As temperatures soared to near 60 degrees Fahrenheit on Tuesday, Denver walkers and runners took back the streets and sidewalks, pounding through slush and jumping over puddles of melting snow.
Now this is what our winter was supposed to look like.
An El Niño weather system arrived in the Pacific Ocean last fall, warming a stretch of water west of Peru’s coast.
The last seven El Niños brought winters that were warmer and drier than usual in Colorado, with a few heavier snowstorms in the fall and spring.
This time, January was the eighth-coldest on record in Denver, and the monthly snowfall was twice the normal tally – nearly 16 inches instead of about 8, said Matt Kelsch, a meteorologist with the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research in Boulder.
There has been measurable snow on the ground in the Front Range for 50 consecutive days, the third- longest period on record, Kelsch said.
“The Chinese have this saying, ‘May you live in interesting times.’ Well, we’re there,” said Klaus Wolter, a scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
This season’s El Niño was a typical one, “moderate sized, fairly vanilla, really,” Wolter said. “But the impacts have been anything but normal in this hemisphere.”
Feeding the almost weekly snows in December and January was an odd constellation of forces, he said, including a warmer- than-usual western Pacific Ocean and storms that moved in from the northwest, not the southwest, as they normally do.
Blame some of the cold on the snow cover, Wolter said. Snow reflects sunlight that might otherwise help warm the ground.
Marty Hoerling, a climate researcher with NOAA in Boulder, said no one forecast these kinds of conditions for an El Niño winter in Colorado.
“It’s variability. The atmos phere is a very chaotic beast,” Hoerling said.
The recent cold and snow do not mean global warming has skipped Colorado, he said.
While the background climate is warming, temperatures and precipitation will always bounce around the norm, Hoerling said.
Most of the recent storms have missed Colorado’s mountains, which have below-normal snowpacks, according to the federal Natural Resources Conservation Service.
Across the mountains, January snowfall was below average, and snowpack levels decreased to 91 percent of normal Feb. 1, the agency reported Tuesday.
The South Platte River basin was at 114 percent of average; and the Yampa and White river basins in northwestern Colorado were at 68 percent of average.
That will translate into less spring and summer runoff, according to NRCS.
The odds are still pretty good for a snowy spring, even in the mountains, Wolter said.
Even though the El Niño appears to be breaking up, its effects have tended to linger into spring, delivering extra moisture to Colorado’s mountains.
For the end of this week, UCAR’s Kelsch said, temperatures will drop, but we aren’t likely to get a lot of snow.
Staff writer Katy Human can be reached at 303-954-1910 or khuman@denverpost.com.
