mayjawintastawm

If I filled the boxes in right, it looks like a COCORAHS station near Arapahoe Park (just east of Aurora) got 9.84" of rain in May. Amazing. Centennial got just over 6.6". Lots and lots, and lots, of mosquitoes tonight. Everything green is happy though. What's just as incredible is my friends in central and western NY state got only 0.4"-0.75" with many days in the 80s. I think we traded weather.

1 hour ago, Chinook said:

Lochbuie CoCoRAHS spotter near the Airport got 7.17" of precip. That's like more than half a year of precip for a bunch of areas, considering 14" per year.

Centennial has about 6.5" and DEN about 5.5". I'm too lazy right now to look at COCORAHS around me but would guess several have 7"+ as well. Half a year, indeed. The Denver Metro area saved millions on lawn watering this month.

Those storms got us this afternoon as I was driving, not too fun but hail stayed just small enough to not create problems (0.75" or so). Yes, traffic was bad. Good moisture. Raining again now. Foggy in the morning perhaps.

We seem to have fallen through both holes in the swiss cheese, with 0.06" rain total the last 2 days.

3 hours ago, Chinook said:

From what I can tell, the forest fire smoke has been above Colorado, as well as most of the Midwest. For my area, I noticed it a week ago, but I don't know if the smoke was over Colorado for all this time.

 

It was noticeable pretty much every day since last Friday around the Front Range, except Sunday which was a lot prettier. Figures that the one year we have a wet Spring, we get smoke from other places.

On 5/16/2023 at 6:21 AM, Newman said:

Just finished up my undergrad meteorology degree at Millersville in PA. Will be moving to Laramie, WY come late July to settle in for grad school at UWYO. Excited to be apart of the Mountain West and to join y'all 

Congrats and welcome! I don't think we have any posters from WY so that's especially good.

Also, noticed you're from Fleetwood- we lived in Allentown (actually Emmaus) for several years in the mid 90s and my wife grew up in Bethlehem.

And DIA was a relative low-precip site compared to several others in the Metro area. Places that got the brunt of the thunderstorms received 1-1.25 inches on the 10th, and much of the south and east metro area received 3.7-4.3 inches on the 11th. So this was really significant, especially because on the 10th the QPF predictions were mostly between 1.5 and 2.5 inches for the entire event.

The Cherry Creek Reservoir level went up 9 feet over the last 3 days. This is 1.8 feet short of the 3rd highest level ever, in 1983, and about as high as I have seen it in our 13 years here, comparable to the September 2013 flood. This is also a special event because prior to the rain, it was at its lowest point in several years due to the dry winter.

What we are all thinking.... if this had come two months ago!!

Sump pump working overtime.

2 hours ago, Chinook said:

That's crazy

And now the total is up to 4.79" at one and 5.02" at another. Still raining, less hard. I think it took about 7 months to get the previous 5" and this time it took 32 hours.

The two PWSs nearest me (my rain gauge still broken) have had 3.75 and 3.92 inches of rain in the last 26 hours. I think that's the most in that short a time since the 2013 floods.

5 hours ago, smokeybandit said:

If it wasn't still hailing when I went outside,  I probably could have found 1.75" too

Did that once to find a 2" stone, while it was hailing, with a bike helmet for protection. Wife thought I was nuts. But it was warm and I didn't want it to melt.

Round 1: A few 1 inch hailstones and a whole lotta rain. We were in 2 tornado warnings inside of an hour I think, but just radar indicated.

37 minutes ago, ValpoVike said:

We had quite the lightning show to kickoff the spring/summer thread up here around 10pm last night, but it moved thru pretty quickly.  Today is rather socked in with low ceilings and current temps in the 40's.  BTW, did NWS Boulder get a new forecaster?  The AFD this morning was rather colorful.

 

 

I think so- I really liked their short term discussion.

Struggling to get out of the soup here and get a little heating.

Here we go, severe season started with a bang last night north of Denver and the current main event might be today. Enhanced risk for severe for the immediate Denver metro and northeast. Keep those cars inside, sports fans.

I'm going to start a spring-summer thread with today's interesting scenario as the first post. 8 pages + 1 post for all of fall and winter... we could use some more traffic!

48.8" snowfall for the 22-23 season at my house, barring anything the rest of May.

32 minutes ago, ValpoVike said:

That’s about right. I am at 7310 and about 100’ above me got light accumulation. Around 8500 it looks like considerably more from what I can see today.  Does anyone know how much rain fell north of DIA?  It looked like some very slow movers in that area. 

There was a narrow N-S band of 1.4-1.8 inches just north and south of DIA from Weld County south to SE Aurora, according to COCORAHS.

Two things really surprised me about that storm: 1) the snow level for real accumulation was much higher than forecast- looks like about 7500 feet; and 2) the total precip was much, much less than forecast south and east of the Metro area. Heavy precip over 2 inches was confined to the Pueblo area. Even SE Colorado got shafted. If it hadn't been for the convection earlier in the day, it would have been bust-o-rama for everyone.

Around an inch of rain here from everyone else's home weather stations, the most in just about 8 months. Temp 39 and it doesn't seem likely that we'll see a single flake. Looks from radar that the snow level is right around 6200 ft.

Some really nice rain for about the last 4 hours, even before the "main event" (or non-event for us). Of course my rain gauge decided to jam right after it started. Have to go up on the roof tomorrow.

The Keenesburg tornado was a landspout. There was some video someone took from a car, looks like they were on I-76. Little bitty thing. We had some nice sunshine today that yielded just enough instability to create some thunderstorms.

Models coming in more south again, with less QPF locally and some with a precip hole over the Denver metro. Why am I not surprised. Good for SE CO though.

OK now GFS says 4" of snow and only 0.88" QPF for my house (like half of the 18z run) while NAM says 14" of snow and 2.5" QPF on the 00z runs. GFS ensemble is 1.4" QPF but only 3 inches of snow (that actually sounds pretty realistic). SREF mean is close to the GEFS. NAM is nuts. Bedtime.

11 minutes ago, smokeybandit said:

Euro with a big jump south.

something looks weird to me though with that- I can only see Euro ensemble with free pivotalweather, but the maximum QPF (like Pueblo/Walsenburg) looks to be too close to where the 500 mb low tracks, which is not too far from where it tracked last run, though it is faster this time. But I certainly do not speak fluent modelese.

6 hours ago, smokeybandit said:

GFS, NAM and Euro are all on board with an impressive spring snowstorm for south of Denver with very sharp cutoffs north.

Smokeybandit, I think this one's for you... I'll be right on the hairy edge at 5650'. Honestly big snow this time of year doesn't excite me quite as much as it would in March, but I'll take it.

4 hours ago, ValpoVike said:

Cool and happy you finally got some snow. Next week looks interesting, especially for the foothills. Both GFS and Euro show a dumping across the Boulder and Larimer foothills.  The lower elevations may get a nice soaking. But we’ll see if it survives the next day or two…

3.2" for the final today as we were under that very last band of snow that only quit around 1 PM. The next week system looks really interesting- sometimes (May 21 last year anyone?) they wind up colder than billed, which could make for a notable Tuesday night/Wednesday. Good thing few trees have leaves yet.

After this week we can make a warm season thread, but maybe not yet.