Precipitation totals denver2/2/2024 Virginia Dale (7.2 miles south-southwest): 10 inches.Here are Fort Collins-area snowfall totals from this week's storm Here is a look at snowfall totals from around the area, where we are for the snow season and how snowpack is looking in the mountains. Snow started falling late Monday night and continued into Tuesday. The National Weather Service forecast called for 2 to 4 inches. And thanks to a weak El Niño, long-range outlooks are mostly favorable to Colorado's chances of getting out of our drought, though seasonal forecasts are notoriously tricky and volatile.Watch Video: Fort Collins snowstorm drops 9 inchesįort Collins officially received 3.3 inches of snow during this week's storm and picked up 0.34 inches of precipitation, according to the Colorado Climate Center. Southwest Colorado, which was hard hit by the 416 and Spring Creek wildfires over the summer, is in particularly bad shape, though recent big snows there give locals hope. Most of Denver's water comes from the South Platte River watershed, which is currently running above average in terms of snowpack.Īs of this week, more than 82 percent of Colorado is officially in a drought, including Denver. As long as the mountains get their snow, the state will have a fairly healthy water supply, even if Denver and the Front Range are on the drier side. That translates to more critical water for the river basins. The mountains generally had a sluggish 2017-’18 snow season, but this winter has gotten off to a promising start, with the state right around where it should be in terms of season-to-date snowfall. And just about every Colorado spot at or above 10,000 feet averages at least 25 inches of moisture a year - way more than the drier Front Range. The second and main reason is that Colorado's mountains receive way more rainfall than the plains, with some of the state's hills averaging more than fifty inches of moisture a year. There are two reasons for this: One, Colorado's mountains receive a lot of snow, which melts into the headwaters for four major river basins (Arkansas, Colorado, Platte and Rio Grande) that supply water for parts of seventeen states. After the 2016-’17 winter produced the second-lowest snow total in Denver's recorded history, the 25.7 inches DIA registered in 2018 was a slight improvement, amounting to the fifth-lowest snow total in the city's recorded history.īut Colorado, like much of the West, is heavily dependent on the mountains for our drinking water. DIA and Stapleton recorded less than half of Denver's typical annual snowfall of about 57 inches. There was also a striking lack of snowfall in Denver for the second consecutive winter. Droughts are often exacerbated by a positive-feedback loop, meaning dry soils and a lack of moisture in the air can suppress future rain and snow chances. Summer storms usually help soak the ground. Why did 2018 lean on the drier side? When you're measuring a full year's worth of moisture, there are several factors to consider, but one thing stands out: an exceptionally dry late spring and summer, which is usually Denver's wettest season. The worst of the drought came in June (22 percent of average rainfall), July (48 percent), August (55 percent) and September (19 percent). Jared Rennie / ArcGIS Still, only two months last year produced above-average moisture (January and March). That's still pretty bad, but notably better than the paltry 8.53 inches DIA says we got. There is an observation site at the old Stapleton Airport, and it received 11.62 inches of rain in 2018. Okay, not really, but DIA is far enough away from downtown Denver (about 25 miles) that it does make a difference, especially when you factor in Denver's hyper-localized climatology. Sure, the official numbers are bad, but they're also for DIA, which is basically in Kansas. From 1950 through 2007, those observations were taken at Stapleton Airport, and before that (1882 through 1949), they were taken at two downtown locations. This is not good news, but there are a few asterisks to these stats we should explain.ĭenver's "official" rain numbers have been taken at Denver International Airport since only 2008. Denver saw about 12 percent of Atlanta's annual precipitation, 13 percent of New York's and 17 percent of Chicago's. Here's another way to think about it: Denver saw less rain in 2018 than true desert climates like Phoenix and Tucson, and Denver saw a rain total closer to America's driest major city, Las Vegas (4.19 inches) than our average annual rainfall. That's a striking number for a bunch of reasons, but the main one is that it's less than 60 percent of Denver's average annual precipitation of 14.30 inches. Literally.ĭenver received only 8.53 inches of precipitation (rain and snow-equivalent rainfall) in 2018, making it the sixth-driest year in the city's recorded history.
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