Denver7 Chief Meteorologist Lisa Hidalgo and Colorado Public Radio host Ryan Warner held the October edition of their monthly weather and climate conversation at the Denver7 studios, discussing everything from a Halloween forecast to a phenomenon called “atmospheric thirst.”
Here are some of the highlights.
‘Intense’ weather swings
Coloradans saw some wild weather swings this week, with warm, dry and windy weather giving way to below-freezing temps overnight – and a return to the 70s in store.
Lisa explains, it’s actually pretty common this time of year.
“This is why I love Colorado, why I love being a meteorologist here, because we do see such intense swings,” she said. “What it ends up doing is it creates some pretty gusty winds. [...] People are always so upset because it rips the leaves off the trees. But you want that to happen. I mean, you bring the leaves off so that when we do get that first heavy snow, it's not breaking branches.”
Could we see snow before Halloween?
Lisa and Ryan both predicted we would during their September climate conversation. And while snow is unlikely by Lisa’s prediction of Oct. 24, there is a small chance it comes before Ryan’s Oct. 29 deadline.
“It’s a little too far out to get specifics, but this next storm Monday into Tuesday could bring a little bit of snow to the metro area [which] could be our first,” Hidalgo said.
The pair wagered an iced coffee on the cold-weather bet.
It was still too far out to have a clear picture of what the Halloween forecast looked like, but Lisa said the outlook was favorable for pleasant fall conditions.
Halloween in Denver is notably all over the board, though. The warmest Halloween on record was 79 degrees in 2016. The coldest was 7 degrees back in 2019. Our snowiest Halloween on record was 8 inches in 1972.
‘A rough cycle’
A report from Climate Central earlier this month referenced the concept of “atmospheric thirst,” in which the atmosphere gets thirstier as temperatures rise, and thus pulls more water from streams, soils and plants – worsening drought conditions and increasing wildfire risks.
Lisa said it’s a “rough cycle.”
“When you look at human caused warming, what ends up happening is, as you get then a warmer atmosphere that creates more evaporation, which then obviously dries things out [it creates] this rough cycle that we continue to see as we warm the atmosphere,” she said.
- Watch Lisa and Ryan's October weather conversation in its entirety in the video player below: