Basecamp Podcast: Meteorologist Tim Kelley

Meteorologist Tim Kelley joined the Basecamp Podcast shortly after the first flakes of the season started to fly on Mount Washington.

It should go without saying that skiers and riders need to be a little weather savvy. Every year, we’re dropping big bucks on gear, passes and lodging and keeping an eye to the sky can help us get the most bang for those bucks.

Being near the ocean can mean one ski area being a mix of snow and rain while another area 20 miles away being all snow, and how much of a difference a couple degrees can make for snowmakers.

Shortly after the first snowflakes of the season started flying on Mount Washington, New England Ski Journal Basecamp Podcast hosts Mike Specian and Keith Pearson had meteorologist Tim Kelley on the podcast to discuss the weather, how he got his popular blog on the Jay Peak website and what he’s been up to recently.

He’s passionate about both meteorology and skiing (surfing, too) and has never been shy about sharing his opinions on either of them.

(Keith Pearson is the editor of the New England Ski Journal. He can be reached at [email protected].)

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Highlights

On how much forecasting has changed over the years

“The computer models have gotten so much better, much higher resolution. It’s like, imagine, the McDonald’s when you were a kid, you knew you wanted a Big Mac or a cheeseburger or whatever. It was very simple to order, and you just went in and you ordered, and that’s how it used to be in the weather. We had the LFM and the NGM, so you just went in, you looked at the LFM and the NGM, and they went out 48 or 60 hours.

“Now, I’m not sure about McDonald’s because I haven’t been there in a long time, but now you go into the weather models, and there are dozens of models. We’ve got all different resolutions; high resolution, mid resolution, global resolution. And you could just start at 7 a.m. looking at all the guidance and by the time you got to your newscast at say 9 a.m., it’s all new again, and it’s so hard to contain it all. So you got to really just focus on what you want to look at and not become obsessed with every different model run.”

Explaining the Jay Cloud 

“If that (coastal) storm can get just east of Maine over Quebec and slow down and cut off at upper levels, that creates a circulation, and there’s always cold air on the backside of those things – 95 percent of the time. And so what happens is the, call it an occluded low, an old low stalls out. It stops snowing at Sunday River, it stops snowing at Wachusett, but it’s just ramping up at Jay Peak.

“If you can get arctic air and instability, that is say the temperature in Mount Washington is like 20 below zero and in the valleys it’s close to 25. That’s a 45-degree temperature gradient, that’s very unstable. And so you get the moisture coming from north of Bermuda around this upper level low and it comes westward across Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and then it comes south off the plains of Quebec and the first elevated area it hits after that is Jay Peak. The air goes up and it condenses all the moisture, and because it’s such an unstable atmosphere, it can snow two, three inches an hour. Of course, usually it’s a 25 miles an hour wind and a temperature of zero degrees. So you’ve got to put up with that, but that’s the machine. That’s the Jay Peak snow machine.”

(This is just a piece of it, it starts at 15:35.)

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