Pleasant weather for the coming work week

Sunday, August 22, 2021

Temperatures are currently in the low seventies under mostly sunny skies in the Steamboat Springs area this Sunday noon. While clouds will come and go and temperatures warm toward the eighties in the coming days, rain chances will be minimal until later Thursday when a fast moving wave to the north grazes our area.

After the excitement of significant rainfall and the first snow of the 2021-2022 ski season at the Steamboat Ski Resort to end the last work week, the weather for the upcoming work week will be far more benign and quite pleasant. Some cool air associated with a wave currently entering the Dakatos will keep our temperatures in the seventies today, a few degrees below our seasonally declining average of 79 F, along with some breezy winds generally from the west.

The NOAA smoke plume model has the southern edge of a ribbon of smoke mildly degrading air quality later this afternoon, but winds turn to be more from the southwest by tonight and push the smoke from our area. Incidentally, the GEOCOLOR satellite movie clearly shows the ribbon of smoke just to our north that is expected to briefly bulge southward over our area this afternoon.

Winds from the southwest ahead of an area of low pressure that is forecast to cross the Pacific Northwest on Tuesday are forecast to raise our temperatures several degrees to around average and keep breezy conditions around through midweek.

That area of low pressure will not move much through the work week as waves of departing energy are replaced by additional waves of incoming energy. By Thursday, forecasts are for one of these waves to be strong enough to turn our winds to be a bit more from the south, which may carry some monsoonal moisture northward over our area and modestly increase the chance for some showers later Thursday and possibly overnight.

Next weekend is currently looking nice, though some sort of tropical storm looks to travel through the Caribbean Sea this week and then possibly the southern Gulf of Mexico which may eventually increase moisture over our area after next weekend. Stay tuned to my next regularly scheduled weather narrative on Thursday afternoon to see if the forecast for a nice weekend holds.