Workweek to see modest shower chances with temperatures to peak near ninety degrees on Tuesday
Sunday, August 4, 2024
After a relatively cool morning with occasional sprinkles, temperatures are only in the mid-seventies this Sunday mid-afternoon in Steamboat Springs under recently cleared and mostly sunny skies. Modest shower chances reappear later today and continue through the work week along with hot temperatures peaking near ninety degrees on a dry Tuesday. But there is hope for a cooler and wetter weather pattern starting around Thursday and continuing through next weekend.
Those infernal easterly winds I talked about in the last weather narrative did appear at the top and near the base of the Steamboat Ski Resort last night, as shown by the accompanying temperature and wind charts from the SnowAlarm weather station and the Storm Peak Laboratory near the top of Mt. Werner
Wind direction is indicated by the red dots in the second chart, with winds having an easterly component denoted in the lower half of the chart and winds with a westerly component in the upper half. The vertical gray line in the center of both upper charts marks 12:05 am on August 4th.
Infernal, since temperatures rose from 69 F to 80 F in about twenty minutes starting at 9:30 pm and stayed elevated until just before 2 am thanks to the gusty easterly winds warming as they descended the Park Range. Interestingly, the Bob Adams airport was spared and downtown showed only about five degrees of warming. Fortunately, no smoke from the Front Range wildfires was carried over our area.
A ridge of high pressure currently over most of the U.S. has been flattened by a series of cool waves moving across Canada, but those waves will not be close enough to moderate the hot temperatures forecast for our area through midweek. The sun today will allow high temperatures to reach the mid to upper eighties, about five degrees above our now slowly falling daily average, and cook the atmosphere, returning modest shower chances later this afternoon and evening.
A degree of warming is forecast for Monday with afternoon and evening thunderstorm chances persisting, along with another bout of nighttime easterly winds advertised by some weather forecast models. Another degree of warming should bring high temperatures to around ninety degrees on Tuesday as winds shift from the southwest to the west thanks to the Canadian waves. These westerly winds look to bring dry air overhead and reduce or eliminate showers for the day.
But moisture returns by Wednesday as some energy left behind by the Canadian waves merges with some energy ejecting from a strong series of storms over the Aleutian Islands and begins to dig southward along the West Coast. Temperatures will see a degree or two of cooling with later-day shower chances.
Cool air associated with the Canadian waves begins infiltrating our area by Thursday for high temperatures in the mid-eighties and a better chance of storms. Monsoonal moisture is reinforced starting Friday as the developing West Coast trough of low pressure nudges the western ridge of high pressure eastward, with temperatures cooling to average on Friday with good chances for storms.
Longer-range weather forecast models have even cooler and unsettled weather persisting through the weekend and into the beginning of the next workweek. Enjoy another very summery start to this week, and check back to my next regularly scheduled weather narrative on Thursday afternoon for more details on the coming moisture.
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