Evan Semon
Audio By Carbonatix
Whether you’re cheering or kicking yourself for buying a ski pass this year, you have to admit that the snow season is off to a weird start. With the exception of a handful of stations in the southern mountains with average or above-average snow, the majority of the snow-reporting stations have had abysmal snowfall so far this season.
Case in point is the Lake Eldora site in the mountains west of Boulder, where the seasonal snowfall last week was 5 percent of the thirty-year average.
In the Denver metro, where we’ve yet to see a measurable snowfall, it’s the same story. But if current forecast models hold true, we’ll get our first shot at snow Thanksgiving weekend…on November 29 or November 30.
Yes, it is strange to wait this long into the fall season to get some snow. Only once in Denver’s weather history have we gone later than November 27 before getting our initial taste of winter. That was in 2021, when it didn’t snow until December 10…and even then, we got less than an inch!
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Why is the snow so late? As with all things weather, it’s a combination of things: climate change (yeah, it’s real), natural seasonal variation, and large-scale wind patterns influenced by how warm the surface of the Equatorial Pacific Ocean is right now.
El Niño always grabs headlines when it gets going in the Tropical Pacific, but little sister La Niña is calling the shots as we head into winter this year. A La Niña is when the temperatures of the ocean’s surface from the west coast of South America out into the Central Pacific are below average.
This year’s La Niña is a weak one, so it’s a lot harder to count on the normal winter patterns that would usually affect Colorado. Right now, we still have a decent chance of an overall average snow year for the northern and central mountains as well as here on the Front Range.
Things could be on the cooler side, too, in the northern and northeastern parts of the state, with more windy, cold days than you get during an El Niño winter.
From Grand Junction south and west, the overall trend is expected to be warmer and drier than normal. Now, that doesn’t mean you won’t get a few marvelous powder days in the San Juans, but when averaged over the three-to-five months from December to April, a bit less than normal snowfall is expected.
History Colorado
The lack of snow along the Front Range so far this season doesn’t tell us a single thing about what the winter will be like. We’re anticipating a reasonable chance of ending up with a snow season close to average (56.6” for central Denver).
Can there be really big storms in La Niña years? Yep. The snowiest season on record was during a weak La Niña in 1908-09, when the official seasonal snow total for Denver was 118.7”.
And no, I can’t tell you for sure when, or even if, that kind of thing will happen in the months to come. If I could do that, I’d be writing this from my beach house in Sardinia, not a townhouse in north Denver.
Bottom line…even though we’ve had a sluggish start to the snow season, there is plenty of time to make up ground in the months ahead. So if you hate shoveling, don’t be doing your victory dance just yet. And if you bought that ski pass, hang in there!
