Wintry storm to affect our weather on both sides of the weekend
Thursday, October 17, 2024
Temperatures in Steamboat Springs are in the upper-fifties late this Thursday afternoon under cloudy skies. A large and complicated wintry storm will bring two rounds of low-elevation rain and high-elevation snow to our area; the first as the storm approaches the Four Corners tonight through Friday and the second from Sunday afternoon through the night as the storm departs Colorado.
A strong and splitting storm currently over Nevada is forecast to first move into Arizona on Friday and form an eddy, then drift to the Four Corners by Sunday morning before quickly moving to the northeast across Colorado through the rest of the day. A cold front associated with the northern part of the splitting storm is on our doorstep, and combined with the moist flow from the south ahead of the soon-to-be eddy, we should see an active night of high-elevation snow showers and low-elevation rain showers.
We could see 1-4” of snow above 9000′ or so by Friday morning, and I’ve placed the latest two-hour movies of the Steamboat Powdercam and the Steamboat Mid-mountain Powdercam on the SnowAlarm home page so we can view the first snow of the season. If the images I download every twenty minutes are not available, the live-view videos can be accessed at the Steamboat Powdercam live view and the Steamboat Mid-mountain Powdercam live view.
The eddy will be strong enough to ingest some dry air from its southwest flank over Baja and create a lull in precipitation before noon on Friday. But afternoon and early evening showers will emerge again with another inch or two of snowfall possible above 9000′ by Saturday morning.
By then, the eddy will be over central Arizona, and while heavy precipitation is expected in southwest Colorado, our area will see gusty winds from the east as winds rotate counter-clockwise around the eddy. Easterly winds usually doom our precipitation chances due to downsloping off the Park Range, which results in drying and warming, so we should see a break in the precipitation lasting from early Saturday through Sunday morning.
By Sunday afternoon, the eddy is forecast to be over central Colorado, and we should see another round of precipitation begin as winds turn to be from our favorable northwest direction. More low-elevation rain showers and high-elevation snow showers should continue through Sunday night, leaving another 2-5” of snowfall near the top of the Steamboat Ski Resort.
Earlier forecasts had a colder event, but the splitting nature of the storm will keep the coldest air to our north. High temperatures in town will range from the high fifties to the low sixties through the weekend, right around our average of 58 F, with Saturday being the warmest day.
Mostly sunny skies should return on Monday, with temperatures again near average, before above-average temperatures return for the rest of the workweek. I’ll review the first part of the storm and have more details on the second half of the storm in my next regularly scheduled weather narrative on Sunday afternoon.
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