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In Brief:
Quiet weather Alert! We warm up to above normal through mid-week and remain dry. We have a super tiny chance of rain/snow Thursday PM and Friday AM. We cool down to below normal for the end of the week and into next week (but only by a few degrees). There are small chances of precipitation at the start of next week as well. End Quiet Weather Alert.
Forecast Discussion:
High pressure still sits anchored in place at the surface (Figure 1) and aloft. We'll see some winds Monday night with a warm front (dry) passing across the state (Figure 2) but not as strong as the down slope winds seen Saturday night (the highest wind gust in town that I can find was 48mph).
The Longer Range Forecast:
We'll see another cool front pass us Wednesday evening with a very small chance of precipitation later Thursday with the passage of some upper level support (Figure 2).
The GFS has snow in the mountains to our west and snow on the plains to the east (Figure 3). Down slope flow will probably inhibit precipitation here. The GEM (Figure 5) has the mountain snows but nothing on the Plains or in Longmont. Scooping in the next two small chances of precipitation (seen next week in Figure 2) the GFS gives us 1/2-1 inch of snow over the next 10 days (Figure 4) and the GEM keeps us dry (Figure 6) even out that far.
Another longer range forecast:
The private forecasting company WeatherBELL has a different take on the rest of the winter as compared to NOAA (covered in a prior post). With warm water off of Alaska and western Canada in the Pacific and a near-neutral ENSO index, they expect us to see a LOT of cold air flowing into the nation with Colorado on the chilly side of normal (Figure 7). More specifically, they paint the entire nation - west coast to east coast - as very much below normal for January alone (Figure 8). If that were true, the amount of cold air we'd need to come in for the last half of the month would be pretty epic. We'll see! (Note, I do have a bit more confidence in WeatherBELL - they have done better than NOAA over the last few seasons.)
