Pleasant weekend ahead
Thursday, May 18, 2023
Temperatures are around sixty degrees under mostly clouds skies early this Thursday evening over the town of Steamboat Springs after a cool front grazed our area this mid-afternoon. Pleasant spring weather is on tap for the weekend with mostly sunny mornings and modest chances for afternoon and evening showers that may produce more wind than rain.
A ridge of high pressure currently extends from Nevada into Canada while a low pressure area approaches the Great Lakes from the Canadian Plains and another low pressure area spins near Baja. Pieces of the storm from last week have finally resumed normal eastward movement and mixed with a weak cool front associated with the low pressure area approaching the Great Lakes. The end result for our area was a cloudy Thursday afternoon with some sprinkles and temperatures falling from their high of 67 F at 4 pm at the Bob Adams airport to the current sixty degrees.
Moisture will continue to be drawn northward on the east side of the Baja area of low pressure, though its northward extent will barely reach into our area as it battles light winds and dry air from the northwest behind today’s front. We should see mostly sunny mornings from Friday through the weekend with temperatures warming toward seventy degrees on Friday and Saturday and the low-seventies by Sunday, which is about five degrees above our average of 67 F. There will also be modest chances of afternoon and evening showers that may produce more wind than rain thanks to the dry low-level air behind the cool front today.
A piece of a large storm currently in the Gulf of Alaska is forecast to break away and cross the southern British Columbia coast late in the weekend, and we may see increasing chances for precipitation as early as Monday as moisture is carried northward by winds from the south and southwest ahead the southward moving storm.
But that is after what should be a very pleasant spring weekend in Steamboat Springs, and I’ll have more on the week’s coming weather in my next regularly scheduled weather narrative on Sunday afternoon.
