What a beautiful morning in Colorado with the sun popping out and snow covering the higher peaks!

I collected the best snow photos from resorts around the state and posted them on Facebook.

Our Friday/Saturday storm (named Xena) behaved about as expected, though snow levels were higher than I thought on Friday so accumulations in the San Juans were lower than I thought and stayed mostly on the higher peaks about 12,000ft.

The second part of the storm performed almost exactly as expected with a moist wrap-around flow bringing snow to areas from Aspen and north on Saturday morning. This map shows the total precipitation from the storm at SNOTEL sites around Colorado. A few notes:

+ SNOTEL sites are remote backcountry weather stations that measure snow
+ The most reliable measurement they make is Snow Water Equivalent (SWE)
+ SWE is measured in liquid inches. It's what you'd get if you melted the snow.
+ Because this storm was warm, 1 inch of SWE is about 8 inches of snow.
+ In cold storms, 1 inch of SWE could be 20 inches of snow.
+ More maps like there can be found here.

From the map, it appears the most snow to fall over the last 48 hours was in the northern mountains near the Never Summer range on the western edge of Rocky Mountain National Park. That red dot is clickable on the SNOTEL page that I linked to above, so I clicked on it. And this is what comes up:

This graph shows the amount of SWE from the beginning of the season (left) to the end of the season (right). Each line represents a single season. The higher lines show more snowfall during a season, and they all go back to zero in June as the snow melts.

The best season ever saw about 1,100mm of SWE (about 43 inches of SWE, or perhaps 500-700 inches of snow). This season is shown in red, and there's not much data because the season just started. The lines are colored by how closely past seasons match this season, with darker lines showing seasons that matched the current season. What you'll notice is that a few of the darker lines show matching seasons that were some of the snowiest ever recorded (lines that go higher on the graph). Other darker lines are low on the graph, showing less snowy seasons.

What does this mean? It means that early-season snowfall is NOTa good predictor of snowfall for the rest of the season. Some seasons with early snowfall like the current season turned out to be great, and some did not. So much for long-range forecasting, eh?

Looking ahead, a weak storm will just touch the northern half of Colorado on Tuesday night, which will lead to a few inches of snow from about 8pm Tuesday through 6am Wednesday. Check the Colorado page for detailed snow amounts, and don't get your hopes up:-) Also, be prepared for very windy conditions on Tuesday for the mountains north of Crested Butte (northern half of the state) and on Wednesday for those same mountains plus the urban areas on the plains.

In better news, night time temperatures should be cold enough for Abasin and Loveland to continue making snow, so I'm guessing that one or both will open within the week!

In fact, here's Abasin's marketing manager Adrienne talking to The Weather Channel this morning...and she does give a prediction for opening day.

JOEL GRATZ