his predictions.

To this fly fishing yank it seems most ironic that the most objective discussions of the issue take place in the foreign press – the UK and Australian press particularly of late.

At least in their minds – despite what the NYT and Al Gore have decreed, the science – the hard, observational data – detailing AGW is far, far from settled.   This fly fishing yank would have to agree.

I’m dreaming of a white Christmas.  Might just happen this year.

Tags: Weather

The last several days my fishing colleagues and I have chatted a time or two about the dramatic reports of snow-induced travails of those living along the eastern seaboard.

The media has portrayed a couple of feet of snow as an almost apocalyptic event, paralyzing the cities and and painting a broad stripe of hardship across a fairly impressive expanse of geography and culture.

Not that anyone gives a hoot in hell, but we call bullshit and say send the snow out to our neighborhood – we’d love to have it piling up on the neighborhood peaks.

Ed reminds me this morning that we had a two foot snow fall late last fall here in Bozeman that didn’t even grant local school kids late arrival that morning, and there sure as hell wasn’t a shapely Weather Channel info-babe assigned to cover our struggles……(Montana for the most part remains invisible on the national news radar – a fact which grants the majority of her residents quiet pleasure).

There is a bit more sincere grumbling about the snowpack being offered up by the locals – it’s pretty skinny for this time of year.  Here’s the latest from the Snotel site this morning per watershed…..

It’s easy to tell that no watershed is in great shape (save for the Smith et al) right now, and the Bitterroot and Clark Fork look really skinny.

The short term climatology forecasts don’t exactly offer a great deal of encouragement at this point in time – here are the temp and precip forecasts for the nation for March-April-May.  Looks like El Nino is still in charge….

We’re putting our money on an early and very fishable spring season for the neighborhood with a skinny water summer and fall.  Hope I’m wrong.

Tags: Weather

The first week of January almost inevitably finds lots of fly fisher folk itchy to get out and stretch after the holiday season.

This year in particular finds me among that cadre – the past six weeks or so (since Thanksgiving) have been the busiest in memory and it’s been damned cold around the neighborhood.

The penetrating cold persisted until about a week ago and has fostered the development of lots of shore and anchor ice, and filled many of the area’s typically December fishable waters with slush more days than not.

Warmer temps in the high twenties and thirties, seemingly almost shirt-sleeve weather if the wind isn’t blowing, have enticed a few of us onto the Gallatin and up to the Madison between the lakes of late.

Fishing has been about what you’d expect this time of year, but the snowpack we’ve seen around the neighborhood has not.

Thanks to a snowy late November and early December here in Bozeman, followed by weeks of cold, we’ve got as much snow on the ground as almost anywhere in the region, and it’s spitting snow right now this morning with several inches forecast for the next day or so.

On the other hand, snow cover is pretty skinny just a few miles in almost any direction you care to travel from here.

A look at SNOTEL’s water equivalent chart today shows that most Montana watersheds are behind normal for this time of year (orange and red bars indicate less than 90% of normal snowpack for this time of year)…

More than one friend and neighbor has noted with chagrin that this winter feels like it’s going to be a dry year, particularly when compared to the well above average snowpack winters we’ve had the past two years.  Subjective as it may be, the old-timers seem to have a true knack for knowing what’s coming weather wise.

NOAH’s climatology scientists seem to agree – the three month forecasts for temp and precip look dry and warm for the region.  If that’s the case, it’ll be Blue Wings in March and Mother’s Day Caddis shouldn’t be buried in runoff this year…..

The quarterly forecast does make me wonder a bit about that March Texas redfish trip we have planned……

Tags: Weather

Damn, missing the season already.

It was -7 in Bozeman this morning with some cold weather due for the weekend and next week.  Ouch.

Tags: Damn!

NOAA has recently posted information about what a cold October it was – here’s the link.

Before the onslaught of emails chiding our mere mention of global climatology – save the pixels and bandwidth – we’ve heard the pitch of how the climate is still heating up despite it seemingly getting cooler.  I’ll see your hyperventilating climate change expert and raise you two skeptical scientists.

Shifting gears – around the region we’ve had two winter seasons in a row with very, very impressive snow packs that have produced very fishable flows throughout the fishing season; hell, we’ve even had to deal with real run-off seasons these past two years.

Any chance of it happening again this year?  Not likely per the current climatology forecasts; the temperature and precip forecasts follow for the December / January / February timeline.  We’ve been tracking their predictions for the past several years and they’ve been astoundingly accurate.  I’m headed to the bookstore this evening and will check the Farmers’ Almanac.

Tags: Weather

Popped over the past to the Paradise Valley a couple of days ago to discuss a nifty new project concept (hot damn!) with a colleague; it happened to be Monday afternoon in the several hours before our latest little batch of weather moved in.

The beauty of the surrounding countryside is truly a two-edge sword; it’s a never ending distraction, offering a siren’s call every minute of the day to leave the pile of work on the desk behind and just get out and wander.  That can be a bad thing.  On the other hand, it’s a constant source of inspiration when pondering the great questions and opportunities that surface now and then.

As is often the case, the wind was howling down the valley – it was damned windy even for those of us who are used to it (I spend some of my early years in the Texas Panhandle where some spring days boasted of winds gusting in the 70-80 range).  Clearly the blog scale limits the resolution of the photos, but you can easily see the snow plumes blowing off the Crazies in the background – 25 miles away (or better) as the crow flies.

Starting to look like late fall / early winter around the neighborhood with snow showers knocking around the valley all morning.

Tags: Pic of the Day

A hearty welcome to the Fall season, though you probably wouldn’t know today is the autumnal equinox given the neighborhood weather.

Here’s to some cooler, cloudy, drizzly Blue Wing Olive fall days.

Wahoo.

Image credit:  redOrbit

Tags: Weather