Monsoon to bring good rain chances and cooler temperatures around midweek

Sunday, August 9, 2026

Temperatures are right at the 83-degree average under cloudy skies this Sunday mid-afternoon in Steamboat Springs. Above-average temperatures to start the workweek, with only slight late-day shower chances, will begin cooling by midweek as rain chances become likely. The monsoon becomes more active by Thursday, with cooler and wetter weather extending into the weekend and perhaps beyond.

The jet stream moving across the Northern Rockies has nudged a persistent ridge of high pressure over the West eastward, allowing the clockwise-rotating winds on the backside of the ridge to carry monsoonal moisture northward into our area. The increasing clouds are more than welcome, both for the eventual rain they will bring and for blocking the sun.

With the 95-degree temperatures a week ago Sunday, which broke the 93-degree record set in 2000, and Friday, which was short of the 97-degree record set in 2001, Steamboat Springs had the second warmest start to August since 1893, with the first 8 days of the month averaging a high temperature of 91.5 degrees, just below the 2001 record of 93 degrees.

We’ll have to endure another couple of days of high temperatures in the upper 80s, with mostly sunny mornings yielding to afternoon clouds and a possible stray shower producing more wind than rain. Today has been cooler than forecast due to the clouds, and that may or may not be the case on Monday and Tuesday.

Monsoonal moisture increases substantially by later Tuesday, just in time to threaten viewing of the Perseid meteor shower on Tuesday and Wednesday nights. Temperatures should cool into the mid-80s on Wednesday, with showers becoming likely on Thursday as high temperatures cool into the 70s, our first below-average day in 2 weeks, and only the second in a month.

Weather forecast models now predict around half an inch of rain between Thursday and Saturday, with the American GFS becoming wetter, closer to the drier-trending European ECMWF. But the rain will come with thunderstorms, which can produce brief, locally heavy rain, leading to uneven rainfall distribution.

So let’s hope for beneficial rains from this monsoon event, enjoy the eventual cooler temperatures, and I’ll have more details on the weekend’s shower chances in my next regularly scheduled weather narrative on Thursday afternoon.