This sort of piggy backs off of what Marty wrote about…but this July is officially going to go into the books as the driest July ever in Colorado Springs. We’ve kept records at the airport since 1948 and even if you go back into the 1920s when records were kept at Colorado College, it would still rank as the driest July of all time.

However, this can be a little mis-leading because you have to consider that when we measure rain its only an eight inch diamter circle (size of NWS regulated rain gauges), so basically a point on the earth’s surface and doesn’t necessarily represent the surrounding area. Here’s what I mean as I list the July rain totals for some of the STORMTRACKER 13 Neighborhood Weather Network and you can see that some areas had noticeably more rain than the airport.

Before I go home (and I really need to)…Heather noticed this when we were at the Broadmoor for the % and 6pm newscasts earlier today and I also got a phone call and email on the apparent haze in the atmosphere this afternoon. I can’t attribute it to moisture (we have really dry air overhead) so its likely a little smoke from the California wildfires…we’ll see if its around again tomorrow, it likely will be as our air is somewhat stagnant… 

Several questions here about the drought lately, I’m pressed for time so forgive the “shallow” answers…

I don’t think I would go so far as to say this drought is worse than 2002 was.  A look at the numbers alone says we are actually drier through this year then we were in 2002 so I’ll have to support my claim, and here’s my reasoning.  2002 was the culmination of several years of drought that had claimed many feet of water from our local reservoirs and stripped any soil moisture of note.  We have been very dry this year, and we are in the midst of a drought, I don’t think that is something I can, or want to dispute, but the mountains in particular had a great winter as far as snowpack went.  Previously we have had several good years which have helped to recharge both soil and reservoir moisture levels.  My point is that yes, it’s bad for many areas right now, but 2002 was brutal and was preceded by several very dry years.  We couldn’t buy a drop of rain anywhere for most of that summer, at least some areas have sporadically received some rainfall this season even if all of us have not been involved.  This next week doesn’t look too good for us as far as rain chances go…

We’re often asked to project the weather over an upcoming season.  I don’t personally believe this is something we can do, the science just isn’t far enough along to do this with any sort of accuracy, my opinion.  Some people make a living trying to do this and here is a link to some of the seasonal projections put out by the Climate Predicition Center, read the “user manuals” and take these forecasts with a grain of salt…

Well, there isn’t a lot of weather to talk about right now and that’s OK with me, it usually takes me an entire summer to recuperate from the mental beatings involved with the craziness of our weather for the rest of the year. It won’t be too long before that “fun” starts again. In the meantime I like to stop and “smell the roses” once in awhile. Nice looking sunrise this morning, here’s a look from a couple of members of the STORMTRACKER 13 Neighborhood Weather Network…

I have a bunch of lightning photographs I’ll be posting soon, not mine but I’m happy to share some great photos.  Thanks for visiting us here at krdo.com!

Even though the atmosphere starts to dry out on Tuesday, the Broadmoor location adjacent to the mountains put it in an area that may get an isolated storm during the afternoon. If you’re heading out to the event I thought I’d remind you of a couple things for the next few days. Its going to be hot and we’ll have abundant sunshine (in particular on Wed-Fri). Drink a lot of water and apply sunscreen frequently…recall that an SPF of 30 means you are fully protected from UVA/UVB rays for 30 minutes, after that you’ll need to re-apply for full protection to continue.  I for one can speak from experience that its easy to forget to keep applying…then you end up burnt!

Visitors will find that they easily dehydrate at elevation and will need to pay extra attention to water/fluid intake. I know many of you are volunteering there, thank you and have fun! 

As of this morning, what used to be Hurricane Dolly was centered over southern New Mexico. You can see the scattered showers and storms associated with Dolly over New Mexico and even a few light showers making their way into southern and southeastern Colorado.

We’ll continue to track the moisture associated with Dolly throughout the next 24-36 hours as it could bring us some much needed rain. However, the computer models have been painting various pictures with the track. One is showing widespread rain across the state on Monday with others keeping much of the rain to our east.

I think that most of the rain today will be in northern New Mexico with some storms developing in southern and southeastern Colorado late today. That would be welcomed news where drought conditions are worst. Tomorrow, I’m betting the heaviest rain will be along the Colorado/Kansas border although we’ll keep a chance for scattered thunderstorms across southern Colorado. This is my first experience forecasting tropical remnants in Colorado. I’m used to tracking Atlantic hurricanes up the east coast so we’ll see how it goes. Have a great Sunday!

I just wanted to take this opportunity to show off some of the sunrise/sunset pictures we recieved this week.  The first two come from Kit Tyler of the Fountain area.


The second comes from Ron Ullrich from the Pueblo area.  Rain showers combined with the sun setting makes for a gorgeous sky!

If you have any cool pictures, make sure you email them to us at weather@krdo.com!

STORMTRACKER 13 Futurecast is once again showing the potential for locally heavy rainfall today, especially across the higher elevations. With heavy rainfall, flash flooding is always a possibility.

It’s important to point out that more deaths occur each year due to flooding than from any other severe weather related hazard. Most of these are due to a vehicle being driven into hazardous flood water. The next highest percentage of flood-related deaths is due to walking into or near flood waters. The reason that so many people drown during flooding is underestimating the power of water. Six inches of fast-moving flood water can knock over an adult. Two feet of rushing water can carry away most vehicles.
The best advice: turn around when you see high water. Don’t attempt to cross it.

The National Weather Service offers these additional tips:

I got an email tonight from Lawrence, who lives 20 miles east of Falcon. He said, “We just totaled the rain gauge readings from April 1 until today. 2.61 inches. This is .3 less than the great drought of a few years ago (2002).”

That got me to do some digging. Interestingly enough, the local Weather Service in Pueblo had done some checking of their own the other day. Below are some of their findings (the rank is in terms of driest January 1-July23 since records have been kept at each individual station - the periods of data differ for different locales)

You can see that for the official observation at the Colorado Springs Airport, its the driest first 204 days of the year on record! In 2002, which now ranks 3rd, we had 4.23″. Pueblo Reservoir ranks 2nd driest ever and its pretty obvious from the other numbers that we need some rain! While we have had some thunderstorms over the last few weeks, they don’t help everyone out. They’ll hit one neighborhood hard (two weeks ago parts of Black Forest had 2-3″ on a Friday night), while Lawrence has had that amount as a total since April 1st.

Checking with the USDA’s Drought Severity Index confirms…we’re in a drought. The southeastern corner of the state has extreme to exceptional drought conditions. We’re tracking the remnants of “Dolly” as it may bring storms Monday…I’ll blog on the current long term prognostications by the Climate Prediction Center through the end of the year early next week.  Have an enjoyable and relaxing weekend!

Being that we are in the heart of summer this is probably not very noticeable, but we are losing a little daylight every day.  I’m really starting to notice it now as I present some of our Neighborhood Weather Network cameras at the top of the 5:00 AM broadcast.  Here are some examples from this morning…

A couple of comments have centered around the dry weather and the monsoon, we’re a little crazy doing some graphical work right now but we’ll try to get you all some answers here over the next several days.  In the meantime, I did touch on this earlier, you can read the older post by scrolling down to the bottom of this page, the entry is titled “The Monsoon Shows Signs of Life!”.  Thank you for the comments!

Marty V

As I’m writing this, the annual Pikes Peak International Hill Climb is about to get underway. You really couldn’t ask for a nicer day for the drivers. I figured it would be appropriate to show some of our Neighborhood Weather Network views of Pikes Peak in honor of the event.

We have the ability to tweak our views to our liking, which is certainly helpful with different weather scenarios. In today’s case, I used our Flooring America camera to zoom into the summit of Pikes Peak to see if I could see any action. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much to see yet…maybe later.

As you can see by the temperatures on the photos, it has been another warm start to the day. Temepratures in the low 80s at 9:00 a.m. mean it’s going to be another hot one. We’ll see temperatures into the 90s in many places and even the 100s around and east of Pueblo. Have a great Sunday!

It’s the first tropical storm to affect the US east coast this year…Tropical Storm Cristobal. 

As of the last update at 5pm EDT, the center of Cristobal was about 125 miles east of Charleston, SC and about 205 miles SW of Cape Hatteras, NC.  This storm is moving to the northeast near 7mph and this motion is expected to continue over the next couple of days.  Maximum sustained winds are near 45mph; slow strengthening is expected during the next day or two.  A Tropical Storm Warning is in effect for the South Carolina coast to the North Carolina/Virginia border.