Saturday’s storm didn’t quite live up to its wind hype, but it still delivered a sharp overnight front and a quick burst of convective snow before sunrise on Sunday.
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aturday’s wind event largely underwhelmed across the Metro area, with just about 90 minutes of strong but likely not damaging winds in the usually windy sectors of Boulder and Jefferson Counties. NCAR Foothills topped out at 59 MPH around 6 PM, by which point temperatures had already cooled and moisture was filtering in from the west, keeping even Red Flag conditions off the table. In hindsight, the setup was borderline for an Xcel preemptive shutdown from the start, and there will likely be some debate in the coming days about whether the evolving forecast warranted a different approach.
Peak wind gusts elsewhere generally ranged from 30 to 50 MPH on Saturday.
Peak wind gusts observed on Saturday
Despite the wind being a flop (which we partially foretold ahead of time), the post-bora-frontal snow portion of the forecast did fire off as expected. The strong front blew in from the north-northwest around 1:30AM on Sunday, with temperatures rapidly falling about 20 degrees.
Several bands of heavy, convective snow showers developed and sagged across the Denver Metro area, ending before sunrise.
Our snowfall forecast map issued Friday evening is shown below with storm totals overlaid. Green values indicate our forecast verified, Yellow values mean the observed total was just outside our forecast, while Red was a busted forecast (more than 1″ off). Verification was pretty good overall, but some portions of Denver got a little bit of bonus snow, with totals of 2 to 4 inches being a bit more widespread than expected. The highest totals were in the Mountains, including Loveland Ski Resort (7″), Eldora (5″), and Winter Park (4″). Officially Boulder recorded 1.3″ of new snow while Denver (DIA) received 0.9″.
Will this morning’s snow be our last of the season? Probably not, but certainly we’re not going to see any snow over the next 10+ days during our impending historical March heatwave. Happy Sunday!
You can find a recap of all the winter storms so far in the 2025-2026 snow season HERE.
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