"Blizzard of '05" Looks Like the Real Thing.

We get two or three "blizzard warnings" every winter. More than half the time, they turn out to be anything but true blizzard conditions. This time, however, the warning was right. It's snowing quite heavily outside, and the wind is blowing constantly, gusting to about 25 to 30 miles an hour. Here in the city there are quite a number of trees, plus buildings and several large hills to break the wind. I'm sure that the eastern plains areas are getting 50 to 60 MPH gusts. There's about 3 inches of snow in my yard, with drifts over a foot in any place that breaks the wind. Visibility is about 250 feet in blowing and drifting snow.

This weather system started as rain about 3:30AM, Mountain Daylight Savings time. It turned to snow sometime after 4:30, and has been going hot and heavy since. This is very wet, slushy snow, which is typical of spring snowstorms in Colorado. Colorado hasn't been getting these types of snowstorms over the last four or five years, which is one reason we've had a drought.

We missed the last really bad blizzard Colorado Springs had. My mother had an accident the day before Thanksgiving, 1997. We left early Thanksgiving morning for Spring, Texas. We could see the snowstorm behind us all the way to Bowie, Texas, where we stopped for the night. During that night, Bowie got several inches of rain from the storm, and it continued to rain on us all the way into the Houston area. When we returned four days later, there was still 30 inches of snow in our back yard.

This current storm is coming from a low pressure area around the Four-Corners area where Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico meet. It's slowly moving east. A Four-Corners low always brings lots of snow to the mountains. As it moves east, it brings snow to the eastern plains. We could get as much as two feet of snow from this storm.