I was pleased with the fluffy high ratio snow that happened last night, it rounded out the storm nicely. The two biggest surprises were Telluride and Wolf Creek. Telluride had the same mostly southerly flow as everyone else which isn’t usually favorable for them. However, the flow was weak there and banding set up with the air saturated with moisture that was all it took. Wolf Creek did not do as well as I expected but they still got good snow.
The next chance of snow will be Wednesday night or Thursday, the trajectory of the storm right now will be more favorable for Telluride but there is plenty of time for it to change into a scenario favoring all areas. After that, there are some disagreements about what will happen, there are some stormy scenarios on the table and some that are just bone-chilling cold.
For today, light snow will be sporadic, primarily in the higher elevations as there is still moisture in place overhead. Throughout the day and tonight, colder air will start moving in and continue moving in Sunday. Monday morning could be very cold. They have done a nice job treating the highways into town, but if memory serves me correctly that only works down to a certain temperature. I believe that our upcoming overnight lows will be lower than that temperature, so beware of ice as the roads freeze back up in the evenings.
I was looking back at last year’s storm totals we woke up to a big storm on January 2nd, then it didn’t snow again until the 8th then we started a very stormy pattern on January 13th-19th.
I read a piece from a Meteorologist I follow, apparently, people are starting to compare the upcoming Winter to the Winter of 1936-1937 because it is an analog for the current sea surface temps with “warm blob” in the NE Pacific. I found that interesting with the cold that some of the models are predicting as we move into January. It was a crazy Winter overall, check out the temperature anomalies for January 1937.
That was a very cold and very snowy Winter for Durango (no, I don’t remember it like it was yesterday). Since records were kept in the late 1800’s there have been 14 winters that Durango got over 100 inches of snow for the season. 1936-1937 was one of them. Next update Sunday.