Cooler weather to arrive for the weekend with limited precipitation chances
Thursday, September 4, 2025
The sky has turned cloudy this Thursday mid-afternoon in Steamboat Springs with a temperature of eighty degrees. While cooler temperatures with highs in the mid-seventies are forecast for the weekend, precipitation chances now appear slim as the best monsoonal moisture stays to our south.
A wave of energy and cool air from the northern Canadian Plains is rotating around an impressive vortex of cold air sitting just north of the Great Lakes. Meanwhile, a ridge of high pressure extends along the West Coast and into Alaska as Hurricane Lorena lies just off the Baja coast. Moisture from the hurricane has moved northwards, but a shifting storm track will keep the best moisture over the Desert Southwest.
A cool front rotating through our area tonight may interact with the available moisture, perhaps bringing a brief shower or two overnight. High temperatures on Friday and the weekend are forecast to fall into the mid-seventies, around our average of seventy-seven degrees, and much warmer than the sixty-five degrees recorded last Friday.
While some of the hurricane moisture will be shunted southward for a brief time early Friday, a small circulation center, currently forming over Utah, may travel piecemeal over our area later Friday, bringing the chance of a shower or two.
Limited shower chances continue Saturday afternoon and evening as energy ejecting from the southern end of a trough of low pressure extending southward from the Gulf of Alaska crosses the Great Basin, dragging additional monsoonal moisture overhead.
The eventual fate of the former hurricane is uncertain, and some energy may be sheared toward our area by Sunday. This may interact with the energy still being ejected from the area of low pressure to our west, bringing more chances for showers at times on Sunday.
While the rain chances are nebulous, the smoke forecast is not. The hazy skies observed today are due to smoke from wildfires in California and the Pacific Northwest. Unfortunately, the NOAA Smoke model forecast indicates smoke will continue to rotate around the high pressure over the West, bringing hazy skies that will last through at least Saturday morning. The smoke model is run four times a day, so check it for the latest forecast.
A storm is forecast to develop and strengthen in the Gulf of Alaska this weekend, with pieces of the storm moving over the Pacific Northwest as early as Sunday. Wildfires may be helped or hurt by the incoming weather; while some precipitation is likely, there will also be increasing winds.
Enjoy the first weekend of meteorological fall, hope the shower chances are more robust than currently forecast, and check back for details on the possibility of increasing moisture near the end of next week from the landfalling Gulf of Alaska storm in my next regularly scheduled weather narrative on Sunday afternoon.
