Monsoonal moisture to bring rains this week
Sunday, July 19, 2026
Temperatures are 91 degrees in Steamboat Springs on this Sunday mid-afternoon, with mostly cloudy skies and thunderstorms approaching from the east. These hot temperatures will start the workweek, along with modest rain chances from the finally arrived monsoonal moisture. Wednesday and Thursday will bring cooler temperatures and likely rain chances, with warmer temperatures and modest rain chances returning for the weekend.
The north end of a ridge of high pressure over the central Rocky Mountains is being squashed by cool air and Pacific energy moving across southwestern Canada. Monsoonal moisture moving northward around the clockwise circulation around the high pressure has finally made it into our area, with thunder rumbling through town.
Interestingly, the thunderstorms are approaching town from the east as small high-pressure cells form under the parent ridge to our north. These infernal easterly winds warm as they downslope off the Park Range, keeping nighttime temperatures elevated as they move overhead through the evening, sometimes lasting past midnight, as they have for most of this past week.
High temperatures will stay in the low 90s through Tuesday, well above the 84-degree average marking the heart of the summer heat. Modest afternoon and evening thunderstorm chances to start the workweek will become likely on Wednesday and Thursday as energy from or causing forecast storms over and south of eastern Texas and southern New Mexico rotates around the ridge.
High temperatures will fall to around average on Wednesday and to around 80 degrees on Thursday, our first below-average high temperatures in 2 weeks. Precipitation forecasts show around an inch of rain for our area through the workweek, though amounts will depend upon the location and intensity of the storms.
In fact, I’ve just had a cell pass overhead near the base of the Steamboat Resort with brief, moderate rain, leaving around a tenth of an inch, and mercifully dropping temperatures by 20 degrees between 3:30 and 4:30 pm, with 15 degrees of that happening in the last half hour!
Let’s hope for more storms to start the workweek, and look forward to the cooler, wetter weather on Wednesday and Thursday. I’ll have more details on the amount of monsoonal moisture for next weekend in my next regularly scheduled weather narrative on Thursday afternoon.
