Published Saturday, February 6th at 1:20 pm
Before I get started, I want to answer some questions before you ask them. There are some apps and some other services that have automated snow forecasts that are showing some big snow amounts for next weekend. If you are looking at those every day you will be in for a rollercoaster ride. I am never sure of the model blend these companies use, but it is likely they use some input from the Canadian, Euro, and GFS.
Two days ago, the Euro was very bullish on the snow totals for next weekend. Yesterday, the Euro was predicting 3 inches at Wolf Creek the same time the Canadian was predicting 92 inches. This morning the Euro was back to 25+ inches at Wolf Creek, and the Canadian (only) had 73 inches. Yesterday the GFS had 5 inches, today it has 20+ inches. The point is it is too early to even know if a storm will hit us, stay north or go south of us, let alone know how much snow could fall.
With that being said there is some model agreement from Tuesday through Thursday with a series of waves coming through our area and dropping a few inches of snow. We are right on the brink of cold air, near the pressure gradient which separates the high-pressure ridge from the deep trough. These things usually go back and forth along the divide making forecasting the temperatures very difficult. The closer the cold air gets to us, the better chance of snow for us.
Here is what that looks like from the Euro model for Thursday. This map is of the states in the Rocky Mountain region. In Colorado, you see the red “L” (low-pressure) and then you see what looks like a thick black line extending into Wyoming. That is not one thick line but several lines stacked on top of each other. That is the boundary of the very cold arctic airmass.
Beyond Thursday the models all disagree on whether or not that cold airmass will overtake the rest of the state, as well as the timing of that, assuming that is going to happen. Storms are stacked up to the west and if the arctic airmass hits us it could be quite an event. It is just too early to tell.
For now, I am just going to focus on the precipitation potential in the Tuesday through Thursday time frame.
Here are the latest model runs, showing the event totals ending on Thursday.
Canadian
GFS
Euro
The Euro was a bit of an outlier today, by Monday we should see better agreement for this first event.
Next Update Monday afternoon, enjoy the rest of the weekend. Thanks for following and supporting the site!