Published Tuesday at 2 pm

24 hours ago we were expecting a nice sunny day today. This certainly has not panned out in the low and mid-elevations. 24 hours ago I was expecting a pretty light event for tonight into Wednesday. Now it looks like the majority of the precipitation between tonight and Friday will occur overnight with scattered showers Wednesday night through Friday. The takeaway is that the models are evolving with every run and the best way to handle this is one wave at a time.

Snow will begin this evening above 8,000 feet and snow levels should drop to around 6,000 feet by morning.

The Euro model just came out and doubled its precipitation totals for tonight through Wednesday.  The old GFS seems to be the outlier while the new GFS is more closely aligned with the Euro and Canadian.

Here are their forecasts.

Euro

New GFS beta

Canadian

Old GFS

The new GFS has been ahead of the curve since we started tracking this. I am not dismissing the old GFS, but if it is so good why are they already upgrading it?

Based on these model runs here are my forecasts.

Durango & Bayfield:  A dusting to 2 inches

Ouray and mid-elevations including Pagosa Springs and Mancos:  1 to 3 inches.

Mayday, Vallecito, Lemon, Aspen Trails & Durango Hills above 7,800:  3 to 5 inches

Telluride, Silverton, and Rico:  4 to 6 inches overnight with a little more during the day.

Purgatory 5 to 7 inches overnight with a little more during the day.

Wolf Creek 6 to 9 inches overnight with a little more during the day.

I am going to hold off discussing the weekend until tomorrow. The models are still all over the place with how they handle the system moving through our area. However, they are still producing significant snow for the Front Range and east of the Continental Divide for the weekend. As I said yesterday travel is going to be extremely difficult for anyone driving to Denver this weekend.

Next Update Wednesday, thanks for following and supporting the site!

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