The 2008-2009 winter sports season has gotten off to a fast start in the eastern half of the country, while the West has sputtered out of the blocks in most locations. This is due to the positioning of the jet stream, which has dipped into the Great Lakes and East most of the time since mid November. While arctic air has been in relatively short supply during most of that time, it has been sufficiently cold enough for significant snowmaking to get underway from the mountains of North Carolina to Quebec. The air that has descended out of Canada has been cold enough to interact with the relatively warm waters of the Great Lakes to such an extent that resorts downwind of Lakes Erie and Ontario have seen a good deal of early season natural snow. While there hasn’t been a major snowstorm in the East, aside from one in late October that melted away before it could be put to good use, there has been enough in the way of mountain snow to supplement the snowmaking effort and help with creating the appearance of winter. There are only a few natural snow trails sufficiently covered to allow skiing and snowboarding, but it won’t be long before the ropes will be dropped on many of the “runs without guns”.

While the eastern U.S. and eastern Canada have benefitted from a favorable flow from Canada, an upper level ridge has dominated the past few weeks in the West, and it has been warmer than normal over much of the other side of the continent. The Northwest has occasionally been hit by an incoming Pacific trough, but those systems have weakened as they moved inland as they encountered the upper level ridge parked over the Rockies. Read More