Ski Day :)

Yesterday I spent a day skiing with my brother and cousin at the Canyon's ski resort in Park City, Utah. If I were a rich man I would ski more often. Still, I manage to go every year and have a great time.

The resort got some new snow on Friday, but it was heavy and wet, especially on the north side of the resort. It was also pretty windy on the north side, so we skied on an unpleasant wind crust for the first few runs. From the Mesoanalysis, a type of weather model that describes the past weather, we can see the strong western winds we were experiencing on the mountain in the morning. This map shows an analysis for the 700 mb level, which is about the height of the mountain peaks. Wind speed and direction are indicated by the orange wind flags. Each full flag represents about 5 mph, so the winds across Utah are between 15 and 20 mph. The time of this analysis is 15z, or 8:00 am MST, two hours before we started skiing.

Mesoanalysis

The weather station at the Canyons also shows that it was windy, mostly blowing from the west. It also warmed up pretty nice by mid-day. The red box shows the approximate time we were are the resort.

MesoWest.utah.edu

The later half of the day we found much better snow on the south side of the resort. The south side is shaded from the sun and the thicker tree cover shielded the runs from strong winds.

kbkb (c) 2014