By Kathryn Reed

Put away the shorts and bring out the long pants. All the flesh that has been visible in the Lake Tahoe Basin has to do with record highs being set. But winter temps are returning.

South Lake Tahoe was 61 degrees on Feb. 24. This broke the previous record of 59 set in 1995.

Apparently 1995 was a warm February as well because the high on Feb. 23 of 56 degrees tied the record of 17 years ago.

Waves like these near Tahoe City on Feb. 15 will be the norm today on Lake Tahoe. Photo/Kathryn Reed

Reno by contrast has not been much warmer than Tahoe. The high on Friday was 64 degrees.

But things have already changed with a cold front having started to blow in last night. Today’s high in South Lake Tahoe is expected to be 45, then 37 on Sunday and 28 on Monday.

A wind advisory is in effect until 10 this morning for Tahoe, Truckee, Carson City and the Reno areas. This means gusts of 50 mph, with ridgetops being whipped twice as hard.

A couple inches of snow may fall in the basin Sunday night into Monday.

“It’s not looking good for any big winter storms coming up,” Alex Hoon, meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Reno, told Lake Tahoe News.

February has been super dry throughout California and Nevada. It’s so bad that water officials have scaled back allocations to farmers and others who rely on reservoir storage from the North State.

Exactly how bad things are will be calculated Feb. 28 at the next snow survey.

Most yards in Tahoe are showing more grass or dirt than snow. People with bikes are coming into town, when normally it’s only skiers and snowboarders who are here.

While the Weather Service only has precipitation records for South Lake Tahoe that date to 2000, in that time the average has been 1.93 inches for February. So far this February 0.38 inches have been tallied.

In Tahoe City, where records date to the early 1900s, the normal February is 5.27 inches of precip. To date there have been 0.31 inches.

Hoon said it is wishful thinking to believe a dry February will bring a wet March. That’s not to say March will be dry, but he said don’t bank on March being a miracle.

A storm is sitting off the coast that is expected to arrive Wednesday that could bring a foot of snow to ski resorts. This would be welcome as most ski areas still don’t have 100 percent of their terrain open.