Summery weather to arrive this week
Sunday, May 26, 2024
The clouds are reluctantly departing this breezy Sunday mid-afternoon in Steamboat Springs as the temperature approaches sixty degrees. Mostly sunny skies with temperatures in the upper-sixties for Memorial Day will precede even warmer temperatures reaching well into the seventies as we head through the holiday-shortened work week.
After a gorgeous Friday, showers started early Saturday afternoon, with several rounds of storms lasting through the night. Between a third and half inch of rain fell in town and a couple of inches of snow accumulated at mid-mountain at the Steamboat Resort during the second day of summer weekend operations.
The cloudy and cool morning today was thanks to the moist and unstable northwest flow behind the last of the three cool fronts mentioned in my previous weather narrative on Thursday afternoon. But skies are clearing this afternoon as a ridge of high pressure begins to build over the Rocky Mountains ahead of yet another strong storm developing in the Gulf of Alaska.
Appropriately timed, we should see sunny skies, light winds and temperatures approaching seventy degrees on Memorial Day for the unofficial start of summer. Even warmer temperatures in the low-seventies on Tuesday and mid-seventies on Wednesday will certainly feel summery, and there will even be small chances for the usual summertime afternoon and evening thunderstorms.
Meanwhile, that Gulf of Alaska storm is forecast to cross the Pacific Northwest coast later on Tuesday and eventually drag a weak cool front through our area on Thursday. High temperatures will drop a few degrees along with an increasing chance of afternoon and evening storms.
Some more cooling is advertised for Friday, bringing high temperatures back to near the seventy-degree mark, along with the best chance of afternoon and evening storms of the week. There may be another cool front on Saturday depending upon whether additional energy rotates around the former Gulf of Alaska storm now forecast to be over the Canadian Plains, or not. So be sure to check back to my next regularly scheduled weather narrative on Thursday afternoon for a look at the coming weekend weather.
