Nice start to the weekend to precede Sunday showers
Thursday, February 26, 2026
Mostly cloudy skies are over Steamboat Springs early this Thursday afternoon, with temperatures around 40 degrees in town, on the way to the mid-forties, and 20 degrees at the top of the Steamboat Ski Resort. The atmospheric river that brought 6” of dense snow to mid-mountain on Wednesday morning and around an inch of rain in town is receding, bringing some sun to the area this afternoon. Beautiful weather will follow on a warm, mostly sunny Friday and Saturday ahead of another round of warm precipitation for Sunday.
Two large eddies of low pressure flank a ridge of high pressure near the Dateline, while a trough of low pressure extends southward from the Great Lakes. The western-most eddy is forecast to strengthen and move eastward, destroying the Dateline ridge and forcing the downstream eddy eastward toward the northern California coast by Sunday.
A transient and shallow ridge of high pressure will build over the West ahead of this eddy, bringing mostly sunny skies on Friday and most of Saturday, with high temperatures in the upper-forties on Friday and around 50 degrees on Saturday, well above our 39-degree average.
Energy and moisture ejecting from the eddy will cross the Great Basin on Saturday, reaching our area as early as Saturday afternoon and bringing increasing high clouds. Fortunately, this won’t be a windy storm, but unfortunately, it will be another warm storm with snow levels around 8,500′, bringing rain to the Yampa Valley and more dense snow at and above mid-mountain on Sunday.
What remains of the eddy is forecast to cross the Great Basin on Monday, providing a break in the precipitation, which is expected to restart later Monday or Tuesday as the storm approaches and then moves across Colorado.
So enjoy the nice couple of days to start the weekend, and I’ll have more details on the approaching storm, including mid-mountain snowfall guesses, in my next regularly scheduled weather narrative on Sunday afternoon.
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