12/28/06 FCST: CO (WINTER PRECIP)

[Andrew Stoller]

Ha!! I don't know what the heck I'm doing with this forecasting stuff, but I did stay in a Holiday Inn last night.

12z NAM pretty much dumps all the precip north of Colorado Springs; GFS does as well but gives a little window of good precip in the "corner" if you will where the Palmer Divide butts up against the front range, over the Monument area. Surface winds now really never end up southeasterly in southern Colorado; instead they are more northeasterly again, which makes it more of a Denver/northeast plains monster. Seems to also favor orographicly induced snow along the northern Palmer divide and northern El Paso county. I dunno, I guess the surface lows in New Mexico are too far north or too far south or something for the Springs to take most of the hit.

If I didn't have to work today and tomorrow Stan, I'd see if you wanted to meet up for some good times 4 wheeling through the snow on Rampart Range road.........but I have to work

 

[beaudodson]

10:30 a.m. Rain has started to fall here in Boulder. Not sure if this is a "now" live thread? I am also blogging photos on this site
http://www.easternuswx.com/bb/index.php?showtopic=118382&st=120&gopid=1595442&#entry1595442

For those interested. I believe that thread is on page 6 as of 11 a.m. Mountain Time.

 

[Mike Hollingshead]

http://grib2.wxcaster.com/wxcaster4/CONUS1_ETA212_SFC_ACCUM-SNOWFALL_84HR.gif


http://204.2.104.196/gfs/WINTER_GFS0P5_SFC_ACCUM-SNOW_84HR.gif


Boy those are a couple annoying differences. Nam says sw SD, nw NE while gfs thinks lesser amounts through the middle of NE....while largely hosing ne CO. I guess if I had to pick a spot that gets the most it'd be that dot on the gfs plot as that would sit fairly well with the nam if you moved the nam south a smidge. It sucks as the system might dig a little more than it was showing, but the dry punch may move a bit further north than it was progged too.

http://www.rap.ucar.edu/weather/model/displayMod.php?var=eta_850_wnd&hours=hr36hr48hr60hr24hr72hr84


Jeez, that is quite the fetch off the gulf/tropics! The track of the 850 low looks pretty similar between both models. The gfs just doesn't give much push to the dry punch, while the nam sends it north. The nam also wants to fill it in better than the gfs later on in the future. The nam goes nuts with precip overnight Saturday while the gfs wants to start to shut it down by then. Hmmmm. I guess I'd probably buy the Nam's movement of the drypunch more, but maybe not buy it's precip difference over the gfs by Sat night/Sun morning.