Looks like snow has almost come to end across the area now, with reports of 3-6 inches across the foothills, and 1-4 across the Metro area, so a little more snow than models were predicting yestrday. Arctic fronts are always difficult to predict snow amounts from. Tonight we will see very cold temps near or slightly below zero most areas, with some strong northerly winds, so very cold wind chills. Strongest winds will be east of I-25 though.
We should see a quick warm up Thursday through this coming weekend, with temps back to above normal by the weekend. Our current storm will move into the Midwest and western Great Lakes Thursday, and then the eastern Great lakes and Northeast on Friday.
Long range models are now indicating a major global upper level pattern change. We currently have 4 major long wave troughs (Rossby Waves) around the globe, which has featured our upper level ridge along the West Coast. Models are indicating that the pattern will shift to a 5 wave pattern over the next 7-10 days. The upper ridge along the west coast will be replaced by an long wave trough by the end of next week, with the upper ridge retrograding to the northwest into eastern Siberia. The impact from this to CO weather will be to have an increased westerly flow from the eastern Pacific into CO which will bring some much needed snow to the mountains west of the Divide. For the foothills, this will mean strong westerly winds (Chinooks) with occassional snows moving across the area.
In the immediate forecast, models now indicate snow possible in western CO on Monday, with a slight chance for light snow across the foothills and Metro area later in the day on Monday. The rest of next week looks mild and mostly dry across CO until Pacific storms begin to impact CO, which looks like late next week or weekend.
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"Climatology is what you expect, Weather is what you get".
"It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong".
Too bad future generations aren't here to see all the great things we are spending their $$ on!!
