Snow showers to last into the start of the weekend
Thursday, January 29, 2026
Light snow showers are over Steamboat Springs this Thursday at noon, with temperatures in town in the upper twenties and eleven degrees at the top of the Steamboat Ski Resort. A couple of grazing waves will allow snow showers to intermittently continue through Saturday morning before dry air moves overhead, leading to mostly sunny skies by the afternoon and warming temperatures by Sunday.
A ridge of high pressure is over the West Coast, while a persistent vortex of cold air remains ensconced over the eastern two-thirds of North America. A wave traveling through the ridge has brought two inches of snow to mid-mountain as of the Thursday morning ski report, and three inches up top, with another two inches falling through this morning.
As is often the case with a ridge to our west and cold air to our east, waves traveling through or over the ridge often ingest more cold air than originally forecast, sometimes leading to snowier outcomes. Similar to last night, this may happen again tonight into Friday morning, and again Friday night into Saturday morning, with an additional 1-4” of snow possible for each morning’s report.
Incidentally, another lobe of frigid air rotating around the cold-air vortex will move southward through the Midwest on Friday, perhaps enhancing our snow chances Friday night, but more impactfully bringing freezing temperatures to Florida by Sunday, and what looks like a strong Nor’easter that will likely impact at least some of the East Coast from Saturday through Sunday nights.
Meanwhile, the southerly winds ahead of storm systems in the Gulf of Alaska, as well as those forecast to develop there through the weekend, will force the West Coast ridge to amplify and move eastward. We should see mostly sunny skies by Saturday afternoon as the ridge moves overhead, with high temperatures in town warming from freezing on Friday, right around our average of thirty-one degrees, to forty degrees on Saturday and low-to-mid-forties on a mostly sunny Sunday.
But the ridge will be under assault by waves of energy and moisture ejecting from Gulf of Alaska storms. Weather forecast models have a strong wave crossing the Pacific Northwest coast late in the weekend, bringing some clouds during the day on Monday as it crosses the Great Basin, and possible snow showers as early as Monday night.
So, enjoy the bit of new snow to start the weekend, and the nice weather to end it, and I’ll have more details about our early-workweek snow chances in my next regularly scheduled weather narrative on Sunday afternoon.
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