Matt Makens

An active weather pattern is likely to return next week and with it will come
chances of rain, snow, and much colder temperatures.

First, the timing and changes. 

The system that will be cooling the area down tomorrow, Friday, will actually be
the initial system that comes through to begin a flow that will keep storm
systems closer to Colorado. 

Let's cycle through the mid-atmosphere starting with Saturday:

Sunday:

Tuesday:

And, Thursday:

In that progression of images we see a stormier flow. (Depicted by the troughier
pattern and the periodic lower than average 500 mb heights.)

This pattern will produce colder and wetter conditions, obviously, but parts of
the region may see significant precipitation and cold.

Let's first go through temperatures anomalies for next week:

High temperature anomalies being forecast for next Wednesday, Thursday, Friday
and Saturday are shown below, and are considerably below average for most of us:

Those temperature anomalies are pretty significant, for this time of year.

Just looking at Denver's forecast, we can see the cold temperatures of next week
may include daily highs just above freezing. Wednesday through Saturday do have
a greater than 5% chance we don't warm above freezing as indicated in the box
and whiskers.

It's too early to be specific about the cold but we do know it will be quite
cool next week and that may support additional snowfall with rain mixed in.
Since we are snow lovers, let's have a look at the snowfall forecasts from
Euro/Ens, GFS/Ens, and Canadian/Ens.

You can see quite a range of possibilities there between those models,
especially GFS which is quite excited for snow. 

Reminder, April is climatologically our second snowiest month and has delivered
strong totals in the past:

Denver’s Top Five April SnowstormsApril is Denver’s second snowiest month on
average
It’s hard to imagine after the stretch of weather we’ve head of late that
April,
on average, is Denver’s second snowiest month. On average, the city sees 9.0″
of
snow during the month of April, second only to March which records 11.5″ of
snow
on ave…Brendan HebertonApr 14, 2015Weather5280
[https://www.weather5280.com/blog/2015/04/14/denvers-top-five-april-snowstorms]
It is certainly too early to talk about snowfall totals. We do know there's
growing support for snowfall considering temperature forecasts are cold enough.
We do know there's a troughier pattern to come through. However, without a
closed low and better 700mb upslope dynamics it is hard to put much trust in the
GFS at this time.

Historically speaking, next week's projected pattern has been wet in the past.

The MJO will also favor a wet week as we swing into phase 7 as projected in GFS
and Euro.

So, feels safe to say it'll be a wet week and colder, however, too early to
safely say how cold and how snowy.

We certainly will keep an eye on it.

Wet and cold pattern for Denver and across the region forms next week