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Tue Update: The Front Range Forecast: Some ice possible

A possible shot of snow and/or ice Wednesday morning and Thursday morning.

In Brief:

A possible shot of snow and/or ice Wednesday morning and Thursday morning.

Tuesday update:

Instead of a big snow storm, we have another chance of a coating of snow or a coating of ice Wednesday morning and again Thursday morning.  Be careful out there!

End Tuesday update.

Sunday update

Just a quick note today on the mid-week storm.  Models are trending towards better agreement AND are taking the storm further north.  Forecasted snow amounts for the I-25 folks are decreasing.  More updates as things come into focus.

End Sunday update.

 

Forecast Discussion:

We start the week with near normal temperature as the mountains keep getting periods of snow (Figure 1). The region will experience strong winds Sunday afternoon. There is a Red Flag Warning for high fire danger for locations where snow has melted and the vegetation has dried out.

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Figure 1: the 10 day graphical forecast from weatherunderground

The Longer Range Forecast:

A very deep trough moves into the West mid-week (Figure 2). This won't bring in unusually cold temperatures, but energy is present for a prolonged period of snow.  Possibly. The Weatherunderground (wunderground for short) model has very different timing from the GFS model. Figure 1 shows the main portion of the storm arriving Wednesday and Thursday. The GFS has the bulk of the storm hitting Friday and Friday night (Figure 3).  I have them compared these timing differences with pink arrows in Figure 1. 

The GFS HAS been consistent with giving the northeastern Plains including I-25 folks a foot or more of snow (Figure 4). The Canadian model only predicts 3-5 inches for this time period. I'll keep updating this article this week as the storm approaches!

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Figure 2: the 500mb upper air forecast map for noon Friday from the GFS and tropicaltidbits.com
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Figure 3: the surface forecast map for midnight Friday from the GFS and tropicaltidbits.com
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Figure 4: the snowfall totals through Saturday (10:1 ratio) from the GFS and weather5280.com
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Figure 5: the snowfall totals through Friday morning (10:1 ratio) from the Canadian model and tropicaltidbits.com