Hi hi!

I took a week off for my Bachelor party and of course, one of Denver’s wettest days since the 70s occurs. If you know any meteorologists/weather weenies, you know that anytime one of us leaves, something amazing happens. It wasn’t the first time this has happened to be and it won’t be the last unfortunately haha

Either way, I’ve kept my socials pretty updated so do follow me there for more consistent weather tidbits.

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I’m going to talk about the rain that has fallen and how our drought was improved, Colorado’s snowpack and then get into the forecast which is looking wet again.

First off, my goodness that rain we had last week! How amazing was that? Most of the Denver metro saw 4-7″ of rain which is 25-40% of some places ANNUAL total. That’s a lot of really good rain for our area. Check out the totals so far this month and how that compares to average.

Some areas like Denver, Colorado Springs, Castle Rock and Ft. Morgan have seen 300-400% of normal precipitation for the month. On top of this, we’ve had some pretty robust thunderstorms recently with large hail and tornadoes being reported.

Denver averages just under 15″ of liquid precip through the entire year and this past storm bumped us up nicely. We’ve seen as much rain as we normally see through early July!

For snowpack, we’re still doing well! All the cloud cover and cooler temperatures have made our snowpack melt slowly. That’s great and exactly what we want every year. Some years we get that, some years we don’t.

Current snowpack is sitting at 134% of average statewide.

Not too shabby for mid-May!

Snow won’t be widespread for awhile but the highest elevations could still see accumulating snows with any system that comes through. For Denver and the Urban Corridor, I’m confident we’ve seen our last snow of the season (which I called on April 28 this year). 🙂

I’m also growing more confident that we’ve seen our last freeze of the year too in Denver. Typically this comes in early May and while we could still have blasts of cooler air, I’m not seeing any signs of big cold air outbreaks moving in over the next two weeks. I’m planting my garden this weekend 🙂

ONTO THE FORECAST

A cold front swung through overnight and that has dropped temperatures and brought a layer of stratus clouds to the areas. Our chances of seeing stronger storms this afternoon is dependent on if we can clear some of these clouds out. Sun=fuel. If we have no sun shining through, we will limit how much fuel the storms later can use. Regardless of that, widespread rain will be likely this afternoon.

We have a marginal threat for flooding in Denver and Colorado Spring but Pueblo and Trinidad and SE Colorado are under a slight threat for flooding. This just means that the storms that form could produce very heavy rainfall. BE ready for that.

We have a solid chance for rain today and Friday but Friday’s threat looks to spark a bit further south so I’m not super optimistic Denver will have a soaker Friday but that chance is better towards COS and southward.

Here’s a look at the animation of storms for today and Friday.

As you can notice, Thursday will come with widespread rain. Whereas Friday will be a bit more concentrated to the mountains and southern I-25 corridor. Severe weather is possible along the entire I-25 corridor. Ft. Collins, Denver, Colorado Springs, Pueblo, Limon – large hail and damaging winds are possible with the storms that pop this afternoon.

Here’s a look at total rainfall potential by Saturday.Healthy half in to inch and a half totals are expected.

A decent soaker on the way. It won’t be like what we saw last week but given this will be in addition to that, this is a healthy round of moisture coming for most folks.

Temperatures across Denver and the Front Range will be held down because of the cloud cover and rain but we’ll warm up into the weekend with pm storm chances continuing.

As we continue into next week, it looks as though our winds will shift a bit. We’ve had NW winds aloft since last week and that has been producing showers and storms, some which have been strong but as we head towards the middle of next week our winds will shift and come from the SW. SW winds bring in warmer and at times more unstable air so the chance of seeing more frequent strong storms next week is a possibility.

May 23-27 looks to be wet, too so this pattern will continuing for the foreseeable future.

CANADIAN SMOKE
Our Canadian neighbors to the north in Alberta are experiencing a horrendous early fire season and huge amounts of smoke have been getting pushed around. With a cold front coming from the north, you may notice smoke in the air. This is from those Canadian fires. We’ll have cloud cover and rain around so you may not notice a lot of it but it’s definitely there. Here’s a look at the smoke forecast for the enxt few days.

Drought has been reduced in many areas because of all the rain. Take a look at the latest drought map that was just updated.

With additional rain coming over SE Colorado I’m optimistic that we will see even more improvements by next week.

As always, there’s a lot to talk about so follow me on socials for more.

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~Andy

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