Durango residents hoping for snow shouldn’t get their hopes too high. According to the National Weather Service office in Grand Junction, snow flurries – mainly in the mountains – are possible over the next several days, but precipitation of more than an inch is unlikely.
A cold front passing through the greater Durango area on Friday and Saturday brought just an inch or two of fresh snow to the San Juan Mountains. As of about 10:30 a.m. Saturday, the weather system was moving north past the San Juans, Scott Stearns, meteorologist at the Grand Junction office of the National Weather Service, said.
“We’ve just got a system kind of scraping the area. Not a whole lot of energy associated with it and it’s going to move through pretty quickly,” he said.
He said the system will have reached Steamboat Springs northeast of Denver by sunset.
There’s a slightly better chance of snow for Sunday afternoon with light flurries, but Stearns said it’s hard to say if any snowfall will accumulate. Another inch of snow is possible on Monday.
Tuesday holds the best chance for snow in the Durango area so far, he said. The NWS says there is a 60% chance of snow on Tuesday with a daily high temperature of 44 degrees.
Stearns said a lot of weather systems are “blending together,” making forecasts less cut and dry and more challenging to nail down than they usually are.
“We can have a system move through and then there’ll be a day or two break and then maybe another system moves through or whatever. It’s not really that clear cut this week,” he said. “Things just kind of remain unsettled through the week.”
FIXED: He said much of Colorado was blasted by strong winds on Friday, and although the Front Range got the brunt of it, Southwest Colorado did experience some strong gusts. But that phenomenon isn’t likely to continue. He expects the region to experience 20 mph to 25 mph wind gusts next week.
“The systems, as they tend to do, kind of deteriorate as they try to meander through the mountains. Especially when it’s low level energy like we saw yesterday with the cold front moving through,” he said.
He said people should keep an eye on weather forecasts because conditions will likely change next week, but chances for snowfall, particularly in lower elevations such as Durango, are iffy.
cburney@durangoherald.com
