After a long, dry and hot summer over Alaska, something much more wintry arrived this morning. The first measurable SNOW in Fairbanks! While grassy surfaces saw a light dusting around town, roads were too warm for snow to stick and for appreciable amounts, you had to go outwith and into higher elevations but nonetheless, the first snowfall hit today and it’s early. The average first measurable snow isn’t until October 1, first trace, September 21.

Interestingly, if you head south into Canada and the Lower 48, the first significant snows have arrived over both the Canadian and Northern US Rockies also.

Check out this web cam shot from earlier Wednesday at Sunrise Village in Banff National Park, Alberta.

Here’s a shot from Big Sky, Montana.

As for the tropics, we have a reinvigorated Manuel as it re-enters warm and increasingly warmer waters. It’s been upgraded back up to tropical depression status as it enters the Gulf of California between the mainland and the southern end of the Baja. This system after bringing significant flooding to the Acapulco area will increase the flood or flash flood threat to the state of Sinaloa.

This was the scene from a couple of days ago in Acapulco.

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Here’s the current infrared imagery showing a much healthier looking Manuel as it hugs just off the west Mexico coast heading into the Gulf of California where waters are warmer.

Here’s the track graphic off AccuWeather.

As for the Atlantic, well we have a tropical trouble maker now heading into the Bay of Campeche in coming days and this feature (95L) has in fact an 80% chance of development over the next few days.

There is a LOT of uncertainty over this system but the models show large scale height falls throughout the Gulf and we have of course a pretty strong front sliding across Texas in which the tail needs to be watched. What I mean is, if you’ve got widespread lowering of pressure withy a system trying to develop, we need to watch that it doesn’t develop, connect with the west to east front sliding across the US and it picks up the system and takes it into somewhere such as Louisiana or Florida. Remember that the northern Gulf is all but untouched from tropical activity and so waters are very warm. You could have a situation in which the system develops, meanders around the western Gulf, gets picked up and as it gets transported into somewhere along the Gulf Coast, may continue to intensify.

The current infrared shows a very interesting looking system which looks like it may pop pretty quickly once completely off the Yucatan Peninsula. It’s heading into very warm waters

Modelling is pretty much all over the place with this right now but this could be a serious situation, especially given the front will pick up vast amounts of moisture from the Gulf and dump it over a broad area stretching from Texas perhaps all the way to the Carolinas over the next 5+ days.

Here’s the latest QPF.

Here’s the upper North America pattern as of today. Notice the system crossing the N Rockies with relatively low heights supporting snow over Montana and Wyoming above 7,000ft.

Here’s the surface chart

Now by the time we slip to 60 hrs or Saturday, notice the same system bringing snow and a chill to the Rockies currently has now deepened into a substantial 996mb storm over Hudson Bay area and has a potent, rain bearing front now soaking the Great Lakes all the way down to Texas. The East Coast remains dry still and ahead of the front, it heats up again.

By next Wednesday, the ECMWF 500mb chart shows a storm and deep trough over the West Coast, so heat gets pumped back up through the Plains, Midwest and possibly reaching the Northeast once again.

Had hoped to show some examples of the long range battle in the models for October but have ran out of time tonight. Will post on this tomorrow!

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Tags: first snow of season for Fairbanks, First snows arrive in Rockies, Montana snow, tropical storm manuel, Wyoming snow