10/24/26 Saturday 3:30 am- 6:30 am
I haven’t addressed this in a while, but the time I put at the beginning of each post is when I sit down at my desk and start perusing the models. I am trying to get into the habit of putting the time I finish before I hit the publish button.
Overview: Wet likes to stay wet… Showers and thunderstorms today, tonight, and tomorrow, moving out of the area late Sunday. The heaviest rain will fall today.
This should give way to 4 or 5 days of temporarily dry weather while the storm track retreats north of our area.
Then, Friday night into Saturday, models are advertising another multi-day storm. I know. It’s becoming a familiar setup: a west coast low-pressure system combines with tropical moisture and gets funneled into our area. It’s too early to dig into this. I will need to see a couple more days of model runs before I have any confidence in the details
News?
I am not sure when this happened, but the local radar is working; at least in Durango, I noticed it last night. It is doing exactly what it is supposed to do. It picks up the activity below the Grand Junction/National Radar.
“La Plata Live Radar” (these radar screenshots were taken at 5:20 am)
BUT, you can’t rely on it 100%; it has a very limited range, so you need to check both local radar and the site’s Hi-Res Radar. These screenshots were taken at the same time (5:20 am)
“Hi-Res Radar”
To switch between the two, click the layers icon at the top left of the screen, right above the full-screen button. For the La Plata Live Radar, I like to switch to “Dark” mode; for Hi-Res, I leave it on “Satellite” mode.
Fingers crossed it works this well in the winter!
Current Weather
So far, the activity has been spotty, but when the first storm blew up over my neighborhood at 4 am, I got brief heavy rain that dropped 0.20″ in a couple of minutes. The rainfall rate briefly hit 3.57″ per hour.
Since then, I have had occasional on-and-off showers (here comes another one at 6:20 am). It appears the La Plata radar has a little longer lag time than the national radar.
Based upon this early activity, I fear the models are severely underforecasting this weekend event, and I am very concerned! I feel like I am doing a play-by-play here: this latest cell briefly measured rain intensity of 4.09″/hr.
I already have had 0.61″ up here in DW2. It’s going to be a long day!