The Boulder office of the National Weather Service (NWS) put out a map Wednesday morning that showed which places in Colorado would get the most snow from the coming winter storm.
As of Friday, a late-winter storm could bring up to 15 inches of snow to Denver. This could be the “biggest snowstorm of the season” for the city. Also, the storm will drop the temperature in central Colorado to 37 degrees by Thursday, which is about 15 degrees below average for this time of year.
On Wednesday morning, NWS Boulder shared a map of the snowfall along with the words “Heavy snowfall for areas in or near the Front Range Mountains, Foothills, and Palmer Divide, including the greater Denver/Boulder area.” X was formerly Twitter. “Conditions will get worse this afternoon and tonight, and they will keep getting worse through Thursday night.” Things will slowly get better on Friday.”
The map shows that up to 37 inches of snow are likely to fall in Evergreen. Red Feather Lakes could get up to 35 inches of rain. Castle Rock could get up to 26 inches of snow, and Estes Park and Lake George could each get 24 inches.
Newsweek talked to NWS scientist Zach Hiris, who said it’s hard to say how much snow the Denver area will get because it’s raining and the temperature is in the 40s. “How long [the rain] lasts will impact snowfall totals,” he noted.
Depending on how the storm works, the amount of snow that falls could change, causing cities to get more or less snow.
NWS.gov says that most of Colorado was either under a winter storm watch, a winter storm alert, or a winter storm warning as of Wednesday afternoon.
The NWS Boulder said in a follow-up post on X that in Denver, “rain will transition to snow this evening.”
This week, AccuWeather said that the storm would be the “snowiest storm of the winter” if it dumped more than 5.5 inches of snow at Denver International Airport. The most recent time Denver had a lot of snow was last month, on February 3, when 5.5 inches fell in 24 hours.
The NWS said that the heavy snow could make it impossible to drive in some places.
“Deep snow will make travel nearly impossible, especially from late tonight through Thursday afternoon,” the winter storm statement from NWS Denver said. “It will be hard to see when it snows a lot.” Power outages will likely happen in different places.
According to a map that NWS Boulder shared on X, the Denver metropolitan area could receive up to 2 inches of snow per hour on Wednesday night and Thursday during the day.
