Rubicon Peak and area wide cloud cover observations.

We toured the N side of Rubicon Peak this morning and got a good handle on lingering storm snow, the state of buried near surface facets, and cloud cover thickness across the forecast area. Traveling the NW-N-NE slopes of Rubicon Peak, we found a fairly evenly distributed 4" of recent storm snow holding between our starting elevation of 6,800' and our highpoint of 9,100'. Any northerly aspects steeper than about 15-20 degrees had yet to undergo any snow surface melt.

Spot probing and hand pits targeting the buried Feb 14 near surface facet layer showed the crust/facet sandwich that exists on many wind protected and semi wind protected northerly aspects around the forecast area. The facet layer we saw today was not particularly weak in the Rubicon Peak area. It is notably stronger than what we observed yesterday on Waterhouse Peak.

From up on Rubicon Peak , we could see that cloud cover was quite thick over all of the forecast area up until about 10:45 am. By 11:30, could cover had thinned significantly over the northern portion of the forecast area. Cloud cover appeared to remain much thicker over the southern portion of the forecast area, thinning at a much slower rate. Prior to 10:30 am, cloud cover was thick enough to drastically block incoming long wave radiation and drastically limit snow surface melt.