Another brilliantly colored dawn on Saturday as another dry weekend arrives.
While the eastern half of the country is being hammered by wild weather, Western Nevada remains dry as high pressure has barred the storm track door.
“Expect warm afternoons and chilly mornings with occasional mountain breezes and valley inversions,” National Weather Service Meteorologist Dustin Norman said on Saturday morning. “The next chance for some sort of precipitation, however, will not arrive until the middle of the month.”
While some high cloudiness brought a beautiful sunrise on Saturday, it should clear by lunchtime as a light breeze pushes it east.
Norman said there’s the slightest hint of an indication in the models that a slider-storm could arrive in mid-February bringing precipitation.
“Spoiler alert: it wouldn’t be much even if it did develop and move through at a favorable trajectory,” he said. “Nevertheless, we need to hang our hat on something, so let’s take what we can get.”
February is typically a pretty solid moisture producer, but so far 2022 has racked up a big goose egg for precipitation.
As of Saturday, it has been 35 days since the last moisture fell in Minden, where records have been kept since 1906.
During that time, the only February to see zero precipitation was 2013. In 114 years of record keeping there has never been both a January and February in Carson Valley that has gone without precipitation, though 2013 came close with only .32 inches for the first two months of the year.
More concerning is the lack of snow in the Sierra during the first weeks of 2022. While December saw record snowfall in places, January was a stark contrast with almost nothing across the Sierra.
