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Mountain West Discussion


Chinook

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Why does the humidity get so low in the afternoon in the mountains?  I've been following the temps in Leadville, CO (elevation 10K) the past few days...i'm amazed at the low afternoon dewpoints...  i wonder if your skin just splits right open at that point?

 

 

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What happens is the ground level moisture mixes with very dry air above the surface as daytime heating mixes the air.

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moisture can mix vertically, so you might get the same mixing ratio as you get at 500mb. Most of the dew points near Leadville were at least 27F yesterday afternoon. So 1 is a little low.

 

Right now I am at DIA. ON my drive here, I could barely see the mountains through the hazy air. Perhaps there is more wildfire smoke around here than I thought. Now radar shows scattered storms. I hope everybody survived the hail yesterday. (It didn't hit me.)

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This supposed highly-rainy time period has been a disappointment for Fort Collins, with only a few hundredths of an inch yesterday. Loveland got 0.21" to 1.00", so that could be quite helpful. I am not even there; I am in Ohio right now, enjoying some pleasant weather.

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This supposed highly-rainy time period has been a disappointment for Fort Collins, with only a few hundredths of an inch yesterday. Loveland got 0.21" to 1.00", so that could be quite helpful. I am not even there; I am in Ohio right now, enjoying some pleasant weather.

FoCo has def been in a relative precip minimum since I got here. Even more so just to the SE

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Kind of meh here as well, with about 1/3 of an inch the past 4 days in DTC/Centennial. Will get us through a couple of 90 + days but not nearly the kind of bank account we need. The flow has been consistently more WNW than SW as predicted. Hopefully the monsoon will deliver.

On the bright side, we've had lots of rain in the South Platte drainage, so watering restrictions shouldn't be too near for you guys. Was a nice crisp 43 this morning as well :)

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I know it's waaay too early for this, but I was playing around with La Nina (traditional, cold Central/East Pacific), vs. La Nina Modokis (Central cold, but east not as cold or even warm), and the main difference in the US during winter seems to be the strength of the Southeastern Ridge. I only went back to 1970 for this, since people are still hashing out which La Ninas are Modokis. The JAMSTEC, for what it's worth is explicitly forecasting a La Nina Modoki. La Nina Modoki is also pretty similar to Neutral with a cold PDO here.

 

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June 2016 was a scorcher +4.8F at Fort Collins with a drought-like 0.05" of rain at the official CSU weather station. At my house, I estimated 0.28" of rain, based off CoCoRAHS. This is the 3rd driest month I have ever lived through, if you count the official weather station. The other months that were drier were March 2012 (trace) and August 2012 (0.03") at Fort Collins. June 2016 was not as hot as June 2012, but it still ranks as a very unusual summer monthly anomaly (something like 1.5 to 2 standard deviations above average). Yuck.

 

DIA had +3.4F and 1.62" of rain. Boulder climate station had above normal precipitation. Cheyenne was +5.2F. Most areas near here had 3-4F above average.

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In terms of how hot the Summer is going to be in the SW, July is really the key month. If the monsoon fails...we fry the whole summer. Never have really had a Summer here where July is hot but there is a colder than average month sometime in June/August/September. If June/Aug/Sept are hot you may be cool in the other months, but a hot July means you roast basically the whole period.

 

Good rule of thumb for hot SW summers is Albuquerque seeing July average highs >=94F. SW bakes in those years - it's the Dustbowl, 47-57 drought, and a bunch of other horrible years all rolled together.

 

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So stoked about La Nina up here.  

 

Currently our weather pattern is pretty interesting up here -- cold and rainy.  Looks like many days with high temps in the low 60s, with snow levels dropping down to 7000 or even 6500 feet in spots next weekend.  

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I think my area of town was about 96 yesterday. It was 92 officially at Fort Collins-CSU, which is not so weird. As compared to northern Montana (see last post,) 6500-7000 ft elevations around here are above 80 on our warm days and will never see a snowflake until September.

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100 at many reporting stations including KDEN today, first in 2 years. Was at the Irish Festival in Littleton, good time but always seems to happen on the hottest weekend of the year, which is not necessarily conducive to drinking Guinness.

 

Cold Springs fire (Nederland) is now up to 600+ acres and the wind ain't helping. Boulder Canyon is closed, and with good reason.

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Cold Springs fire (Nederland) is now up to 600+ acres and the wind ain't helping. Boulder Canyon is closed, and with good reason.

I was up there climbing and they evac'd us and the rest of the crags in the Canyon around 3-3:30 pm. The smoke plume did seem to be getting thicker, so I wasn't surprised when we heard the siren.

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The monsoon seems to have a periodicity of about three years for intensity in New Mexico, with occasional flips between July and August as the most intense month. Albuquerque had 9.5 inches of rain in the past three Julys - so I've been working off the assumptions the monsoon would be strongest in August for NM/CO/W TX. Could be September too - but we're routinely seeing dewpoints at June levels now - 35-40 - when we need dew points in the 50-55 range to have a real shot at good rains.

 

My working theory is the PDO has more influence on July than August, but the AMO has more influence on August than July. The PDO is still positive, but may be weakening. The AMO doesn't look negative if you look against SSTA, but with the oceans still pretty warm overall, the Atlantic may functionally be in a negative phase as its warmness is less than all of the other oceans right now,

 

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Around here it 65-70 degrees typically in May, it was 99 on one day in June. Kind of a shock. The lower 48 (CONUS) had the warmest June ever, that's what I heard from NOAA. Saturday and Sunday were 96 and 97 here. Grass is starting to look bad.

Earlier this year, I was wondering if this summer would look like Summer '83 due to similarity in El Nino. I'm not really sure that's a very helpful statement, but July-Aug 1983 were 4-6 degrees F above average in most of the Midwest and cool in California. I guess we're halfway through summer.

 

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Some areas east of I-25 got 1 to 2" of rain last night. I saw a few pretty good lightning bolts in the distance at about 10:00PM. It has been so long since we have gotten some decent rain. Maybe we will get some today. Getting a D1 drought status (U.S. Drought Monitor) in the next 2 months is probably at least 50% likely for Larimer County and many parts of Wyoming. (Some of Wyoming is in a D1-D2 drought)

 

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5 hours ago, Chinook said:

Some areas east of I-25 got 1 to 2" of rain last night. I saw a few pretty good lightning bolts in the distance at about 10:00PM. It has been so long since we have gotten some decent rain. Maybe we will get some today. 

 

 

No dice...outside of a few periods of light rain/sprinkles, it looks like

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Once again rain events have been underperforming. Yesterday a widespread 0.25"+ was predicted and almost all areas got less than 0.1". Maybe today, who knows. Even the hailstorm that gave me 2" hailstones last Friday still only amounted to about 0.15". Enough to keep things from becoming totally dusty and cracked, but not much more.

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