I will keep including the notes below in each of my posts. I will highlight new additions in red. 

Stay At Home Colorado

“I direct all Coloradans to stay at home, subject to limited exceptions such as obtaining food and other household necessities, going to and from work at critical businesses, seeking medical care, caring for dependents or pets, or caring for a vulnerable person in another location.” This directive by the governor is in force from March 26 through at least April 11. Here is the full text of the Executive Order. Here is an explainer article.

Should You Go Skiing?

While it appears to be legal to go skiing, my take on this is that it's probably best to not ski.

If you go skiing in the backcountry, please stay close to home, do not travel to mountain communities if you don't already live there, and put yourself in a low-risk situation so that you do not have an accident that requires search and rescue (here's an amazingly-good article about what happened near Telluride on March 24th)

If you go skiing at a closed resort, please check ahead to see if uphill access is open (spoiler alert – uphill access is NOT open at most resorts) and respect those resorts who have closed uphill access.

The Weather

On Monday and Monday night we saw snow showers across the state. Based on mountain cams and SNOTEL sites, it looks like the average snow accumulation was a coating to 3 inches. The most snow that I found was at Red Mountain Pass in the southern mountains, between Telluride and Silverton, where the SNOTEL site showed about 5 inches of accumulation.

Now on Tuesday morning, the state is split in half with low clouds over the northern and some central mountains, and sunshine over the southern mountains.

The satellite image (from Colorado State University) shows these low clouds, just before sunrise, as the blue color over the northern half of the state.

I trust the satellite image, though its nice to verify the weather conditions with actual images if possible.

Here is a cam from Keystone, in the northern mountains, showing the low clouds.

Here is a from Wolf Creek, in the southern mountains, showing clear skies and a beautiful sunrise.

Tuesday’s weather should be dry and partly to mostly sunny as the low clouds over the northern mountains should break up by midday or afternoon.

Wednesday’s weather should be dry and partly sunny for most of the day. We might see a few showers later in the day and through the evening as moisture and a bit of energy moves over the state ahead of the next storm.

Thursday into Friday is when we’ll see our next storm. This system will track over the northern mountains and will be strong but move quickly.

We’ll see some showers on Thursday morning and midday, and then expect intense precipitation for a few hours from Thursday mid-afternoon through Thursday evening. When this intense precipitation moves through, the combination of heavy snow and strong winds could create very low visibility and potential road closures. Most of us shouldn’t be traveling anyway on Thursday afternoon/evening, but I know some people might be driving through the mountains for emergency/health/family reasons so I wanted to mention this.

The precipitation forecast from the American GFS model looks reasonable. The most precipitation is over the northern and central mountains, and amounts should average 0.3 - 0.8 inches. At a snow-to-liquid ratio of 13-to-1, that’s 4-10 inches, so roughly the same forecast that we talked about yesterday.

Do not look at the exact location of the heaviest snow in the map above. It’s just a guide to seeing that there could be pockets of deeper accumulations as the storm moves through. This will be a fast-moving system, hitting the northern mountains hard on Thursday afternoon, and then it'll be gone by late Thursday night.

Friday should be a dry day because our storm will have moved away by Thursday night. And then looking ahead to Saturday, most models show another weak storm moving through with a few showers and light accumulations.

Next week looks active over the west coast and some of this storminess should move into Colorado.

The 6-10 day outlook from NOAA shows that the highest odds for colder weather and precipitation will be over the west coast and just west of Colorado.

While the most precipitation will stay to our west, we should see some snow from two storms moving into the Rockies. The first chance of precipitation next week should be around Tuesday, April 7th. Then another storm could bring snow to Colorado later next week, roughly between Thursday, April 9th and Sunday, April 12th.

Thanks for reading!

Stay healthy, stay happy.

My next post will be on Wednesday morning.

JOEL GRATZ

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https://opensnow.com/news/post/help-support-covid-19-relief-efforts

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Geography Key

Northern Mountains
Steamboat, Granby, Beaver Creek, Vail, Ski Cooper, Copper, Breckenridge, Keystone, Loveland, Arapahoe Basin, Winter Park, Berthoud Pass, Eldora, Rocky Mountain National Park, Cameron Pass

Along the Divide
Loveland, Arapahoe Basin, Winter Park, Berthoud Pass

East of the Divide
Eldora, Echo, Rocky Mountain National Park, Cameron Pass

Central Mountains
Aspen, Sunlight, Monarch, Crested Butte, Irwin, Powderhorn

Southern Mountains
Telluride, Silverton – north side of the southern mountains | Purgatory, Wolf Creek – south side of the southern mountains