Halloween Snowstorm

This should turn out to be quite a memorable Halloween for many kids across the Front Range of Colorado and Wyoming. In this photo, you can see 21" (53cm) of snow piling up on the deck behind this house in Rollinsville, Colorado which is just west of Denver at an elevation of 9,200 feet (2,804meters). The city itself also saw a foot of snow causing traffic trouble and closed schools. Of course, this area of the country is well prepared for such a storm and managed to get through it just fine. Temperatures this upcoming week in the Denver metro area are forecast to be in the 50's and 60's. All but the big piles of snow in the parking lots will be nothing more than a memory next week.

Back at home, the weather has been somewhat interesting. The high temperature today reached 78F (26C) which was the warmest day since September 22. In fact, this was only the second day in October in which the temperature rose above 70 degrees. That's very unusual. Typically, we'll have about 7-8 days above 70 degrees in October. All of the warm weather of today was surging north ahead of a cold front. In fact, the warmth was coming in on strong winds. The peak wind gust today was 37mph (60kph) from the south. Although heavy rain was forecast for today, it seems that most of the rain has fallen apart the closer it moved towards us. We're getting some showers now, but I don't think they will add up to the 1 to 1.5 inches forecast earlier.