Nice weekend with warming temperatures to precede more precipitation next week
Thursday, April 30, 2026
Temperatures are in the mid-forties this mid-afternoon in Steamboat Springs after reaching 50 degrees around 1 pm. The storm that left 0.84” of precipitation in town, including 2” of snow, three graupel showers, and 13” at mid-mountain at the Steamboat Ski Resort, is grudgingly leaving the area, ahead of mostly sunny skies to start the weekend and warming temperatures.
A final piece of energy that moved over the top of a ridge of high pressure just east of the Gulf of Alaska has kept the southwestern end of a trough of low pressure lingering over the West. This wave is splitting as it moves overhead, with the eastern part of the split leading to one more day of unsettled weather over our area today, and the western part eventually interacting with an eddy of low pressure moving eastward across northern Baja.
The western part of the split will rotate southwards across Utah and Nevada on Friday, forcing the Baja eddy eastward across the Mexican border and keeping the weather to our south, more similar to the American GFS forecast rather than the European ECMWS forecast, as discussed in my last weather narrative.
Meanwhile, a storm upstream of the ridge is forecast to develop in the Gulf of Alaska, move southward along the West Coast through the weekend, and form an eddy of low pressure. As our current storm moves eastward, a transient ridge of high pressure will begin to form over the West ahead of the West Coast storm, bringing mostly sunny skies on Friday despite the cool air left behind our current storm. High temperatures will warm to the high fifties, just below our 60-degree average.
Continued mostly sunny skies are advertised for a very pleasant Saturday, with temperatures warming toward the mid-sixties. While Sunday will start mostly sunny, with even warmer high temperatures in the upper sixties, the West Coast eddy is forecast to elongate eastward, first bringing mid- and high-level clouds overhead by later Sunday, followed by a good chance of precipitation on Monday.
The unsettled weather may last through much of the next workweek as the eddy weakens and lumbers across the West. So enjoy a pleasant weekend, and I’ll have more details about the workweek in my next regularly scheduled weather narrative on Sunday afternoon.
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