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Snowstorm may be headed this way

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Tuesday, Jan. 28, 2014 11:42 PM

The area has gone more than 38 days without a flake of snow or a drop of rain, but there is a storm in the forecast, a local meteorologist said.

This could improve the snowpack at Jackson Lake, where it is just slightly less than half of average.

The unsettled weather is headed for the Four Corners area could bring cloud cover and temperatures in the 30s and 40s for Wednesday through Friday. It might even bring snow to the mountains, said meteorologist Jim Andrus. The storm may be cleared up by the weekend, and the area will return to temperatures in the 50s.

There's some uncertainty where the storm will hit as it travels through Colorado, but the central mountains are likely to get the most snow, he said. However the storm is headed this way because a persistent high-pressure ridge off the Pacific Coast is breaking.

"This is the first sign of weakness it's shown in a month," he said.

Above Jackson Gulch Reservoir the snow is measured both by a "snotel" that measures the water content of the snow. Every month, the snow depths are also manually measured at the end of each month. This is known as the "snow course".

The Mancos snotel is currently showing 4.6 inches of water in the snow. The snow course is at 49 percent of normal.

"Right now it doesn't look good, but it doesn't mean it's going to be that way, it could turn around," said Gary Kennedy, the superintendent of the Mancos Water Conservancy District.

The monsoon rains did bring the overall average to 60 percent of expected precipitation and helped to bring the soil moisture back to normal after a particularly dry year.

But the mountains are in need of the heavy wet snows that are typical of February and March because the agricultural land in the Mancos Valley is drying up.

"Don't give up on the snow yet," Kennedy said. "I've seen it turn around many years."

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