8/9/22 Tuesday 5:15 am

For today, expect a similar setup to yesterday. Isolated to scattered afternoon storms throughout the forecast area. As usual, the higher terrain will be favored but a few storms will roll off to the mid and lower elevations. High pressure will be slowly moving to our east this week. This should put the area into a more favorable position for widespread showers and thunderstorms as the week progresses.

Yesterday an impressive-looking band of storms moved from the central portions of the forecast area to the southern portions of the forecast area. I was eagerly watching on radar waiting for the rain to dump on my house. The blue dot is where I live.

0.01 inches. That is all I got despite the impressive radar returns. I am beginning to think the Grand Junction radar has gotten worse since their last two “fixes”. However, half an hour later, I heard from a loyal follower in the Shenandoah subdivision which is south of me. He received an inch of intense rain in under an hour. The moral of the story is, that we still cannot trust the Grand Junction radar.

This led me to reach out to the County gods and check the status of our radar. Here is what they told me.

The radar will be housed at the Durango La Plata County Airport. In July, they released an RFP (request for proposal)  seeking bids for a vendor to provide a solution and manage the project. Unfortunately, they were not able to select a vendor based on the responses. So, they are re-releasing the RFP by the end of this month. The timeline remains to have the project complete no later than March 2024.

Ugh, don’t shoot the messenger…maybe we should include hiking trails and bike lanes around the radar facility, I am sure we would be able to find a favorable bid then…sorry, could not resist.

It’s Tuesday, time for the extended outlook. As I mentioned yesterday, there is plenty of August left and the monsoon is not over. There is still a positive precipitation anomaly forecasted for the next 6 weeks.

Here is the forecasted anomaly through September 22

The same model is projecting a dusting of snow in the higher elevations between 9/10 and 9/22.

I’ll take it.

My next update will be Wednesday. Thanks for following and supporting the site!