7 am

The Weather Soap Opera continues, it took a while to get going yesterday but boy did it! Rain accumulations of generally between 1/2 an inch and an inch so far. 13 inches of snow at Purgatory makes my prediction wrong taking them above 300 inches a couple of days earlier than I expected. Telluride getting 7 is in line with what I expected, you are going to get a lot more snow on the backside of this storm. And Wolf Creek showing off with 26 inches already.

There have been some updates to the warnings, I think they are generally too low with the final totals so I am going to leave them off. They also just might want to do one of those above 7,000 feet “Foothill Special” advisories for 6-12 inches with locally up to 18. Just in case they are reading they may want to consider that. (Nudge, nudge). If they were to do that they may want to start it at 6 pm Tuesday through 6 pm Wednesday. Just saying…

Rain, snow and a mix will continue today, there is a chance the rain levels go higher than yesterday. I have low faith in that model right now because it is snowing at my house and the guidance suggested the snow level would be 9,000 feet, go figure. It is a very complex situation with multiple areas of low pressure and a main closed low coming into Arizona.  As the main low approaches late today and tonight, an interesting situation could happen where the snow level near Durango could be lower than the snow level at say Coal Bank Pass, just due to the positioning of the low. This is confusing I realize that. In other words, it would be snowing in both places but it would be drier snow in Durango. This not what I am forecasting it is just a hypothetical to illustrate how difficult determining snow levels will be.

Yesterday morning I mentioned the snow levels would drop as the cold storm merged with the current system. The two will merge into what will be a superstorm out on the plains and eastern Colorado Wednesday, I talked about a travel nightmare developing with that blizzard. Today we are one step closer to that happening.

Around here I mentioned this would end with lower snow levels and that I anticipated 5-14 inches of snow for the lower and mid-elevations from roughly midnight to sometime on Wednesday. The models have generally stayed in that direction. If this does what it looks like it should 15-20 more inches at Purgatory Telluride and Wolf Creek would not surprise me.

Just out, here are the projected total precipitation amounts from the HiRes model yet to fall before this thing wraps up, pretty incredible.

Later today I will take a stab at how much of this ends up as snow for the lower and mid elevations when it turns over tonight. It sounds like a fool’s errand but I will give it a shot.

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