Weekend Outlook: Mountain Snow, Mild with Showers Possible on the Plains

Despite the active Eastern US it has been a quiet week around our region to start your 2018. Temperatures have been average to above average across the state, and snowfall has been hard to come by. In fact, here's a look at precipitation totals across the state for the last seven days, pretty grim:

The weekend finally brings a bit of snow to the high country, with a disturbance quickly moving through the state on Saturday and Saturday night. This will help to “stop the bleeding a bit” but certainly won't make up for the lack of snow in the mountains. Across the plains this will translate to a chance of rain and snow showers, mainly overnight Saturday into Sunday.

A look at this morning's GFS run shows the snowfall potential across the high country through Sunday:

As you can see, it shows a bit of activity across eastern Colorado... but not much. I suspect most areas don't see anything, and those that do just enough to make things wet/coat the ground with a burst of light snow.

At 500mb you can see this system is not impressive, and also will move very quickly across the state:

And by Monday it's long gone with ridging in its place:

On Weather5280 Insider we've been talking quite a bit about the upcoming pattern. We'll have another update there soon discussing the system following this one for next week (which could be a bit stronger) and continued discussion on where this pattern goes for the remainder of January and on into February.

Overall not a terribly cold outlook. You'll see that this weekend's system does little to impact our temperatures in Denver, with perhaps a colder push of air associated with the system next week but nothing like we've seen recently: