Air quality to improve heading into the Independence Day weekend
Thursday, July 2, 2026
After a bout of smoky haze this morning, air quality is temporarily improving this Thursday mid-afternoon in Steamboat Springs under mostly sunny skies and 80-degree temperatures. Smoke will revisit the area overnight before westerly winds behind a grazing storm to our north improve air quality through at least Independence Day, with increasing temperatures to end the holiday weekend.
The low-pressure area over the Pacific Northwest this past week will finally be dislodged by Pacific energy moving through the Gulf of Alaska. Winds will shift from southwesterly to westerly by Friday morning, clearing the smoky skies forecast to return tonight, according to the latest run of the NOAA smoke model. While we will not see the cool air expected from the grazing storm in all but the summer months, the shifting winds should keep the skies smoke-free through at least Independence Day.
Friday should be a quintessential Colorado high-country summer day, with high temperatures right around our comfortable 82-degree average. A high-pressure cell is forecast to build over New Mexico behind the grazing wave on Saturday, building into Colorado through Sunday, and eventually into the Northern Rockies next week. Not only will we see temperatures warming into the mid-80s on Independence Day, but winds will shift back to southwesterly on an upper-80-degree Sunday, possibly carrying smoke back toward our area from the wildfires to our southwest and south.
However, these southwesterly winds may also carry some moisture from a decaying extra-tropical disturbance well west of Baja toward Colorado, in a brief monsoonal-like pattern lasting into the beginning of the workweek. Southern Colorado will see the moisture first, but the lack of low-level moisture limits the good news. While the forecast can change, chances for wetting rains are low, with better chances for dry thunderstorms that may make the wildfires worse.
So enjoy America’s 250th birthday weekend, and I’ll have more details about the incoming moisture in my next regularly scheduled weather narrative on Sunday afternoon.
