It appears that several short waves at 500 mb will kick out of the developing trough along the west coast this week. These will bring more moutain snows to much of the West but stay north of Arizona. However, by 5 am next Monday morning both the GFS (top) and ECMWF (middle) operational models forecast a stong system to be over southern California. At this time the ECMWF is a bit deeper with this short wave/cutoff, but the interesting aspect of the forecasts is that the ECMWF forecasts a strong negative tilt that provides significant forcing for vertical motion over the Southwest. The GFS forecasts a positive tilt to the trough and tends to move it east-northeastward further north than does the ECMWF. The spaghetti chart for the GFS ensemble at 144-hours (bottom) indicates that the operational member is an outlier, lagging behind the other members that have the system further east. As usual, I expect that the ECMWF will perform better at 144-hours than will the GFS. At least something to watch for out on the horizon.
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Strange precipitation quirk - I was just looking back through my weather log and note that no month since October 2010 has had any precipitaion (not even a Trace) here at the house during its first half - and March has fit right into this pattern.
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