Colorado Weather Forecast | June 7–13, 2021
Hot and dry, with little respite on the way.
We proceed into June with a weather pattern that isn’t abnormal for this time of year — hot and dry, with isolated thunderstorms mostly relegated to the Divide and east.
If we look at climatological averages, the next week or two is anomalously warm and dry, but ‘average’ is a bit of a misnomer when we think about typical weather. If we instead look at medians and percentiles, we see that mid June is one of the driest parts of the summer, and many “average” years see the mountains picking up almost no precipitation over the course of a few weeks — so is our pattern really an anomaly?
The climatological average includes some years that were very wet, and makes any typical dry June (even the median) appear drier than average.
Anyways, the point is that most of Colorado west of the Divide is likely to see almost no precipitation whatsoever over at least the next week, which is fairly common.
There’s always a chance a decent storm or two could put down a significant amount of rain in some localized areas in the mountains, but that’s not the likely scenario for a vast majority of the terrain in the state. Meanwhile, eastern Colorado looks to have a number of days of severe storm risk ahead, which is also typical for this time of year.
Temperatures follow suit as well, though these are a bit warmer than we’d expect even from a typical dry pattern, thanks to how pronounced ridging is overhead:
This looks to be the story for the foreseeable future, with a ridging remaining stationary and building in strength over a large swath of North America. It doesn’t look like a couple shortwaves grazing the western border of Colorado will do much to change that.
After today, the chance of afternoon thunderstorms in the mountains drops to an almost negligible level.
A surge of moisture from the east looks to bump probabilities along the Divide back up for the weekend, but the likelihood of lightning strikes remains quite low for most of the rest of Colorado’s mountains.
The Climate Prediction Center doesn’t think next week will be much different.
What’s worse, our top analog for the upcoming two week stretch is 2002. Let’s pull up Independence Pass’s SNOTEL site (since it’s near the center of the Colorado mountains) and see how it did in June 2002.
Yikes!
We’ll update you later this week on the weekend’s weather forecast. Until then, if you’re skiing or climbing couloirs, don’t forget that you can use our website’s elevation selector to see if your desired line is likely to freeze properly overnight or not.
And remember, on clear nights, outgoing longwave radiation can help refreeze a snowpack even if air temperatures are a bit higher than freezing.
Forecast by
Thomas Horner (Twitter: @thomaschorner)
Website and app with automated, high-resolution forecasts for mountains, climbing areas, and ski resorts (+ backcountry) with elevation switcher, uncertainty visualization, and more:
https://highpointwx.com
Frequent updates, graphics, and general stoke:
Twitter / Instagram / Facebook: @highpointwx
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