A Dusting Then A Dumping

2 pm

A weak piece of the next storm will come through the area later today and overnight, for lower elevations I expect 2 inches or less. Areas north of Rockwood up through the passes could see between 2-6″. Higher areas in La Plata Canyon could do better than that.

Here is what the HiRes WRF model shows for the first piece, this is through Thursday morning at 5 am.wrf12zWed

Not much to see, Thursday gets complicated. I generally don’t like to extend that HiRes model out past 24 hours, but I wanted to take a look anyway and I was very surprised to see a mostly snow event for the lower elevations. At this point, the warmest model right now is the GFS, a low-resolution model.  Because the models show very little snow over the next 24 hours it is easier to determine what the models are expecting for the Valentines storm.

Here are the models’ totals for liquid and snow just through Friday (more on that later).

GFS liquid

gfs12z

GFS snow

gfs12zsnow

7 inches of snow at the airport from 1.1 inches of liquid is very slushy.

 

Euro liquid

Euro12z

Euro snow

euro12z snow

A little better

Check out the HiRes WRF model liquid

hires_tprecip_colorado_61

Snow

hires_snow_colorado_61

This may be a little ambitious, in fact, if it happened like this at the lower elevations I would be very (happily) surprised.

There are similarities in the amount of total liquid that the models show. There are also similarities in timing with the models agreeing that two big waves of precipitation will come through between 4pm and 11pm.  Tomorrow morning I will update that.

The extended period looks great. After this system moves out it will leave very moist conditions and very cold air. This is a perfect “leftovers” environment. Regardless of what happens with that,  there is a possibility for up to FOUR more cold snow events before the end of the month.

 

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