This shift thankfully did take some of the highest-end snow amounts off the table for the Denver area, while at the same time ramping up the storm’s impact for the Palmer Divide and Colorado Springs regions. In the end, we didn’t make too big of a deal about this as we didn’t believe it would change the forecast much for our area. This same trend was visible in other models as well, though not as pronounced. Notice how the bullseye over Colorado both shrinks and shifts southward slightly. The animation below shows the precipitation output from the European model in its six runs leading up to the storm’s arrival. About 24 hours leading up to the event, we started to see shifts in the models - the system was taking a more southern track and precipitation amounts were declining slightly across the Denver Metro area. Whether you realize it or not, we actually somewhat dodged a bullet with this storm. Temperatures bounced back and forth between 32 and 33 degrees at our station for the next 19 hours with snow falling continuously. After this front passed, it was all snow from there on out. It was this front that took this storm to the next level - from just a rain/snow mix type of event with little fanfare, instead to a late-season impactful snowstorm for nearly the entire Metro area.
You can see this second front in the graphic below passing through around 1PM on Friday. We got about 0.3″ of rain in Boulder before the change-over to snow occurred early Friday afternoon aided by an anticipated secondary surge of cold air (i.e. Goodbye 80s! Hello 🌨 #cowx /L8KXNBXqM8īy Friday morning, rain had broken out across the area, with snow already falling in the higher elevations. Here comes the cold front from the northeast on radar. This intense front came packed with a wall of dust which was clearly visible on radar and ominously to the naked eye as it approached and blew through. This strong boundary dropped the temperature at our station from 81☏ to 54☏ in just 25 minutes. Things kicked off late Thursday evening with the passage of the initial Canadian cold front. We’ll skip most of the details surrounding the storm’s evolution in the days leading up to the event - though it was a fun and challenging forecast - ultimately you know how it turned out: wet and snowy! Though we did have a beat on the system many days ahead of time, there wasn’t great model support for this much snow - except for the American GFS model which was showing a decent snowstorm all along.
Then came this week’s snowstorm, almost entirely out of left field. That progress unfortunately was erased by the dearth of precipitation the last eight weeks - Ugh!
This was extra bad news for the drought as this springtime period is usually our wettest and often snowiest time of the year.Īfter the record snowy start to 2022 (that seems like ages ago, doesn’t it?), we had dug ourselves out of a huge precipitation deficit by early April with drought classifications nearly lapsing across the Front Range. Since then, it has been the driest and least snowy such stretch in the city’s history. Rior to Friday, the last measurable snowfall in Boulder was incredibly two months ago, all the way back in late March.
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