Updated at 11:16 a.m. Dec. 12, 2025: This story was updated to incorporate the latest snowpack data from the USDA’s National Water and Climate Center.
Following an abnormally warm and dry year, Colorado’s snow season is off to an abnormally warm and dry start — and not much is expected to change in the near future.
Colorado’s statewide snowpack on Friday sat at 70% of the median recorded between 1991 and 2020, . Storms in the first week of December boosted the amount of snow in the mountains from near-record lows, helping struggling ski resorts, but forecasts with little chance of flurries in the near future could counteract those gains.
“It’s early, but man, we could use some snow soon,” said Zach Hiris, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Boulder.
Colorado’s snowpack provides not only critical winter habitat for wildlife and creates snowy slopes for skiers and snowboarders, but also serves as the state’s main water supply. In the spring, the snow melts into the water that feeds the rivers and reservoirs relied upon by Coloradans and others downstream.
In a worst-case scenario, the state could record its lowest snowpack since the USDA began publishing data in 1987, the federal agency’s projections show.
The dryness is . The Upper Arkansas River Basin’s snowpack level is the strongest in the state, at 77% of median, and the Colorado River Headwaters area is the driest, at 61% of median.
Colorado is expected to continue to warm as climate change progresses, especially each fall. While climate change’s impact on precipitation is less clear, that reductions to spring snowpack will continue and that peak snowpack will come earlier.
It is still early in the season — snowpack typically peaks in early April — but both the short-term forecast and long-term predictions do not favor much snow.
“There’s not a whole lot of snow in the mountains any time in the near future,” Hiris said.
Data also shows that is expected to continue to affect weather cycles during Colorado’s winter, he said. That means warmer-than-normal temperatures and less snow, especially in the southern half of the state.
The best chance for above-average snowfall will be in the far northern reaches of Colorado, he said.
The rest of the Intermountain West is not faring much better, according to by at the University of Colorado Boulder.
All of Colorado and nearly the entire Western U.S. experienced temperatures several degrees above normal in October and November, according to the Western Water Assessment. Colorado’s Western Slope measured temperatures more than 6 degrees above normal in November.
November was the third-warmest November on record, dating back to 1895, according to a report released Thursday by the . Sections of the Western Slope experienced their warmest fall on record.
The Rocky Mountains, however, are faring much better than the Great Basin, California and along the Pacific Coast, where snowpack is measuring less than half of normal and, in some locations, less than 10% of normal. Snowpack in Oregon’s Deschutes and Willamette basins sat at 2% and 3% of normal on Friday.
The warm and dry weather in Colorado so far in the late fall follows a pattern that’s held for much of the year, according to .
The report crunched data from the previous water year, which ran from Oct. 1, 2024, to Sept. 20, 2025. A water year follows the water cycle: from its beginning in the fall as mountain snow through spring runoff and summer dry-out.
The recently concluded water year was the 10th warmest in 130 years of data collection, and above-average temperatures were recorded in all but two months. Seven of the top 10 warmest water years have occurred since 2012, the report states.
