3/24/23 Friday 7:30 am
I see that 550 is closed, my understanding was that Coal Bank and Molas were open but are now closed again. Red Mountain and Wolf Creek remain closed. I have nothing official yet, but rumor has it Wolf Creek will open around 9 am. Stay tuned to the CDOT website for more information. Crews are working on Lizard Head so you may encounter delays during spot removals.
For today, expect snow showers to develop in the higher elevations by noon. A weak wave will approach from the west and snow showers will spread south across the forecast area mid to late afternoon. Some showers may become heavy due to convection, thundersnow can’t be ruled out. Overall, the system will be a quick mover so I do not expect significant accumulation. Isolated amounts of 3 to 6 inches of snow are possible at higher elevations. Lesser amounts will fall across the rest of the forecast area.
Snow showers return on Sunday after a little break on Saturday. It does look like another storm will come on from California in the middle of next week. At this time, the models are not in agreement regarding how impactful it will be. The Canadian model already is signaling that it will be a big deal, the European is showing just a small storm, and the GFS is in between the two. We’ll see.
Awesome Snow Pack Update
From left to right is location; elevation; current Snow-Water Equivalent in liquid inches; the normal average for this date in liquid inches; the normal average for the entire season for this particular location in liquid inches; the date that this location achieves its seasonal average. The last two columns on the right are the percentage of the average for the current date and the percentage of the seasonal peak average for the entire season.
So, for example, from this table you can derive the following:
At the Vallecito Snotel site @ 10,782′ elevation, it is showing 25.8 liquid inches of precipitation. Normally on this date, the site has 13.6 liquid inches, which is a 190% of the average for March 24th. While the seasonal peak average is 174%.
On the bottom, it shows the average percentage of all locations in these basins for this day is 181% and 153% for the seasonal peak.
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