Though the season has just begun, Denver received approximately 20 inches of snow last week. And if another solid storm comes through before December, it could make history.
“So if the month ended right now — which obviously it isn't — but right now the 20 inches we have on the month, that would actually be the 10th snowiest November in Denver's history,” said Zach Hiris, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. “To get to the top two or three, we’ve got to get about eight or nine more inches of snow.”
Southeast Denver received an unusually large amount of snow compared to other areas along the Front Range. And according to Hiris, this was simply due to “the way the winds worked out.”
Further south, snowfall records for the date were broken in both Pueblo and Colorado Springs.
On Friday, Nov. 8, both cities received record breaking amounts of snowfall. Pueblo received almost 5 inches of snow — breaking the previous daily record set in 1890. Similarly in Colorado Springs, the southern Colorado city received 8 inches of snow breaking the previous record of 2.6 inches set in 1975.
To the west, the mountains are also off to a snowy start, giving the state’s early snowpack a boost. Front Range cities and agriculture all depend on a deep snowpack.
“Across the state, we're doing pretty darn good for the most part. We're running above average to well above average to start,” Hiris said of the snowpack in the various mountain basins — particularly those south of I-70. “But obviously it's a long ways to go until we get to the peak of the snowpack season.”
At the height of the storm, more than 75,300 people lost power across the state, most of them in the Denver metro area. As of noon Monday, more than 1,000 homes in metro Denver are without power, according to Xcel’s power outage map, but according to Michelle Aguayo, a spokesperson for the utility, none of these outages are related to the storm.
“Everybody whose power was impacted by the storm has been restored,” Aguayo told CPR News.
