Shower chances increase midweek
Sunday, July 21, 2019
Steamboat Springs is currently seeing warm temperatures and sunny skies this Sunday morning. High temperatures these past several days have been running up to five degrees above our 82 F average, which is expected to continue for the upcoming week, save for a couple of pulses of monsoonal moisture that will increase shower chances around midweek and again mid-next weekend.
A ridge of high pressure is currently amplifying over the West behind a disturbance traveling across the upper Midwest and ahead of a strong storm in the Gulf of Alaska. While we will see more warm and mostly dry weather on Monday and Tuesday, the cool front associated with this disturbance will bring relief from the excessive heat for the eastern two thirds of the country through midweek.
Meanwhile, a piece of the Gulf of Alaska storm is ejected later Tuesday and once again suppresses the ridge of high pressure over the West southward as it travels across the northern U.S. border. The resultant westerly flow over the Great Basin bends a plume of monsoonal moisture forecast to be over Utah on Tuesday eastward over our area for Wednesday, increasing the chance of wetting rains, with those areas lucky enough to see precipitation possibly experiencing brief and localized moderate to heavy rain.
The forecast for the last several days had this monsoonal moisture plume hanging around for the rest of the work week, but weather forecast now models have a wedge of dry air intruding over Wyoming and northern Colorado. So shower chances now look to decrease markedly or even disappear for the end of the work week and headed into the following weekend, along with some increased westerly winds on Thursday.
But we will be on the edge of better moisture, and indeed, another pulse of monsoonal moisture is forecast for around mid-next weekend. At this point, this does not look to stick around for more than a day or two as dry air is forecast to return to our area for the last week of July.
