Quiet and summery weather ahead
Sunday, August 18, 2019
After a relatively active weather day yesterday associated with a cool front in our vicinity, this cloud-free Sunday morning in Steamboat Springs is sunny and quickly growing warmer. We should have mostly sunny, warm and dry days for the upcoming week, save for some clouds and a small chance of afternoon and evening showers on Tuesday and Wednesday.
The cool front this past Saturday produced a more active pattern than weather forecast models predicted; in fact even the shortest range model that usually does reasonably well predicting up to 18 hours in advance frustratingly failed to capture the early and late afternoon storms that put down around 0.07” of precipitation over short period of time.
In any event, the upcoming week is looking quite nice as the jet stream stays to our north, with plenty of sun and warm to hot high temperatures exceeding our slowly falling average of 80 F.
While there will be little chance of precipitation early and late in the upcoming week, the ridge of high pressure currently over our area is deformed midweek by some cool air traveling southward from a storm near the Great Lakes. Interestingly, this storm originally brought the cool front through our area yesterday, and it is not done with us as southerly monsoonal flow under the ridge is enhanced by the cool air east of the ridge traveling south in the Midwest.
So we should see more clouds later Tuesday and Wednesday with a slight chance of afternoon and early evening storms that would likely produce more wind than rain.
Meanwhile, incoming Pacific energy crosses the upper West Coast around midweek, and pushes the weak monsoonal moisture plume eastward, restoring the drier atmosphere over our area by Thursday. Dry, warm and mostly sunny weather should continue through most of the following weekend before another round of incoming Pacific energy crosses the upper West Coast early in the weekend. If the current forecast holds, a weak but dry cool front may be around our area late in the weekend or early the following week, along with breezy to windy conditions.
