The biggest snowstorm in the Denver area in nearly 20 years brought 27.1 inches, reported the National Weather Service in Boulder – with a little more snow expected earlier this week.
Although temperatures in the Denver area are between 30 and 30 degrees on Monday and Tuesday, an additional inch of snow is expected from Tuesday night until Wednesday morning.
“Obviously we are not going to come close to what we saw this weekend,” said National Meteorological Service meteorologist Zach Hiris.
It finally stopped snowing in most of the metro around midnight on Monday, at which point most observers recorded readings from 18 to 24 inches, with scattered reports from 24 to 30 inches, said Hiris.
The city’s official metering point at Denver International Airport recorded more snow than most of the rest of the area, said Hiris, in part because it started on Saturday.
“In fact, they fared much better than most downtown in that first wave,” he said.
Although the heavy snow started later than meteorologists initially expected, the blizzard camped out as soon as it arrived.
“The tendency for that storm, even in the first hours of snow starting on Saturday, is that it got slower and slower, which delayed the time the snow started,” said Hiris. “This late start definitely hurt our initial forecast, but our final values were very good – slower to start, but also slower to get out of here.”
It ended up being the fourth largest in recorded Denver history. Outside the 2003 storm, which hit 31.8 inches, this weekend was the city’s biggest snowstorm since 1946.
The largest record of the storm in the state was southeast of Buckhorn Mountain, near Fort Collins, at 42 inches, but Hiris stressed that the numbers were still rolling since early Monday.
With the exception of a few days that are expected to reach 50 this week, the area will see cold days and cold nights in the near future – meaning that most of the snow is going nowhere soon.
“It will be a little slower than normal to get rid of this … more than normal for snow in March,” said Hiris, adding that the NWS expects to freeze again on some sidewalks and roads.