Colorado Climate Center

New post from Peter Goble about his recent paper on why forecasting river flows and water supply in Colorado is tough. It's largely because we don't know enough about what's going to happen with spring and summer weather!

Understanding and Predicting Our Precious Western Colorado Water Supply - Colorado Climate Blog The Colorado River is the lifeblood of the desert southwestern United States. Its water is...

Here's our November monthly climate summary for Colorado. It was the 5th straight month of warmer-than-average temperature, and tied for the 8th warmest fall statewide. The streak of drier-than-average falls that started in 2016 also continued. Read on for more details!

CO Monthly Climate Summary

Members of a State Climate Extremes Committee said “Hail yes!” to a new statewide hail diameter record set near Kirk, Colorado on August 8, 2023. Besides coming in at an impressive 5.25 inches in diameter, the stone raised some hail measurement conundrums too. Read more in the full report:https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/monitoring-content/extremes/scec/reports/20230926-Colorado-Hailstone.pdf

U.S. National Weather Service (NWS) US National Weather Service Goodland Kansas Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety - IBHS Colorado Climate Center

The first time since July 16, 2019 that the US Drought Monitor map has been completely clear across Colorado! 🎉

We know June was a wet month across eastern Colorado. A couple CoCoRaHS observers in El Paso County had over 10" of rain. Where did June stack up historically? Based on preliminary PRISM data, the wettest June on record over a broad area (dark green shading on 2nd map).

What if we compare it to *all* months in the record (not just June)? That's the third map, and shows that there are pockets of eastern Colorado that had their wettest month on record, period, according to this dataset.

You might also remember that May was very wet in many of the same areas. If we compare May-June 2023 to all other 2-month periods (4th map), again we see that much of eastern Colorado had its wettest 2-month period on record.

These maps are all from preliminary data from the PRISM climate group; we'll update them with official NOAA numbers when they're released next week. If you want to get those updates in your inbox, subscribe to our monthly state climate summaries! https://climate.colostate.edu/subscribe.html