It is quite unusual for any part of Colorado to wake up to thunderstorm activity especially this late in the summer, but such is the case this Sunday morning. A narrow line of elevated convection<\/span> is fueling some very short pulses of heavy rainfall over the Northeast Plains. This is a good indication that today’s atmosphere is ready to generate rainfall, although the vast majority of it will fortunately not pose a flood threat.<\/p>\n Looking at the visible satellite image, below, we continue to see a very messy picture over Colorado. Our state lies on the eastern periphery of a seasonably strong upper-level ridge that is centered over CA. With a fairly strong pressure gradient between the ridge and a trough<\/span> over the Central Plains, southeasterly steering winds continue to remain strong, above 25mph for most of Colorado. This will limit point rainfall for most areas. Switching to the moisture analysis, Denver’s Precipitable Water<\/span> (PW<\/span>) is 0.79 inches, up slightly from yesterday. On the other side of the Continental Divide<\/span>, Grand Junction’s PW<\/span> has also increased a bit to 0.8 inches. However, at both soundings, moisture was “top-heavy”, which is not a good sign for heavy rainfall potential. Further south, however, the moisture profile looks better, with PW<\/span> up to 0.9 inches along the NM border and higher near-surface moisture. Mid-level temperatures are colder today than yesterday and there is more substantial synoptic scale lift today, both of which will result in an uptick in rainfall coverage. The key to the heavy rainfall potential will be to find the juxtaposition of instability and relatively slow steering flow, with the southern high terrain appearing to meet both criteria.<\/p>\n Translating everything into sensible weather, we expect scattered<\/span> to numerous<\/span> showers and thunderstorms over basically the entire Continental Divide<\/span> spine of higher terrain. Over northern and central areas, only very short-term heavy rainfall is expected. Further south, over the San Juans and Southeast Mountains, 60-90 minutes of heavy rainfall will be possible, which warrants a LOW flood threat for isolated<\/span> flash flooding<\/span>, debris slides and mud flows.<\/p>\n
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