On the right you see the Snow Tracker forecast that I presented on Wednesday evening (3/25/2009) ahead of the blizzard that rocked many of you Thursday afternoon and Friday. On the right you see final snowfall numbers that were reported to the local NWS office. While this was an admitted hard to storm to actually measure the snowfall due to the blowing and drifting that occured, you can see that for the most part we did really well with our prognostication and what ended up being reality.

Even though large scale and mature storms are usually easiest to forecast for many areas of the country, we still have our usual terrain issues to deal with here that always make for complexity when tracking/forecasting and trying to communicate in a nice little package on television what is going to happen when it arrives. In my opinion, the “slam-dunk” of this storm was the 10″-20″ on the eastern plains south of highway 50. I actually found it extremely interesting that one of our competitors was forecasting 3-8″ for this area Wednesday evening. With ranchers in the midst of calving, I assume any folks that saw that forecast may have been scrambling to take care of the herd when actuality arrived. We did talk to a woman in Lamar Friday morning that knew some people who had already lost some calves during the storm. 

While being spot on for almost everyone, we did struggle a little in Teller County as we were a touch too high across the board. The pocket of 10-20″ ended up being across extreme northern Teller County on an arc into the foothills west of Denver. Right idea, just a little displaced on the forecast. This was due to the speed in which the cold front rocketed southward Thursday afternoon, taking a source of lift away from Teller County that I thought would be around for several more hours. The foothills of Jefferson County say along the front through the morning before it raced south, thus ending up with the 10″-20″.

There you go, a little behind the scene glimpse at a post-analysis. We do this every storm as we continuously learn about the atmosphere and how it behaves given our local terrain, but something we don’t always have time to share. As always, we welcome any comments or suggestions you may have regarding our coverage. We’re interested in what you have to say as our number 1 goal is to constantly strive to serve you better.

I know Marty likes to share some of the beautiful sunrise pictures we get from our cameras across the Neighborhood Weather Network. Here are a few that really stood out from this morning. Alamosa is one of our new cameras and that one really caught my eye this morning. Enjoy!

Above are two images for Friday morning. The one on the left shows the large scale storm track with the main area of low pressure to our south, near Santa Fe at 6am Friday. This is a large difference from the storm that passed through today, which went to our north with blizzard conditions for eastern Wyoming, the Nebraska panhandle and western South Dakota. The second image shows the large scale lift at 6am Friday morning that would result from the low in this position. In addition to this large scale positioning, this storm is a lot colder than the one that moved through today and will produce a lot of wind. Its still a few days off and we’ll see some iterations in the computer models over the next few days, but model continuity and the track means this storm has a lot smaller chance to “miss” us than today’s did. While it could cause some significant travel issues and headaches, it is the best chance we’ve had in a long while for a noticeable and significant moisture producer for a widespread portion of the area.

Speaking of today’s storm, while a blizzard was occuring on the back side of it, note the severe weather reports in the warm sector of the storm. Several tornadoes in western Iowa outside of Omaha hurt some people when a tree fell on a car and an outhouse building blew into a car. This picture will be common with the any strong storms moving out of the Rockies and into the plains over the next month. Thunderstorms on the front and wind and snow on the back.

This morning’s system tracked too far to the north to bring much-needed moisture to southern Colorado. Some portions of the viewing area picked up a dusting of some wet snow early this morning. Woodland Park got this snow around 5:00 this morning.

The system was producing showers and thunderstorms across northeastern Colorado as it tracked to the northeast. Some wet snow also mixed in at times. CDOT’s camera in Limon showed some wet snowflakes sticking to the lens.

We’ll be tracking another system for the end of the week that we hope will bring some precipitation our way.

There were a few thunderstorms across the state this afternoon. One on the northeast plains became severe and even had a tornado warning issued for it just before 7pm.

You can see the National Weather Service was reporting some circulation with this storm. And our velocity was showing circulation as well. The green area is what is moving toward the radar site in Denver, and the red area shows what is moving away from the radar site. That is a good sign there is some circulation associated with the storm.

I did not hear any actual reports of a tornado or even a funnel cloud with this storm. It’s that time of year! Today was a good warm-up to get back into the thunderstorm tracking groove!

The view from Pueblo around 9:00 this mornning showed blue skies and mild temperatures–pretty much the norm for the area so far this month. We’re halfway through the month and Pueblo has only reported three days with trace amounts of precipitation–nothing measurable. I came across an interesting fact from the National Weather Service Pueblo office. It said that the last time Pueblo went through the entire month of March without any measurable precipitation was 1888! There is no precipitation in the forecast for the next 7 days and longer-range models don’t show too much promise either. Is it possible this 121-year-old record will be matched?

We’ll get the weekend started with a lot of sunshine, mild temperatures and not much wind. By 6:00 this evening, Futurecast is hinting at fairly light winds out of the south as indicated by the small arrows.

By tomorrow morning, those arrows become longer, indicating stronger winds, and they become westerly.

The winds out of the west will make for warmer temperatures Sunday. However, the strong winds will mix with low relative humidity values and dry fuels to bring about the threat of fire danger. Fire weather watches go into effect at noon for much of southeastern Colorado.

We need some moisture badly but it doesn’t look like any hope is in sight this week.

I know this isn’t typically a word to use when less than an inch of snow fell, but what happenend this morning was.  Interestingly it wasn’t a surprise, seriously, no really!!!  Actually I felt like we did a pretty good job with this considering the inherent uncertainties in this environment, haven’t had any hate mail yet, but we don’t mind the ribbing if you’d like to be the first ;-)

We know when “convective elements” will exist within larger areas of snow, we just don’t know exactly where/when these elements will form.  That may sound, well, like we don’t know what is going on!  But seriously, an event like this really exposes the limitations to the science, even if we happen to get it right.  We can do this about as well as we can tell you whether an afternoon thunderstorm will hit your house versus your friend’s house a few miles away, we know there will be storms, but when/where is the problem.  The line of snow this morning was associated with the passage of an upper level wave and was only about 10 miles wide, it came together just to our northwest, rumbled overhead (just in time for the morning commute of course) and then fell apart as it exited El Paso county, here’s a quick look at the line after it had passed over Colorado Springs, the burst of real heavy snow is represented by the magenta coloring on the map…

Over the last couple of days we kept noting that the computer models weren’t showing any snow, but that we’d probably see at least a quick shot of scattered snow showers, doesn’t make us too smart, we’ve just learned from past beatings at the hands of Mother Nature.  As we move towards spring the atmosphere within storm systems will become increasingly unstable.  “Cells” within larger areas of snow act much like thunderstorms, except they produce snow, and like summer thunderstorms the precipitation they produce can really come down for a short time.  Granted this was more of a line (like a line of thunderstorms), but it was the cellular nature of this line that made for the intesity of the snow that we had.  I’ve already had at least one person here at work describe the “mushroom clouds” (cumulus) that they could see after the line passed over the area.  Bottom line is that a half inch of snow wrecked our morning commute!  Soon enough we’ll forecast for 3″ to 6″ of snow over Teller County, and most areas will get that, but someone will call and say they got a foot, and we won’t be surprised!

I always wonder how best to communicate the impacts events like today will have.  We can throw around phrases like “scary for a short while”, “reduced visibility”, “bursts of snow”, “briefly white/slick roadways”, I just don’t know if it really makes the point or not.  Quite frankly I’ve seen this before, recognized what was coming on radar and yet am still very impressed when I watch it happen as it did today.  Sometimes I wonder if in this situation I’d just be better off saying we’re in for a half a foot, might make the impression I’m looking to make, we’re only as accurate as you think we are anyway.  As this was coming into the area I actually said on television something like “no phone calls, I don’t want to hear how surprised you are when it rolls over and scares you!”, dunno if it helped or not though?!  It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words, that’s why we love the Neighborhood Weather Network!  Watching dry roadways become completely snow covered in 5 minutes makes an impression.  If we aren’t effective communicators, the cameras can help us out, I’d like to think they did that this morning, here’s a look at a few images I was able to grab while being on television, radio, the web, whine whine whine.  At the time of these image grabs the snow was essentially done falling over Woodland Park and Monument…

Snow was falling heavily over areas farther east, note the poor visibility…

Travel should be fine this afternoon, but that wind will be chilly, have a great day!

Several wildfires broke out this (Sunday) evening. A few in Pueblo County and one near the Denver/Aurora line. High fire danger has been an issue today with relative humidities in the single digits and wind speeds between 15 to 20mph with higher wind gusts. Unfortunately, we are expecting high fire danger once again to start out the workweek. The National Weather Service has already issued a Fire Weather Watch for the areas shaded in orange.

Wind speeds will be gusting above 40mph. That combined with dry fuels and relative humidities possibly falling below 15%, we are looking at another very dangerous day for fires.

We have very dry conditions across I-25 and the eastern plains.  Today we at least got a little bit of moisture, but not enough.  These are the only official reports from the National Weather Service… 1 SSE Wolf Creek Pass 9in…11 NNE Crestone 3in… 5 NE Colorado Springs 1in… 2 S Cuchara 3in.  Cripple Creek got about 3 inches in certain parts of the city.  Our Neighborhood Weather Network camera in Cripple Creek shows some slick spots still on the roads as of 9:30pm.

The high country has slick to hazardous conditions.  Our Real-Time Tavel shows a lot of red and yellow dots meaning hazardous and slick/slow conditions for many of the mountain passes.  Green dots across much of the northeastern plains.  Those wet conditions could turn to slick/slow as overnight temperatures drop.