It's always fun and relatable to complain about the weather, but the last few weeks have really caused a stir in the city.
NBD. We're just swinging from one of the hottest Augusts on record, complete with wildfire ash raining from the sky, to a likely snow day.
The National Weather Service expects things to remain hot, dry and increasingly windy until Monday night, when the low temperature will drop to around 36 degrees and rain becomes more likely. Temperatures will drop further by Tuesday afternoon, when we'll likely see snow. There's a 90 percent chance of precipitation Tuesday with an expected high of 40 degrees.
Get those coats out of your closets.
The most immediate reason for the plummeting temperatures is an "amplified jet stream" that will dip south from Canada like a chilly, humorless snake. The Weather Channel says two typhoons (Pacific hurricanes) that appeared late last week, heading toward Japan and South Korea, have helped stoke the cold front.
"Its kind of a crazy change, really," David Barjenbruch, a NWS meteorologist, told us. "Winter arrives on Tuesday."
He said the cold front is literally sucking air from above the Arctic Circle down to the Front Range.
Barjenbruch said Denver's earliest snowfall ever recorded was on Sept. 3, 1961, but September snowfall was pretty common until the late '90s. Those sort of patterns basically disappeared in the 2000s, which explains why some folks with short memories of the city's weather might find themselves shocked.
Weather officials in other cities have also taken notice, and some have elected to make fun of us.
Barjenbruch predicted the snow will be a welcome change to communities dealing with high fire danger, but the days leading up to the cold will actually make things worse. Winds are expected to blow harder while things are still hot through Monday.
