Hot and dry weather to return for the weekend
Thursday, July 24, 2025
After reaching the low eighties, temperatures fell into the low to mid-seventies this Thursday mid-afternoon in Steamboat Springs when a shower with more wind than rain passed through town. While the sun is out now, we may see another shower later today before the monsoonal plume of moisture shifts eastward, bringing hot and dry weather for the weekend.
An area of low pressure is just off the coast of central California, and a high pressure cell over the western Atlantic, known as the Bermuda High, has shifted to the East Coast. Today will be the last day of shower chances until next week as the eastern high pressure shifts towards the Mississippi River Valley and severs the weak plume of monsoonal moisture overhead.
Dry air associated with the California low will replace the monsoonal moisture, eliminating shower chances and allowing temperatures to rise into the mid-eighties on Friday and Saturday, and upper eighties on Sunday, above our average high of eighty-four degrees, with mostly sunny skies.
However, as is the case today, hazy skies may persist on Friday and possibly part or all of the weekend as southwesterly winds transport smoke from the Dragon Bravo Fire in Grand Canyon National Park over our area. I have recently added the Purple Air widget, which measures air quality at the Thunderhead Lodge, to the home page, with easy access to the NOAA Smoke model forecast through the link underneath the widget.
The lack of productive storms this week is disappointing, but there is hope for a substantial push of monsoonal moisture starting next mid-week as another low pressure area forms off the coast of California from a storm in the Gulf of Alaska. This is the strongest signal yet for wetting rains from our struggling monsoon so far this season, but it is still a week away.
So enjoy another quintessential Colorado summer weekend, and I’ll have more details on the next possible surge of monsoonal moisture in my next regularly scheduled weather narrative on Sunday afternoon.
