Storm to end tonight ahead of another for the end of the weekend
Thursday, May 15, 2025
Temperatures are in the mid-forties under cloudy skies this Thursday mid-afternoon in Steamboat Springs behind an early afternoon thunderstorm. Good precipitation chances will continue through midnight before we see mostly sunny mornings and warmer temperatures through the weekend. Afternoon thnderstorm chances will linger on Friday and Saturday before the next storm brings good precipitation chances and cooler temperatures from Sunday afternoon through Monday.
After a beautiful start to the workweek, with high temperatures above seventy-five degrees on Monday, high temperatures plummeted into the low-fifties on Wednesday behind a cold storm from the Gulf of Alaska. We went from temperatures representative of mid-June to mid-April in just a couple of days, which is not uncommon for the mercurial spring season.
Winter Park reported nine inches of snow this morning and Arapahoe Basin reported seven inches for that classic mid-May powder day. We saw snow above 8000′ and a couple of tenths of an inch of rain in town, with a low temperature of 21 F at the top of the Steamboat Ski Resort this morning. The cool temperatures and showers, with sometimes moderate to heavy rain and small hail, are forecast to continue through midnight in the favorable moist and unstable northwest behind the storm, now moving northeast through the eastern Dakotas.
A ridge of high pressure is building over the West Coast ahead of another strong storm brewing over the Aleutian Islands, which has incorporated some sub-tropical moisture to form a weak atmospheric river. The storm will push the ridge eastward as it moves across the West Coast early Saturday, warming temperatures into the upper-fifties on Friday and mid-sixties on Saturday, right around our average of 66 F.
Mornings should start mostly sunny, with only a small chance of late-day thunderstorms on Friday, but a better chance on Saturday as a wave of energy and moisture ejecting from the landfalling storm moves overhead.
Take advantage of the nice start to Sunday as the storm rotates through the Great Basin, first bringing increasing clouds by noon that will cap our high temperatures in the low-sixties, and then a cold front in the afternoon or evening, accompanied by precipitation.
The storm will be wetter than the departing storm, pinwheeling through Colorado on Monday and bringing additional snow to the higher elevations and rain in town. While showers may linger in our favorable northwest flow behind the storm on Tuesday, temperatures will begin to rise by Wednesday under mostly sunny skies, perhaps reaching back into the mid-seventies by Friday and next weekend.
So enjoy the break between storms that will begin on Friday and last through at least the first half of Sunday, and I’ll have more details on what will be a soggy start to the workweek in my next regularly scheduled weather narrative on Sunday afternoon.
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