With ths latest wave of cold fronts and snow we thought it was time to look at the long term seasonal forecast as predicted at JMA, one of our favourite weather sites. We have posted some screen captures below but what do these tell us?
A few picture from the first snow on Annupuri and Iwaonupuri on 8 October 2016 and first real snow on Yotei for the season.
In the Iast few days we had about 10cm down at village level here in Annupuri with 17cm recorded in Kutchan on the 11th of April. This snowfall brings our recorded snowfall to 1044cm and stretches the seasons snowfall to the 12th of April at base level, 4 days later than last year and a quite a few days more than the year before, you will need to go here to check that out.
we are still playing catch up with 146cm in 7 days but things are on track. check our niseko snowfall chart here to get an idea of how it compares to the last 2 seasons.
With North West to WNW winds straight off Siberia for most of the week we should get another 50cm at least over the next 168 hours , that's 7 days, small daily top ups with a few clear days here and there. check metvew if you interested in looooking at isobars and synoptic charts.
just a quick note to document the change in the forecast for Sunday morning from 3 days ago, check the top image screen captured just now with the one in our last post below it. will still get snow tonight but maybe not what we had so boldly predicted.
with both snow forecast and one of our favourite sites metvew both showing big snow Saturday night and Sunday we are pretty confident in posting this, out guess would be 50cm to 1m over those days so let see if we can do catch up! Slightly behind as our snow graph is showing.
with no snow for over a week now and rain last night we headed up to Goshiki Onsen again to check on the snow base up there.
measuring at the same spots as last time, the base measusred in at 84cm so slightly up on the last measurements of 70cm. check the images below for a comaparison of snow coverage or check the links below.
here is the link to our last check 1 week and 6 days ago.
here is a link to November 25th check (~3 weeks ago)
with the rain the other day, which is quite normal btw. we thougth it might be interesting to see how el Nino weather patterns may effect the coming winter and early winter which has already passed. In visitng JMA kutchan snowfall records we took a snap shot of the data (http://www.data.jma.go.jp/obd/stats/etrn/view/monthly_s3_en.php?block_no...) and compared if with the last strong el Nino which was '97 - '98.
with a week passed since out last check at Goshiki Onsen and 50cm of recorded snowfall in Annupuri the snow base up at Goshiki now measures 70cm.
Today ii was 4˚C and raining up at Goshiki, but this will do very little to a snowpack of 70cm. Snow in the forecast at Niseko town level over the next few days so upper mountain is looking good for this time of year.
images below taken at same spots as last week, you can see the snowbanks are growing, check here for last week.
Yesterday, November 25th, we decided to go back up to Goshiki to see how much snow had fallen up higher on the mountain. With about 28cm at our check point in Annupuri recorded over 2 days we were wondering how much had settled in up in Goshiki. What we measure was about 32cm, note that this is settled snow and that our measurements was over 2 seperate days of freshly fallen snow.
We also took a couple of picture to compare to when we were up there on the 23rd of November , you can check that here.
