What is this?

The plot on the right here shows accumulated snow for Crystal Mountain from the West-WRF ensemble from the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes at UC San Diego. West-WRF is an ensemble of 200 member models with 9km horizontal grid resolution (9km x 9km grid cells) run from October-March. It was developed primarily to forecast high-intensity winter precipitation (especially during atmospheric rivers) and recent studies have shown it to perform better than the GEFS (US) and as well or better than the ECMWF ensemble ( Delle Monache et al. 2025 ).

How to use:

Look at the range of the ensemble members (also called ensemble spread) to evaluate the uncertainty in the forecast. Larger spread implies lower confidence in the forecast.

Source:

https://cw3e.ucsd.edu/west-wrf_ensemble_meteograms ×

What is this?

The plot on the right here shows precipitation (rain + snow water equivalent) for Crystal Mountain from the West-WRF ensemble from the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes at UC San Diego. West-WRF is an ensemble of 200 member models with 9km horizontal grid resolution (9km x 9km grid cells) run from October-March. It was developed primarily to forecast high-intensity winter precipitation (especially during atmospheric rivers) and recent studies have shown it to perform better than the GEFS (US) and as well or better than the ECMWF ensemble ( Delle Monache et al. 2025 ).

How to use:

Look at the range of the ensemble members (also called ensemble spread) to evaluate the uncertainty in the forecast. Larger spread implies lower confidence in the forecast.

Source:

https://cw3e.ucsd.edu/west-wrf_ensemble_meteograms ×

What is this?

This image shows the ECMWF (European) ensemble forecast for freezing levels at Crystal Mountain (Puyallup River Watershed). Each light gray line represents a single model within the ensemble. Tightly spaced model lines imply high model agreement which can give us more confidence in the forecast while widely spaced lines mean higher uncertainty. It can be helpful to look at the ensemble mean (light green line) and the +/- 1 standard deviation ensemble spread (gray shading between red and blue lines) to better understand model uncertainty. The bar plot shows 6hr precipitation totals averaged across the whole watershed with colors representing what percentage of the watershed will see snow vs. rain during that time period.

Source:

https://cw3e.ucsd.edu/DSMaps/DS_freezing.html ×

What is this?

This image shows the GEFS (American) ensemble forecast for freezing levels at Crystal Mountain (Puyallup River Watershed). Each light gray line represents a single model within the ensemble. Tightly spaced model lines imply high model agreement which can give us more confidence in the forecast while widely spaced lines mean higher uncertainty. It can be helpful to look at the ensemble mean (light green line) and the +/- 1 standard deviation ensemble spread (gray shading between red and blue lines) to better understand model uncertainty. The bar plot shows 6hr precipitation totals averaged across the whole watershed with colors representing what percentage of the watershed will see snow vs. rain during that time period.

Source:

https://cw3e.ucsd.edu/DSMaps/DS_freezing.html ×