Shower chances to decrease for the weekend with comfortable temperatures
Thursday, July 31, 2025
After reaching almost eighty degrees just after noon on this Thursday, the temperature near the base of the Steamboat Ski Resort fell fifteen degrees by 2 pm as a thunderstorm with brief moderate rain and pea-sized hail moved through. There may be some additional showers through this evening before drier air from the west brings comfortable temperatures and decreases thunderstorm chances for Friday and the weekend.
The monsoonal plume of moisture over our area the last two days will be severed and pushed east by a weak wave moving across the Great Basin, ejected from a storm in the Gulf of Alaska. Even though the sun has returned behind the early afternoon storm, there are good chances for an additional storm or two later this afternoon and evening ahead of winds shifting to the west and bringing much drier air overhead for the weekend.
This new weather regime will bring crisp overnight temperatures in the mid-forties, below our average of forty-seven degrees, and sunny mornings with high temperatures around our average of eighty-four degrees, quintessential Colorado mountain weather, replete with the chance for an afternoon or early evening thunderstorm on Friday and Saturday.
Even though winds over northern Colorado will be from the west, the NOAA Smoke Plume model has southwesterly winds over Utah, feeding smoke from the Monroe Canyon wildfire in central Utah and the Bravo Dragon wildfire in Grand Canyon National Park towards our area. Right now, a hazy start to both Saturday and Sunday is forecast, with gradually improving air quality by later Friday. These smoke forecasts are challenging, as they depend on both the forecast winds and forecast fire intensity, and it isn’t easy to get one right, much less both! The forecast is run four times a day, so check the latest iteration before your outdoor activities.
Although it doesn’t feel like it, our July precipitation of 1.66 inches was close to our average of 1.72 inches, largely due to the inch of rain we received the day before Independence Day. The rain today will count toward our 1.8” average in August, which, when combined with the June 1.58” average, marks the driest three-month period of the year.
The Gulf of Alaska storm is forecast to rotate toward the Canadian West Coast early in the workweek, pumping up a ridge of high pressure over the Rockies and sending our high temperatures back into the upper eighties. Enjoy the beautiful weekend ahead, hope the smoke stays away, and I’ll have more details on the hot and dry start to the workweek and the possibility of a weak plume of monsoonal moisture for midweek in my next regularly scheduled weather narrative on Sunday afternoon.
