Our weather guru. He is Fox thirty one's chief meteorlogist, Dave Frasier. Dave, did Wyoming actually get blown off the map yesterday?
Yeah, that's always a tough state, one of the windiest in the country. And boy was at Hollowing yesterday, especially along the I eighty corridor, so they got the front of it. Although impressive wind gusts up high in the foothills west of Denver with some eighty eighty fives. I think there was even a peak at ninety outsres.
That's like beyond a tropical storm.
Yeah, it's beyond hurricane force, which is at a minimum seventy five miles per hour. So you know, the good thing is it's generally a lot of those gusts are over the pass. Is not good if you're traveling. You know, think of like Bertha Pass trying to get up to win a park. So it can be a challenge for travelers. There's not a lot of people that live up at that ten thousand foot level, and the gusts are occasional.
So you know, when we talk about wind, there's the constant wind, the movement, and then the gus occasional burst. But if You're out and about and all of a sudden, boom something, they hitch you in the back. You know, gus to win thirty forty five miles proud. There's nothing more annoying. And I think when it comes to weather factors, wind is by far the most annoying.
That is A Rod made the exact same point yesterday. He is in complete agreement with you about that. I want to know about this polar vortex, and so does one of our texters, Mandy. Does Dave foresee a polar blast coming around Christmas time to New Year's That from Tom and Loveland? What are we looking at this polar vortex? Because I'm actually going to be in Ohio, so I'm afraid I'm driving into the polar vortex.
You are? You are? And again that's a cute name, if you will. It's an attention grab or it's basically a giant area of low pressure. We see these spinning up near Hudson Bay in Canada, and they're deep low pressures and they can whip up cold and they can whip up wind. And right now, the next shot of very very cold air is going to slip east of Colorado, the northeast corner of the state may get a little bit of that, meaning their temperatures may be a little
lower than ours. Here along the front range, we're looking very warm and dry. But I yes, I agree with you. I think if you are heading east in the next ten days, at least you're heading into the colder, the wind eer and the higher probabilities of running into snow in those areas where we're on the flip side of that. I got nothing the next chance, I see. I just told Arod, maybe keep your fingers crossed, keep your toes crossed.
The twenty third we might get a little something.
But between now and then, run in twenty degrees above average and dry.
Okay, So this one, this text message, This is all it says, Mandy. Exclamation point. Please tell Dave that my daffodils are coming up. We've got weather confused plants out there.
No way to send me.
A picture to the station. I would love to get some type of a gardener or somebody with a green thumb to be to explain that that is in fact true. Do they think it's a second spring? I don't know. I'm not the biggest when it comes to green thumb. I mean, I know how to take care of my lawn and my trees and my shrubs when it comes to plants like that. That's not my forte. But I would love to see that picture if in fact that is Troy. Wouldn't that be a sign of coming changes.
I have some daffodils in my yard, and they were there when I moved in. I've just never gotten rid of them. They just randomly come up. I mean sometimes if we have like three warm days in January, my daffodils will come up. So it's always like a mystery as to when the daffodils will decide to make it appearance and where they are. They get no sun, so they literally grow to be like three inches high. They're the saddest, little cutest little daffodils you ever saw in
your life day. They're just like the little daffodils that could and I probably should like dig them up and transplant them. It's kind of become like a fun thing for me to note when this was going to happen.
You know, I'll bet, I'll bet just on our little conversation, your text line is going to be flooded with daffodil experts telling you exactly.
That maybe they are.
Maybe they are sensitive to just temperature alone, and they just sound smart enough to realize it's December.
They're just like, hey, it's warm enough, let's pop our heads up.
I know, yeah, there you go. I just got this text message. It says, Mandy, I don't plan on murdering someone, but if I did, it would be on a windy day.
So there you go.
Yeah, this this text has this question, manby, what happened last night? At nine forty five last night, the temperature was fifty nine degrees with wind out of the west. By ten thirty wind shifted out of the east and the temperature was thirty seven degrees. What went on there?
That was our cold front that came in last night. So remember here along the Front Range, if you have a west northwest, even southwesterly wind, you're coming up and over the foothills the mountains to the west and then downsloping, and that heats the air coming into Denver in the Front Range.
So think of it as a hair dryer.
Being turned on. The air drives out, the air, temperatures go up. So while we were in the fifties late last night, we I had a little bit of a westerly component to the wind, and the cold front came in.
And the reason you'll know a colt.
Front has gone by is the wind will generally turn to an east northeast or even a straight northerly direction. And when that happens, now we're tapping into much colder air sitting north of Colorado, across the Great Plains and into our Canada. And that's what happened last night. Temperatures today are down a little bit from where we were yesterday,
not dramatically, but down a few degrees. So temperatures today will be in the fifties, but tomorrow we race right back to about sixty four sixty five, which is twenty degrees above normal, ten away from the record, thankfully, but yeah, we evan flow with the wind. Wind is king in Colorado.
I have a very specific question. Can you explain the mechanism of why when the wind comes out of the south it gets colder. It seems like it should be the opposite.
It depends on what time of the year it is. You know, when I say wind is king, wind is king as it relates to topography and how it moved around those graphical features that we have foothills, Palmer divide, mountains, hodback. All those terms you hear us use when is king when it comes to differences in elevation and how storms are transported, and when is king depending on direction. And sometimes you can move a wind across a snowfield that
can transport colder temperatures to you. So if you have a southerly wind, generally, if you're down here on the south side of town, you're going to get a downsloping component as it comes up over Monument Hill and he heats a little bit. But if there's a ton of snow to the south and east out near say Elbert or Lineman, or over the Eastern plains, and you have a suddenly wind, you can transport colder air towards you. And so those are factors that we have to take it.
But generally a southerly wind will be on the warm side for most of the front range, barring any snowfields or cold pockets. Sometimes Lineman is one of the fastest places to fall off on the Eastern plant because they're on the very end of the Palmer divide, so their elevation drops off and all the coal there pours right into Linemen, just like it doesn't Gunnison. The high mountain valleys are prone to cold there because once that coal there pours in, it's trapped down in the lower high
valley locations and you can't scour it out. Linen is in factor.
You know, I never really thought about like how much that, you know, And I'll use the word valley even though like I live in a hilly neighborhood and you go down a hill and go back up, like in the morning, I can feel myself walking into that cold sink.
You know what I mean.
You don't.
You don't realize how significant that is. But it's it's it's a degree change that is significant enough that I can feel it as I'm walking. And I always I just think that's like really cool.
I don't know, I'm proplored.
Everything's flat right.
Right right, No, And and like I said, you know, the.
Topography elevation changes the little I call them nooks and crannies, ye, Carilado, because that's basically what it is. And you know, I live south of Colorado towards Castle Rock, and I'm a thousand feet up in elevation, as are you then downtown Denver, and yet everybody in the country thinks of Denver's the mile high city. Yet Denver is surrounded to the east, the south, and the west by higher terrain, and that's
where a good chunk of people live. And so those variations and in the weather center I bought twenty five years ago when I moved here, I bought a three dimensional map of Colorado to be able to study the features here, the mountain ranges, the different names for the ranges, how they.
Sit, where they are, and stuff.
And every time we hire a new employee onto the Pinpoint Weather Team, I show them that map and I say, study this and understand how those features and different wind directions play into upslope, downslope where there can be cold pockets, where there can be warmer, where there can be more snow. And it's really a great visual When you look at it, you can see, oh yeah, now I know why that's cold. And look how low it is compared to the terrain around it.
And that's why I thought thirty one's weather. That's the best weather. And that's why Dave Frasier is our favorite meteorologist. Dave good to talk to you, my friend. I'll talk to you next week.
Sounds good.
Enjoying the warm weather heading your way. Sure will thank you day, Fraser