Gorgeous weather to arrive for most of the Labor Day Weekend
Thursday, August 28, 2025
Temperatures are in the comfortable low seventies with partly cloudy skies this Thursday mid-afternoon in Steamboat Springs. Including Sunday, it has rained every day this week, with more expected later this afternoon and Friday before we see warming and drying for the long Labor Day Weekend, with temperatures rising to near eighty degrees on a mostly sunny Monday.
A ridge of high pressure to our south is flanked by a deep area of low pressure extending southward from the Great Lakes and another off the West Coast extending southward from a storm in the Gulf of Alaska that is approaching the Pacific Northwest coast. Additionally, a tropical disturbance has migrated northward from off the coast of Baja, merging with the southern end of the eastward-moving low pressure off the West Coast to bring another round of likely showers to our area on Friday.
Including the rainfall from the cell that moved overhead last night, about six-tenths of an inch of rain has fallen around town this week, including Sunday. There should be additional rainfall this afternoon and on Friday, perhaps starting by noon, with uncertainty regarding the exact trajectory of the remnants of the tropical disturbance affecting where the best rain falls.
Showers may linger into Friday evening, before the ridge of high pressure to our south builds over most of the West ahead of the Pacific Northwest storm, bringing drier air overhead starting on Saturday. The low-seventy-degree high temperatures of today, below the average of seventy-nine degrees, are forecast to persist through Saturday, with only a small chance of afternoon and evening showers. Mostly sunny skies and mid-seventy-degree temperatures on Sunday, along with upper seventies on Labor Day, will provide the perfect backdrop for the traditional end-of-summer barbecues.
While control of our local wildfires has been helped immensely by this week of wet weather, with the Crosho fire 100% contained and the Lee fire 90% contained, the NOAA Smoke model forecast indicates smoke from the Emigrant fire in southern Oregon and the Klamath fire in northern California may travel around the top of the high pressure ridge and encroach on our area Friday afternoon. Only a forty-eight-hour forecast is provided by the smoke model, so check it during the weekend for possible smoke impacts to our area for the rest of the long weekend.
Let’s look forward to some more rain through Friday, enjoy what should be a glorious unofficial end to the summer season, and I’ll have details on what may be our first fall-like northwest cool front of the season around midweek in my next regularly scheduled weather narrative on Sunday afternoon.
