I made it home at 3:30 am (after twenty hours of plane travel from western New York) to find 18 inches of permanent drought on the ground. Despite 50+ inches of snow over the last eight weeks and normal snowpack in the mountains, we are still listed as being in a drought.
It might have been faster to drive.
Steve, you were on the low side to only get 18 inches. I think we were closer to 20-24. If it was ~18 on the ground when you returned, it was surely more than that while you were gone since the first inch or so melted and we had some melt on Tuesday that compressed the snow pack a bit. It’s a ton of moisture…well over an inch of rainfall equivalent…I’m guessing close to 8% of our total precipitation for an average year fell in one storm over three days. I haven’t seen any official numbers summed up over the three days, it’d be curious to see what they say.
There was an article in the Collegian where it looked like they were trying to save face by interviewing a CSU professor who claimed that November, March, and April are FoCo’s big snow months. I call BS on that…March is definitely true, but this link shows the average order to be March, February, December, November, April, January.
http://www.wrcc.dri.edu/cgi-bin/cliMONtsnf.pl?co3005
So while this kind of thing isn’t unexpected, claiming that Apr is one of the big 3 snow months in FoCo is definitely questionable…
-Scott