A breezy winter day is over Steamboat Springs this Ides of March Sunday, with early-afternoon temperatures only 24 degrees in town, well below the 45-degree average, and 4 degrees at the top of the Steamboat Ski Resort. After no snow fell with the cold front last night, which brought plenty of wind, light snowfall chances will start a warming workweek with record-high temperatures, likely in the seventies(!), starting Thursday and lasting into the weekend.

Weather forecasting is humbling if nothing else, and I’ve had a rough week, highlighted by 4” of snow Tuesday night, which was not well-forecast, followed by no snow last night, when snow was forecast. We were oh-so-close as a line of snow showers produced 7” of snow at Loveland, and 6” at Winter Park and Eldora, but last night’s cold front brought only cold and plenty of wind to our area, with moutain-top gusts reaching 84 mph just after midnight, and gusts in the fifties during the day Saturday.

The winter weather is courtesy of strong, northwest flow over the Rockies as air travels over the top of a ridge of high pressure over the eastern Pacific towards a trough of low pressure extending southward from central Canada across the Midwest. The ridge is downstream of a deep trough of low pressure extending southward from the Gulf of Alaska to the Dateline northwest of Hawaii, directing Pineapple Express moisture toward the Pacific Northwest.

Even though the ridge of high pressure will be forced eastward by energy ejecting out of the Dateline trough, a couple of pockets of moisture in the northwest flow will carry precipitation chances over our area during the day Monday, and again Monday night. Though moist, northwest flow is favorable for precipitation in north-central Colorado, warming temperatures are not, so at the risk of another busted forecast, we could see 1-4” of snowfall at mid-mountain during the day Monday and another 1-4” overnight.

Though high temperatures are forecast to rise to the low forties in town on Monday, snow levels stay below 7,000′ until late in the day, allowing for the chance of snow showers in town during the day, changing to rain showers overnight.

Clouds will decrease during the day on Tuesday as the ridge crosses the West Coast and begins moving across the Great Basin, allowing high temperatures to jump into the upper-fifties. Mostly sunny skies for the rest of the workweek will allow high temperatures to continue climbing, reaching the mid-to-upper sixties by Wednesday, below the record-high of 70 degrees set in 2017.

But the record-high temperatures of 64 degrees on both Thursday and Friday, set in 2017, will likely fall as forecasts call for around 70 degrees on Thursday, and a bit warmer on Friday, representative of late-May and early-June temperatures. The seventy-degree stretch of weather is forecast to start the weekend, likely breaking the 65-degree Saturday record set in 2003.

So enjoy the coming springlike weather, while hoping for snow to start the workweek, and I’ll have more details about the weekend in my next regularly scheduled weather narrative on Thursday afternoon.