I was blessed with the chance to live in Colorado for about 6 months last year- Breckenridge to be exact. During my time out there, it sure was interesting getting an opportunity to study the weather across such a rugged area. While weather forecasting in any location is certainly a challenge, trying to forecast the weather in the Rockies (directly along the continental divide) was particularly rough.
When you consider the fact that the eastern part of the state (roughly from Denver east to the KS border) is flat as a pancake, though high in elevation (around 5k feet on average) and the western half of the state features some of the most rugged mountains in the country (with elevations soaring close to 15k feet in some places), you have the makings for some “fun” forecasting and weather events.
I spoke with several friends from CO yesterday. At the same time tornadoes were dropping on the eastern half of CO, snow was flying in Breckenridge (the town sits at an elevation of 9600 feet), and accumulating! At the same time, of course, damaging tornadoes were wrecking havoc on the eastern communities, along with extremely large hail storms (baseball sized hail was reported). All in all, however, this was just another day in Colorado, and really not that out of the ordinary!
Below I’ve posted a few links to the rough weather that plagued “my second home” yesterday. If you get some time, read over these stories…some of the weather reports are quite impressive.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/05/22/colorado.tornado.video/index.html
http://www.9news.com/news/top-article.aspx?
http://www.crh.noaa.gov/bou/?n=severe_reports_052208
