Weekend weather to clear after wintry storm for Friday
Thursday, April 16, 2026
Mostly cloudy skies with temperatures in the low sixties are over Steamboat Springs on this Thursday mid-afternoon. A strong cold front tonight will bring wintry weather on Friday, with significant snowfall at all elevations, followed by mostly sunny skies and warming temperatures for the weekend.
Our next weather-maker is moving southeastward through Idaho, with a strong cold front stretching from central Utah into northwest Wyoming. Southwest breezes ahead of the front will continue through the afternoon before the cold front blasts through mid-evening, with snow showers starting at all elevations by around midnight.
Snowfall rates may be as high as an inch per hour at times between 3 am and noon on Friday, with brief showers occurring during the afternoon in our favorable cold and unstable northwest flow behind the storm. We could see 5-10” of snowfall on the hill, with around half that in town by sunset on Friday, with high temperatures in town struggling to rise above freezing, over 20 degrees below our 55-degree average.
If skies clear by Saturday morning as forecast, we will be greeted by wintertime temperatures reaching as low as the teens in town, below our average of 27 degrees, and single digits at the top of the now-closed Steamboat Ski Resort.
Mostly sunny skies on Saturday should allow high temperatures to rise into the mid-forties in town, followed by another warmer, but still cold Sunday morning, with high temperatures rising to around 60 degrees.
Meanwhile, another storm is forecast to develop over the Aleutian Islands on Friday, strengthen as it ingests cold air moving southward across Alaska, and elongate to the south as it moves across the Gulf of Alaska mid-weekend, eventually forming an eddy off the northern California coast on Monday.
Southerly winds ahead of the eddy will allow high temperatures to keep rising as a ridge of high pressure builds overhead, eventually reaching around 70 degrees by Tuesday. The pleasant weather is forecast to continue through most of the workweek until the eddy is forced eastward across the West by energy moving across the northern Pacific.
Our end-of-workweek weather will depend upon the northern stream energy and its eventual interaction with the eddy, with weather forecast models varying both between and within themselves. So, welcome the wintry-springtime moisture on Friday, enjoy the mostly sunny weekend, and I’ll have more details about the incoming eddy in my next regularly scheduled weather narrative on Sunday afternoon.
