Holiday Update

On By durangoweatherguy

8am

Today

It is going to be windy and uncomfortable today. We may see some snow near Red Mountain and Telluride area today, with blowing snow on all passes.

Christmas Week

I want to start with a couple of quotes from a Senior Forecaster at the NWS. The first one was yesterday’s overnight discussion.

SOME PROGNOSTICATORS WILL   
START GETTING EXCITED ABOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF SNOW ON CHRISTMAS   
DAY BUT NOT THIS GRINCH. THERE IS SO MUCH DOWNSTREAM VARIABILITY   
IN THE PATTERN THAT CONFIDENCE IS NEAR ZERO ON HOW AND WHERE   
ENERGY WILL DIG INTO THE WEST.

Here is the same guy 24 hours later.

THE GFS BRINGS A SMALLER TROUGH THROUGH MONDAY (SHORTWAVE) THEN  
BRINGS THE STRONGER STORM THROUGH THE GREAT BASIN AND INTO THE  
FORECAST AREA TUESDAY, CHRISTMAS AFTERNOON. EVEN WITH THE TIMING  
AND MINOR STRENGTH DIFFERENCES, BOTH MODELS SHOW A STORM  
SOMETIME ON CHRISTMAS AND CONTINUING FOR A FEW DAYS THEREAFTER.

The reason I share this is to show you the frustration that the forecasters are having with next week. Also, I get a kick out of the guy’s commentary. The Euro has always been the go-to model, this shoulder season for whatever reason, that has not been the case. The Euro has had a lot of problems. The GFS has outperformed the Euro in the 4-10 day period over and over.

For people traveling over the weekend, at the moment things look pretty good. Stay tuned.

Things continue to look very good between Christmas day and New Years. There have been some indications that Christmas night through the 26th and again the 27th-29th could be very productive.  The last 7 runs of the GFS model show over 6 inches of snow in town and well over a foot in higher elevations, consistency in model runs is a good thing. I hope and expect to see the Euro get more consistent in the next couple of days. The last five runs of the Euro (60 hours) have shown between 3 and 18 inches of snow at the Airport and between 8 and 32 inches at Purgatory between the 23rd and the 28th, so we can’t trust anything it is saying right now until it gets more consistent like the GFS has been.

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