Cool fronts today and Wednesday
Sunday, September 8, 2019
This beautiful and sunny Sunday morning in Steamboat Springs will give way to an active weather afternoon and evening as a storm currently in the Great Basin travels across our area today. Cooler and quieter weather will follow early in the work week before a colder, but drier, storm brings an additional round of active weather through the area on Wednesday. Cooler weather and mostly sunny skies should follow for the rest of the work week and the following weekend.
The approaching storm is currently producing rain showers in Salt Lake City ahead of the cold front moving through eastern Nevada. Clouds will increase later this morning with showers starting around mid-afternoon and continuing through the evening, before they end by around midnight after the cool front passes through.
Monday should feel fall-like with sunny skies and high temperatures several degrees below our average of 75 F. Tuesday will start sunny and cool, with frost possible in the lowest-lying areas before we see increasing clouds and the possibility of an afternoon or evening shower ahead of the next colder, but drier, storm moving across the Great Basin.
The cold front associated with the storm will move through northern Colorado later in the day Wednesday, bringing cooler temperatures and increasing showers and that will last through the afternoon and some of overnight. I would consider this our first fall front of season due to the structure of the storm and the likelihood of snowfall dusting the higher peaks on Thursday morning.
And accordingly, low temperatures on Thursday and Friday will be the coldest of the season so far, with frost likely on Thursday and freezing temperatures on Friday as the mercury dips five to ten degrees below our average of 37 F. So those late-blooming and barely mature plants of the summer will have to be protected to prolong the incredibly short growing season this year.
But we should see plenty of sun later Thursday and Friday which should persist through the weekend, with high temperatures rising from below normal on Thursday to around normal on Friday.
An additional storm develops in the Gulf of Alaska midweek and pushes onshore around Vancouver late in the work week. Any precipitation from the storm is forecast to be to our north, though we may see some cooler, but still likely dry air sink over our region during the weekend. The main effect will be the windy westerly winds that are forecast to develop over much of the west as the Vancouver storm mixes with some cold air from the northern latitudes of western Canada through the weekend.
