Colorado Weather: Overall Snowpack drops despite light snow
With no big blasts of snow this week our overall snowpack numbers have trickled down a bit from the big boost last weeks cold wave produced. Last weeks numbers shot up after feet of snow dropped on the Colorado mountains at the same time the eastern plains were in the deep freeze.
That helped many areas of northern and western Colorado to shoot up into the 90% to 100% range for a few days. Southern Colorado did rose up but, still lagged behind with percentiles only getting into the 70% to 85 % ranges. Still overall a big improvement. As a whole though the entire state still did not quite get up to the ideal100% for the statewide average. That number pushed up to 94%.
This week the new snowpack numbers on January 24th tended to drop down overall with no big snowstorms developing across the Rockies. The only area that held on to its favorable snowpack is the Upper Colorado Basin with 101%! Most other areas of the state dropped off by a few points.
The area hit with the lowest percent of average was the Upper Rio Grande Basin in southern Colorado. This spot around the San Luis Valley and Eastern San Juan Mountains dropped into the 60s on percent. The overall Colorado average dropped to 91 % which is still not ideal. Even with the lower numbers however, most of those areas ranging from 80% to 101% are still much better off than the beginning of the year when all numbers were coming in around 60% to 75%.
There is a small shot of measurable snow heading into the state for Thursday night into Friday. The bullseye for this round may be the southern mountains with 5 to 10 inches possible for some more favored areas of the San Juan and Sangre De Cristo mountains by Saturday morning. After that, a dry pattern takes over through Ground Hog Day (February 2nd). The long range models do have a change in the pattern after that bringing back a chance for mountain snow.
The 90 day precipitation outlook from the Climate Prediction Center has February, March and April forecast for above normal precipitation. Which most likely will be mostly in the form of snow. For the mountains and west in the un-shaded area of the map below, the forecast is for equal chances of above or below normal snowfall. But, since we are in an El Nino winter we can still hold on to the idea that we should still have a few good snowstorms that should boost our snowpack numbers going from Winter into the start of Spring.
