Parts of southwest Colorado have picked up 15 to 20 inches of rain in the last 60 days, and this weekend’s storm pushed rivers across the Four Corners to historic levels with devastating results. Here on the Front Range, southwest flow kept us mostly dry again, with Sunday evening’s showers adding up to about a tenth of an inch.
The colder back half of that storm reaches us Monday. A cold front moving through this morning brings our best chance of rain from this system, though some parts of the Denver area are better positioned than others. Snow is on the way for the high country, temperatures will below normal, and another storm is approaching later this week. Here’s what to expect.
After months of worsening drought, southwest Colorado has flipped the script in dramatic fashion this fall. From Pagosa Springs to Durango to the entire San Juans, some locations have picked up an astonishing 15 to 20 inches of precipitation in just 60 days, erasing extreme drought conditions but ultimately triggering one of the region’s most significant flood events on record. What turned a parched landscape into a flood disaster in only eight weeks? We dive into the remarkable sequence of tropical moisture surges, the key role of a strengthening record El Niño, and why the same pattern that drenched southwest Colorado left Boulder and Denver largely high and dry.
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