ValpoVike

Merry Christmas to y’all and here’s to hoping that some of us have a little snow cover this weekend. On a personal note, FedEx dropped off a heavy box yesterday addressed to my wife. I couldn’t help but notice that the sender was Davis Instruments. I have the best wife ever

That is par for the course in many storms. Often either southern/central Boulder foothills and Larimer foothills will get widely divergent snow totals.

Ended up with 3.5”. Not a lot, but most of it came in a two hour burst last evening.

This is looking to be a narrow event for the front range… Boulder-Longmont-FoCo. I got my hopes up yesterday for 10-12” up here but that has been reduced significantly. Interestingly, this is pretty much what the GFS has been showing for many days now, with most QPF in a narrow stripe at the base of the foothills. Happy Thanksgiving!

11.5” here, about 5 miles north of town. Yeah power is out in the entire EP Valley. This is the 2nd time for the transmission lines running down to Loveland have failed over the past year. They are slowly bringing power back on line thru a backup source running thru the Alva tunnel that goes thru the divide west. So it will be back soon.

Several lightning strikes in a band just NW of Lake George.

Grab some microspikes and hike Gem Lake. You won’t have to drive the park but you can still get a hike in. Will be pretty cold though…

Saturday thru Sunday look interesting up here. GFS and ECMWF both showing some decent snow, around 6"-9". Trying not to get my hopes up, but cautiously optimistic as models seem to be generally aligned.

I got a deck dusting overnight. Technically, first snow of the fall.

I’ll take it. Light but steady rain all day so far. Our area in Larimer county just can’t take a heavy rain event after so many this summer.

Woke up around 2’ish this morning to the sound of boulders crashing down the Miller Fork. Fortunately I live 300’ above the streams but many got flood damage.

You should try to watch a loop of the activity in Larimer county during the Ft Collins rain event. The dynamics and storm motions were interesting.

I am having concerns about heavy rain should storms fire as predicted today. My home weather station is showing a current dewpoint of 60, which is very unusual for my location.

Lookie at what happened today.

Estes Park fireworks got postponed to July 15. Not sure about other communities.

Dang, summer made it finally!

So 6 minutes delta due to latitude. The shift due to longitude within the respective time zone is big though especially if you like a late sunset. Coincidentally I was thinking quite a bit about that over the past week while on vacation in the USVI where sunrise was about 5:45am and sunset was about 6:48pm earlier this week…with total daylight of 13 hours, 3 minutes versus Fort Collins at 14 hours, 52 minutes. My mind often fixates a bit on such matters to the great annoyance of my wife. Here is a photo I took of one of the 6:48 sunsets

It was crazy smoky and on Friday. Visibility was down to about a mile up here, very similar to bad days during the CP fire but without the smell. That is remarkable given the distance to the fires in Canada.

Welcome!

Just light rain up here, and only .13" today so far. I wouldn't mind getting to 1", but we don't want it all at once due to burn scars in the neighborhood.

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.

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.

A big bust up here. My neighbor 100’ above me has about an inch on the ground. I have nothing but a wet deck. I have casually noticed that the Pinpoint Weather app from Fox31 has outperformed the WPC guidance all winter for my backyard. Strange and sad.

06z GFS actually puts the heaviest north and west of Denver bullseye on Larimer and Boulder. Euro likes Denver and loves the Palmer divide. Clearly someone is gonna get pasted edit: holy smokes look at the 06z GFS QPF, broad 3” with some crazy 4”+ amounts. NAM is trending similarly thru the end of its run.

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…