Weekend to be a few degrees cooler with best shower chances on Friday
Thursday, July 17, 2025
After a mostly sunny morning in Steamboat Springs, temperatures have hit eighty-six degrees this Thursday mid-afternoon under partly sunny skies. Some approaching energy from Baja will conspire with Pacific energy to yield the best, but still modest, chance of showers this weekend on Friday, along with a few degrees of cooling that will persist through the weekend and into the following workweek.
A weak area of low pressure over Baja is forecast to move northward towards Nevada this weekend and interact with the jet stream moving across southern Canada. Some energy and moisture ejecting from the low will move northward before being forced eastward by the jet stream, and pass overhead later Friday. This will yield the best chance of afternoon, evening, and perhaps overnight showers of the weekend, along with slightly cooler temperatures around our average of eighty-four degrees, as the jet stream squashes the ridge of high pressure that brought the hot early-week temperatures.
The shower chances tomorrow are modest, and don’t even show up on the forty-eight-hour forecast for Steamboat Springs from the short-range HRRR weather forecast model, which I just added to the homepage, and can be found by clicking the ‘Precipitation Forecasts’ heading. Not only does the panel have forecasts for temperature, wind and precipitation, but also smoke. Because I host the charts on my server, I can add Previous forecast and Next forecast links to compare model iterations and determine model variability for our location.
Waves of energy rotating through the jet stream will keep the chance of showers around on Saturday and Sunday, with the classic sunny mornings giving way to some clouds by the afternoon.
The jet stream is forecast to sag southward along the West Coast to start the workweek, which may eject the low pressure over Nevada toward our area by midweek, increasing the chance of showers as monsoonal moisture from the south is ingested.
Unfortunately, there is no clear monsoonal signature behind the midweek event as high pressure over the Southeast migrates westward and severs any southerly connection to moisture.
So let’s hope for some rain on Friday, enjoy the cooler near-average temperatures of the weekend, and check back to my next regularly scheduled weather narrative on Sunday afternoon for any updates to our missing monsoon.
