Greetings BirkieGuide readers!
We haven’t posted many updates for Birkie 2025 yet because, amongst other things, there haven’t been that many. Word on the street from podcastland (apple, spotify) is that the goal is Birkie 2023, with good snow and a Main Street finish (and hopefully, for me, no “norovirus a week before”). Having said that, there are contingencies in place for lower snow including long loops on the north end (to OO on the skate trail and back on the classic trail) or a longer-than-last-year snowmaking loop. No one is hoping for that.
This page has also engaged in weather speculation in the past and this year will be no exception! First, you should listen to our podcast with Ketzel Levens from a few weeks ago; it’s not very current but a) we will have more recordings with her soon and b) it gives a good overview of what’s gone on so far.
What’s new since then? Well, the trail got a bit more snow, enough to ski but not enough for 10,000 people to ski. There are a couple of warm days in the 30s this week, which may actually be beneficial to transform the top layer of snow, with potentially some snow this weekend. Looking ahead there are a couple of resources to keep an eye on:
Current status: cold and moist (very good!)
Current status: cold to normal temps, normal moisture.
The European weekly guidance (temperature, precipitation)
Current status: mostly normal
This is fine, because normal snowfall for the next three weeks is about 8″, which would be plenty.
A word on how weather models work and why this really is speculation and if you see a model run with 21″ of snow over the next two weeks, or another which is bone dry, don’t get too excited and/or despondent. Weather models break the entire global atmosphere into a three-dimensional grid and have observations for everywhere in that grid, although some areas have more data than others (whether from surface observations, marine observations, airplane observations, weather balloons, satellite observations, etc). These create a set of initiation conditions which the model then interprets and spits out an operational model run of what it thinks will happen (there are shorter and longer range models run by different agencies, but they all do about the same thing). However, the modelers know that there can be initiation error for these models, given that a lot of the data gathered is far from complete, so each model also comes with an “ensemble” which perturbs the initial data (proverbially, flaps the butterfly’s wings) and with multiple models there are dozens of model runs per cycle, and several cycles per day, so hundreds of ensemble runs per day. As I write this, the mean snowfall for the GEFS ensemble for the next 16 days for Hayward is 8″ which is, well, about what you’d expect given the time of year. The very long and very short of it is that you can look at all the models you want right now, but there are no signals for particularly warm weather in the next few weeks, so as long as there’s some snow, we should be in pretty good shape.
I’ll work on another podcast episode with Ketzel, it’s probably time!
Finally, I’ll remind folks that there is a Patreon for this page and this year, if we can get 10 new members (8 to go) we’ll get novelty cowbells for the Birkie. I think we need at least a week of lead time for this if we want them for Birkie itself, so consider this a kickstarter and get on it (there’s a minimum order size). If this works, we’ll get thank you gifts in the future, and you can join for as little as $1 per month. And if anyone wants to create a Cowbell Fever logo, let me know.