We check in with the best day meteorologists out there. He's Dave Frasier.
Hi, Dave, Hey, good afternoon on a beautiful October.
First, I was going to say, I have absolutely no complaints about today, So well done. Whatever ingredients you had to put in your witches brew there to draw up this weather, you keep up the good work. But how much longer are we going to be getting? I mean, I think today, are we going to hit eighty today?
Yeah, that's our forecast. I is eighty. We're warming about two to three degrees above where we were yesterday at this time, so that should put us on track for eighty. Yesterday we hit seventy seven for the last day of September, and so a couple of degrees of warming should get us right there. And the average, just so everybody knows, is about seventy two, So that is above average, but it's not record setting. The records are ninety today and then upper eighties for the next few days.
So it's going to say it's going to be upper eighties the next few days. When are we going to start to see that lovely fall weather return?
Come Saturday, come the weekend, we'll start to get a little bit of a cool down, a storm system coming in from the Pacific northwest, the bulk of which looks to go north of Colorado, but a week trailing cold front on the southern fringe of it should come across the north Central Mountains and clip northeast Colorado. So I have shower chances in Saturday late afternoon, early evening, and again later in the day on Sunday. It's not a
high chance, twenty thirty percent chance. And I really think it's Denver North that sees it because of the position of the storm to the north of us. But a week cold front should get us into the mid seventies on Saturday, and then following that will be in the mid sixties on Sunday, and then the rest of next week does look to stay in the sixties, about sixty
five sixfoos every day and a little unsettled. And by that what I mean is there's just going to be these storms kind of passing by to the north, and I think just close enough by that we're going to keep up a ten percent cya chance for a few showers in the forecast each afternoon as some of that moisture works its way over the mountains and could creep down into Denver. Nothing widespread, nothing big, but just a little unsettled and certainly a little more like fall for next week.
I've been kind of surprised as I go to let my dog out first thing in the morning, and I'm like, oh my gosh, it rained last night. Like we've been getting rain overnight, which I don't recall in my vast thirteen years as being a regular thing. So I'm telling you, this summer's been different than any other summer I remember here.
Yeah, I just think it's been the right mix. And while it may not be a traditional summer, I just think that overall it's been pretty good. You know, we expect certain types of weather when it comes to stormy skies, the hail season and the flooding rains and the monsoons. We expect that from time to time, and I just think that it's just been enough sampling of everything that
the mix has just been fantastic. For instance, September, I crunched the numbers last night, and some people may remember, you know, well, it was warm early in the month. The longest temperature we had in September was ninety degrees. I think was back on the tenth right, and the average came out actually one tenth of a degree below. Yeah, wow, September. So an average September is like sixty four point eight,
and we ended up at sixty four point seven. So temperature wise, there was a balance as you look at the monthly calendar between some above normal temperatures and a series of below normal temperatures that everything weighed out to be just about average for this time, and we did well for moisture because of those overnight showers. We ended up about the four tenths of an inch ahead. And of course August was great for us for moisture. So yeah, I think the balance has been fantastic.
I got a couple questions from our common Spirit health techt line, ask Weatherman Fraser that seems to be very I mean, chief Meteorologist Fraser Texture. Ask Weatherman Fraser, why does the temperature drop when the sun rises?
So what happens is your lowest temperature in the morning generally occurs just the little f or sunrise. So what happens is the sun comes up and for a brief period that sunrise heats the atmosphere and kind of turns. It turns it a little bit, and colder air always sinks to the bottom. So think of a think of a murky kind of sandy glass of water and you spin it and it's all mixed together. When that goes calm, the coldest air kind of drops to the bottom, or
the sand settles on the bottom of the sediment. Same thing happens in the atmosphere. The coldest air is going to calm as things kind of are settled. There's just enough turnover in the morning briefly as the sun comes up before the warming effect kicks in that that colder air sinks to the ground.
Okay, that makes sense, But a follow up question that would be what causes that turbulence? What causes that churn? Is it the sun rising? Is it the what makes that happen in the first place.
Yeah. If you think about the overnights as being calm and stable, yeah, and you don't have the heat eating of the sun, you don't have that kind of rising motion and kind of that mixing of the atmosphere and so forth and so on, then sometimes you know, you can get that little bit of a turnover. Same thing
happens like when we're dealing with wind. So sometimes at night we have this, We have this roaring wind coming off the foothills and it's kind of cold overnight, and the cooler, stable air is forcing the wind down the foothills and blowing it out. And then the sun rises and the air rises, and it kind of lifts that stronger wind away from us on the ground and lifts it overhead. So again the atmosphere is very buoyant. That buoyancy,
just much like an ocean can make a difference. I mean in the ocean, you know, the same thing is happening. The colder air is sinking down. By the way, did you know what the cold is air? I think I've told you this before. The coldest temperature for sinking air. No, do you have a thirty nine degrees? What? Yeah? Think about that? Right? Doesn't make sense? But what happens. What happens is you pass thirty nine and you approach thirty two. I guess it's yeah, freezes and it flows to the top.
This coldest oceanaire is closer to thirty nine degrees, causing it to sink as opposed to getting closer to freezing, when it will turn into cubes and rises.
Well, isn't that nerdy and interesting? One more question before we let you go, and that is just how much more difficult is forecasting weather here than other cities? Or is that just a myths?
No, it's not a myth. I remember more than twenty five years ago when I was leaving Cincinnati to come out here. I worked in the Midwest. There are certain things in the Midwest where you can literally do persistent forecasting, where you can look out the window and say, doing this one hundred miles away, it's going to do this in about three hours. It's not that simplistic. Every part of the country has its nuances when it comes to
forecasting challenges. Right about the Great Lakes and lake effects. Now you think about, you know, sea breezes in the southeast and Florida and the challenges that come with those wind lines and shifts and everything like that. But I remember when I was leaving to come here, one of my good friends in Cincinnati said, you have any idea what you get yourself into moving prospect he put to Denver, Colorado.
He says, good luck to you. And I literally had to go and dig out some college books and kind of refresh Mountain meteorology, and it has to do with everything we talk about here on Weather Wednesdays. It has to do with our variant topography and wind is king. I say that to when we're interviewing candidates. I said, you're going to study wind like you've never studied win before. When speeds, when direction lifting, wind falling, wind upslope, downslope,
direction of the wind, jet streams, so forth. So the wind is what drives it, and the monoliths of the mountains get in the way of that. And you have to understand as that wind flows up, over, down, through and around, it changes our weather. And so that's why we have when you see snowfall forecast. The variation is all driven on what we call topographical features, the mountains, the hills, the Palmer Divide, everything plays into that.
Well, Dave Frasier informative as always that I have one more question. Maybe we'll get to it in the next Well maybe you can answer a yes or no. Can you ask why some of our records date back to before we had SUVs. Well, I'm not quite sure why they. I mean, how far do our records go back? Reliable records here in the metro Do you know.
I mean, we've had our records go back to the late eighteen hundreds, oh wow, right, started being kept and again we've talked about this before. Records have been kept at four different sites in Denver to downtown, one at Stapleton finally moved out in the nineties to Denver International. So that's our history of records in Denver eighteen hundreds, late eighteen hundreds to now.
All right, that is Fox thirty one chief meteorologists. You can watch him and the rest of their amazing team over at Fox thirty one on Fox thirty one and we'll talk to you next week, my friend.
Enjoy the next couple of days and the fall feeling next week.
Amen to that.