12/8/22 Thursday 10 am

I will finish tabulating the contest entries when I wake up tomorrow morning. I hope to do the drawing Friday afternoon and send emails out to the winners. As I mentioned the other day I have already made all of the charitable donations.

As I posted Wednesday afternoon, the storm diverged slightly from what the models had earlier expected. My original forecast on Tuesday did well in the mountains and areas above 8,000 feet.  My forecast for Wolf Creek was 12 to 16 inches, they ended up with 13. I had 10-14 inches for Purgatory, they had 14. I had 6 to 10 inches for Telluride and Silverton, Telluride ended up with 7 and Silverton 6.5.  I expected 3 to 6 inches at the top of Durango Hills and Glacier Club, I have had reports of just over 4 inches at the top of Durango Hills and 3.5 at Glacier. I am confident we will see some accumulating snow in the lower elevations before the month’s end.

Temperatures will moderate this weekend and Sunday and it will warm up slightly. My attention is now on the next storm, it should arrive on Monday. I believe we will have another advisory-level storm in the mountains with similar totals to what we saw with this storm. The storm will likely blossom as it departs Colorado and cause a big mess in Nebraska and the Dakotas. Anyone planning to travel in that direction should keep track of this.

I will talk more about the rest of the month on Tuesday, but it looks like we will be going into a hemispheric pattern change for the last 10 to 14 days of December that will involve a direct discharge of Arctic air across the United States. That would bring temperatures well below average, in some places 30 to 40 degrees below average! Get ready for all of the “Polar Vortex” stories in the media.

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