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Forecast Discussion:
With northwest flow dominating the weather over Colorado - short lived cold fronts will come and go. (I covered the upper air situation in depth yesterday.) This morning, one of those cold fronts is moving in to cool us about 10 degrees. Sunday night, there wasn't anything significant on the map around Colorado (Figure 1) and almost no moisture (Figure 2). The dew point map in Figure 2 is a map of the actual amount of water in the air with green colors being pretty moist. Colorado is high and dry.
Figure 3 is the forecasted surface map Monday midday showing the front that has formed and raced down across Colorado. The high mountains, foothills, and wind prone areas will see periods of good wind today. The I-25 corridor and Longmont will have breezy to windy periods as temperatures drop a bit. Temperatures rebound on Tuesday and Wednesday with continued dry conditions.
The longer range forecast:
The next weather maker is our Thursday short wave and, what looks a this time, to be a one-two cold front punch Thursday morning and Thursday afternoon. The afternoon front looks like it pushes enough moisture uphill (upslope flow) to create precipitation and brings in cold enough air (a high of 48F dropping in the afternoon) for a brief heavy shot of snow. The GFS has a roughly 2" total as seen in Figure 4 right down I-25 and in the foothills (and another band out on the NE Plains of Colorado) falling in just a few hours before clearing out. I'll get into the details of this storm more as the week goes on. We warm up and dry out right after Thursday.
