Quiet weather follows some light snow for Friday
Thursday, January 10, 2019
A Pacific storm currently crossing the Great Basin will bring some light snows to the Steamboat Springs area on Friday. Quiet weather is then expected until midweek when another round of incoming Pacific energy brings snow chances back to the west.
The current partly sunny conditions this Thursday morning will give way to clouds later today and snow showers after midnight as a Pacific storm crosses the Great Basin. The storm will undergo a modest split as it passes over Colorado, with the best precipitation expected to our south and east as it mixes with some cool air from the Canadian Plains. We may see an inch for the Friday morning ski report and possibly several more inches during the day before showers end Friday night.
A rather convoluted weather pattern then ensues over the west as a ridge of high pressure tries to build ahead of another Pacific storm that crosses the West Coast on Saturday. However, the southern part of the ridge quickly succumbs to the Pacific storm as it races across the Desert Southwest through the rest of the weekend, leaving north-central Colorado caught between the building ridge of high pressure to our north and the storm to our south.
The end result for our area should be decreasing clouds on Saturday and seasonably cool temperatures with mostly calm conditions. This weather will persist through the first half of the work week ahead another Pacific storm that begins affecting the West Coast late in the weekend. Most of the energy will be dissipated and shunted north as it battles the ridge of high pressure over the Intermountain West; in fact northern portion of the ridge amplifies ahead of the storm and eventually treks across Alaska and the Bering Sea. This may be important for our area later in the month as chunk of very cold air is forced southward over Japan and fuels a series of storms that may move across the Pacific and eventually impact our continent.
In any event, we may see some increasing clouds by later Tuesday and some snow showers on Wednesday and Thursday as some of the energy and moisture from the Pacific storm survives the battle with the ridge and moves over our area.
A more active pattern is advertised for around the following weekend or soon thereafter as the hemispheric jet stream reorganizes, though there are significant differences in timing, strength and position of storms between the weather forecast models.
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