Beautiful workweek start to precede a midweek pattern change
Sunday, April 19, 2026
A gorgeous day is over Steamboat Springs this Sunday mid-afternoon with sunny skies and temperatures around 60 degrees. Beautiful weather with even warmer temperatures will persist through Tuesday before winds pick up on a still-warm Wednesday ahead of a pattern change bringing cooler, unsettled weather that may hang around for a while.
After a wintry Friday brought around 5” of snow to mid-mountain and 9” up top, with a couple of inches in town, and a bright but cool Saturday, temperatures have warmed today above our average of 56 degrees under a ridge of high pressure over the West.
The ridge, downstream of a large eddy of low pressure moving southward along the West Coast, will persist over our area into midweek as the eddy eventually moves eastward across the central California coast on Tuesday.
Temperatures under mostly sunny skies will warm toward 70 degrees on Monday and perhaps the mid-seventies on Tuesday, well above our 56-degree average. The eddy is forecast to move across the Great Basin on Wednesday and ingest cold air moving southward from western Canada, bringing increasing clouds and winds by Wednesday afternoon, high temperatures in the sixties, and a cool front late in the afternoon or early in the evening.
Cooler temperatures and unsettled weather will follow, lasting through the weekend and into at least next week, perhaps even into the first part of May. However, the details are very uncertain as the leading part of the eddy is partially deflected to our north by our early-workweek ridge of high pressure, which will have been pushed to the Midwest, even as more cold air from western Canada reinvigorates the western part of the lingering eddy over Nevada.
This creates a general trough of low pressure over the West (finally!), allowing for cool weather and periods of precipitation, with snow levels dipping to town-level overnight and rising to around 8,000′ during the day.
Right now, the precipitation looks to start on the showery side, with weather forecast models disagreeing if more persistent precipitation arrives for the weekend’s start, like the American GFS, or closer to the weekend’s end, like the European ECMWF. So enjoy the gorgeous start to the workweek, and I’ll have more details on the cooler and unsettled weather that follows in my next regularly scheduled weather narrative on Thursday afternoon.
