Storm Clears, Another To Move In

On the heels of the last system comes another storm flow that will dump snow on southwestern Colorado starting today and may bring measurable snowfall to the metro areas by the weekend.

The last storm did little by way of accumulation for the Northern Front Range but did drop quite a bit of snowfall over the high country. You can see the totals here:

Snowfall Analysis

The next storm is already visible in the state and will spread impact virtually from border to border throughout the next several days, the effect on the metro areas being Friday into Saturday.

Let's take a general look at the system's most likely snowfall as forecast by the Weather Prediction Center (WPC). This product is their 50% probability product, or another way to think about that is the mean of all possibilities. The Denver area is shown to be in the 1 to 3-inch range.

WPC 50% - via CSU

Comparing that now to the GFS, Euro, and NAM, you can see where the bullseye of snowfall will be and where there remain some question marks. The Denver area is consistently within the 0-3" range amongst the three models shown.

Note, these are based on a 10:1 snow ratio which is way too low for our mountains, meaning snowfall totals may be 1.5 to 2 times the indicated totals.
GFS

Euro

NAM

At this point, we know heavy snowfall is coming to parts of the mountains, and potentially in the metro areas as well. What we need to do is see how the storm performs during the next 24 hours before getting too specific on a snowfall forecast for the cities as totals may drop from what we see here.

That assumption supported in the Snowfall Gambler Chart we just computed for points in the city:

To get you ahead of the storm as much as possible, consider this timeline of impact on Denver and Colorado Springs knowing that accumulating snow is possible:

  • 11 pm Thursday to 5 am Friday: Snow begins in many areas.
  • 5 am Friday to 11 am Friday: Snow showers continue.
  • 11 am Friday to 5 pm Friday: Isolated activity.
  • 5 pm Friday to 5 am Saturday: More numerous snow showers.
  • 5 am Saturday to 5 pm Saturday: Isolated snow, mostly over.

We know that many of you have travel plans for the weekend. Plan on travel impacts Friday and Saturday but improved conditions by Sunday.

More precise details will come in our snowfall forecast that we will issue tomorrow.