It really depends on your point of view. Tranquil weather can be be boring for a meteorologist, but if today’s cold and snow was more than you would like to see in early October, then you will have a week or so of dry and seasonably mild weather to get over it.
Looking at the last 24 hours, the forecast for very cold weather and snow was right on track. Upslope flow developed last night as cold, moist air poured into Colorado, and this resulted in a prolonged period of freezing drizzle which came down heavy at times. In my last post, I said the roads would freeze solid, and they most certainly did. This resulted in numerous accidents and even the closure of Boulder Canyon. I left for work at 5 AM this morning. After skidding and sliding about 200 feet down a very icy CO 119 in the Boulder Canyon Narrows, I turned around and decided to work from home. If you were up that early, you would have noticed that the ground was bare, and it was not snowing. This changed starting around 6 AM when a band of moderate to heavy snow moved through the Front Range Foothills and adjacent plains quickly dropping a couple of inches of snow. Snow continued through about noon before diminishing to snow showers.
Accumulations in and around Nederland have been generally in the 3 to 5 inch range, slightly less than the 6 to 8 inch forecast from a few days ago. This was not much of a surprise given the suboptimal track of the storm through Wyoming. Many times, storms that track to our north produce little to no snow on the east side of the Continental Divide. In this case, there was just enough forcing and upslope flow to give us a few hours of accumulating snowfall.
Temperatures will modify over the next few days as the large upper level storm system slowly tracks to the Great Lakes region and loses energy. The forecast from Weather Underground for Nederland shows this warming and drying trend:
As well does the National Weather Service forecast:
Any way you slice this forecast, it will be a nice weekend, and most of the snow will melt.