State and federal flooding planners this afternoon said the near-record level mountain snow pack presents elevated risk of flooding but that they are not sure this will happen.
“Weather is the driver,” Tom Browning, the Colorado Department of Natural Resources official in charge of flood planning, told a gathering of about 30 officials.
Flooding would require four to five consecutive days of high temperatures and that has not happened yet, Browning said.
However, water levels in the Yampa River, near Steamboat Springs on the west side of the Continental Divide, have reached 15,000 cubic feet per second — “near flood stage,” Browning said.
Heavy Front Range rains prompted the National Weather Service today to issue a flash-flood watch for the mountains of Boulder and Larimer counties, with special notice of the Fourmile Canyon and Crystal fire areas. That watch expires at midnight. Rain is forecast to fall in the Fourmile area at about 0.2 inch per hour below 7,500 feet and snow at higher elevations.
But temperatures have remained low in the high country.
Snow pack overall in the mountains reached 160 percent of average, said Mike Gillespie, snow survey coordinator for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Now as snow melts that figure is falling, he said.
“We’ve got a lot of volume to come out. It is just a matter of the timing,” Gillespie said.
While precipitation in the mountains has been immense, rain and snow on the prairie has been minimal, Colorado Climate Center coordinator Wendy Ryan said.
“We’ve been wet in the mountains, dry on the plains,” she said. Temperature-wise, “nothing terribly above or below average.”
