After weeks of dry stretches and warmer-than-average temperatures, Colorado could see a brief return to winter this week. But meteorologists say it likely won’t be enough to significantly boost the state’s lagging snowpack.
“It’s been a low snow year,” Joel Gratz, OpenSnow’s founder and CEO, told CPR News. “Near record low for Colorado snowpack based on about 100 automated weather stations across the state. And we’re going to stay near the bottom of the barrel for the foreseeable future.”
Colorado’s snowpack remains well behind where it typically sits for this time of year. The Upper Arkansas basin in central Colorado is the driest in the state, at just 47 percent of normal. Meteorologist Maggie Ideker with the National Weather Service said many of Colorado’s river basins are “close to the minimum” levels seen over the past decade.
“Really, it’s going to take about two to three good snowstorms in order for us to get back to normal,” Ideker told CPR News.
And while the mountains may receive some snow on New Year’s Day, the forecast for the coming week suggests Colorado’s snowpack won’t get much of a boost. The snow is forecast to start as early as 11 a.m. Thursday, before the storm winds down Friday evening.
“As of right now, light snowfall is expected, so we’re not looking at a big snowstorm … with minimal accumulations,” Ideker said. “But unfortunately, for the most part this week, we will have dry conditions and above normal temperatures.”
While it’s still too early to pin down exact snowfall totals, Ideker said a winter storm warning or advisory is unlikely given the small amount of expected snow.
That raises a bigger question: What’s behind Colorado’s unusually low snowpack this winter? In short, the lack of precipitation is likely not a sign of climate change, but the warm temperatures could be.
One factor potentially at play is La Niña. While the climate pattern can influence storm tracks, snowfall and temperatures in Colorado — often favoring drier conditions — forecasters caution that no La Niña or El Niño year looks exactly the same in Colorado, a state known for its weather variability.
Gratz said that natural variability is why he’s hesitant to attribute the current snowpack conditions to climate change.
“In looking at the data, this is not a climate change issue,” Gratz said. “There are plenty of years in the past that have had low snow and plenty of years in the past that have had high snow, and that’s only looking at the last 30 to 50 years — not even a thousand years. So climate change is warming temperatures, but it’s not — at least what we see in the data — changing the amount of precipitation that’s falling in Colorado.”
But while Colorado State Climatologist Russ Schumacher doesn’t necessarily disagree, he said the broader context matters.
Schumacher said Colorado has historically seen winters with very little snow, and that a dry month with few storms can fall within the state’s natural variability. But he noted that this December is on track to be the warmest on record in Colorado — potentially breaking the previous record set in 1980 — and that extreme winter warmth across much of the region is more consistent with a climate change signal.
“When we start seeing really extreme warmth in the winter, it’s probably that piece of it that is more likely to have a climate change fingerprint,” said Schumacher.
And those unusually warm conditions are expected to continue in the week ahead. Temperatures in the mountains are expected to be in the mid-30s to 40s this week. Further east, temperatures are expected to be in the mid-50s to 60s across the plains — above normal for the season.
