10/18/26 Sunday 4 am
I got a great night’s sleep, and I feel better than I have in over a week. I say that because I want everybody to know I am looking at these models with my brain firing at full capacity.
I add that disclaimer because I want people to know that I am very serious when I say. SW Colorado, we may have a problem.
I am not hearing enough chatter about this precipitation event. This looks a lot bigger than the last one. Streams and rivers had a short period of time to recede, but they’re starting from an elevated baseline—meaning this next round will hit saturated ground and high channels very quickly.
At this point, I urge Cities’ EMS and even CDOT to start looking at the potential impacts this event could have on our area.
As I said, I have never seen such overwhelming model consensus on an incoming storm in all my years doing this. I am not trying to scare anybody, but as I said, nobody is talking about this. The NWS had one sentence in their discussion about “the possibility of substantial rain in the four corners mid to late week”. I don’t think that goes far enough.
I just don’t want anyone to be caught off guard. Those of you who live in areas affected by flash flooding or flooding need to at least think about how to prepare.
I don’t know all of the vulnerable locations in the six-county area. But you residents do. Don’t wait for the Wednesday morning Herald article quoting an NWS forecaster from a Tuesday phone call.
I have many models to share. I haven’t been able to share these other models because they are shorter-term. But now, their range is finally within the event’s envelope.
I also think it’s important to note that most locations have exceeded the models’ forecasts over the last 6 weeks.
GFS- it’s still struggling. None of the others are. The precipitation spread makes no sense for any approaching storm in any conditions, ever. But I will leave it in here as an outlier.
European
NOAA NBM: This is a big deal, because this is almost always the most conservative model.
NOAA WPC (Weather Prediction Center)
UKMET (NOAA equivalent in the UK)
Canadian
ICON (Germany)
Again, I am not trying to be an alarmist. But the fact that even the NWS Grand Junction is only giving one sentence about this, that is easy to skim right over, is concerning to me.