April Weather Outlook From NOAA Brings Some 'Iffy' News For Colorado's Snowpack
DENVER (CBS4) - As we roll into the last part of March the snowpack across Colorado's high country is in good shape with more than half of the major river basins running above normal. The Yampa and White River Basin is the lowest at 91 percent of where it should be.
March and April are critical months for building snow depth above 9,000 feet in Colorado. Historically this is the time of year when an active storm track brings a parade of snowstorms that are full of moisture from the Pacific Ocean. Snowpack typically reaches a peak in Colorado right around April 9.
An ideal transition from March to April will bring a few final snowstorms of the season to Colorado along with a slow and gradual warm up that is spread out over several weeks. On Thursday the Climate Prediction Center released their weather outlook for the month of April and it calls for temperatures to trend above normal with below normal precipitation.
A trend for above normal temperatures can be concerning during the month of April because if it gets too warm, too fast, the snowpack will melt faster than it should and we can't reap the full benefit of all that water currently being stored in the higher elevations. The possibility of below normal precipitation is also concerning because we usually look to April for a few good final storms of the season to add to the snowpack. April snow typically has a high water content, even at the higher elevations.
Having said all of that, this is just an outlook, and outlooks can sometimes be wrong, especially when looking more than 30 days into the future. The other thing to point out is that a dry and warm outlook doesn't necessarily mean we'll be storm free, it just means the current data is showing a trend for above normal temps and below normal moisture.
In Denver, a typical April will produce about 1.68 inches of moisture and anywhere from 6.7 to 8.8 inches of snow, depending on how you calculate it. The average temperature for April is about 47.8 degrees in the Mile High City.
So let's say hypothetically that in Denver we see about 4 inches of snow during April, a total liquid of 1.10 inches and an average temperature of 49.0 degrees. That is below normal for precipitation and above normal for the temperature, which would align with NOAA's outlook. But it also isn't as bad as it could be. It's important to always keep that perspective when looking ahead at long-range outlooks during a critical time of the year.
