Chilly starts to sunny and warmer days through the weekend
Thursday, January 27, 2022
After some intermittent snow showers early this morning, sunny skies are over the Steamboat Springs area this Thursday afternoon. The clear skies will persist through the weekend, and though the days will see warming temperatures, quite cold nights are expected down at the Yampa Valley floor. Our next chance for precipitation looks to occur sometime after the start of the next work week.
A narrow ridge of high pressure is currently situated along the West Coast while a deep vortex of very cold air extends from Baffin Bay west of Greenland through the Great Lakes and towards our neck of the woods. The couple of small storms last Tuesday and today traveled over the top of the ridge, and mixed with some of the cold and dry air associated with the vortex, but those underwhelming storms will be the last of our interesting weather for the next five days or so as that West Coast ridge is forecast to move overhead this weekend.
The sunny skies will help moderate the arctic air mass that has settled over our area, but stout temperature inversions, where temperatures increase with height, are forecast to form over the valley through the weekend. It looks like the coldest morning of the next several will be Friday morning, with low temperatures in the valley expected to be in the negative teens, even as mountain-top low temperatures stay above zero.
We should be able to warm towards our average of 28 F in the valley on Friday as mountain-top temperatures warm into the teens, so at some point during the day the stronger warming at the surface will erase the nighttime temperature inversion.
But the temperature inversion looks to return each morning through the weekend, though there will be a steady upward trend in the low and high temperatures each day, perhaps around 5 F. The temperature inversions will be the only weather story during a gorgeous weekend, but there is some weather forecast model consensus that storminess returns to our area around next Tuesday or Wednesday. There is still disagreement on the details, and I hope to have some clarity on the upcoming pattern change by my next regularly scheduled weather narrative on Sunday afternoon.
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