Snow Records

When we walk into the school building each morning, the only snow to see clings to the mountains under the light of the sunrise. The concrete sidewalks leading up to the doors aren’t wet or covered in slippery ice. There are still no snow days. In the fall semester of October of 2019, a snowstorm left us with a snow day and an early release in the same week. However, that might be an exception to snowfall. How much snow do we get in the late months of each year?

As we move into December, the lack of snowfall in Denver keeps appearing in the news as new records are made. So how does this compare to snow in the past? We've gone so long without snow, it’s easy to focus on the fact we haven’t seen it this year. How much does it usually snow from the start of the snow season through December? Is the lack of noticeable snow right now causing us to overreact?

The National Weather Service first started recording snow in Colorado in 1882. Since then, it’s kept a record of the inches of snowfall each month. These records were first recorded at Stapleton Airport before moving to Denver International Airport during the 2007-2008 snow season. Since then, snowfall has been recorded at DIA. At least a tenth of an inch must be reported at DIA in order for it to have officially snowed in Denver, and because DIA isn’t extremely close to Denver, the amount of snow reported for Denver is not always accurate. It also means the snowfall we witnessed in late November did not officially count as the first snowfall this year.

According to the National Weather Service, from September through December last year, Denver received 17 inches of snow. The year before that, there were 26.7 inches of snow, and the year just before that, 2018, Denver had 8.2 inches of snow in that time period. A similar trend of mostly small numbers appears in the years before that. Overall, Denver and the nearby cities usually don’t get a lot of snow near the end of the year.

Snowfall tends to increase at the beginning of the year, with March having some of the highest snowfall numbers. In March of this year, Denver received 34 inches of snow. In March of 2020, it received 7.5 inches of snow, and in March of 2019, it received 12.9 inches of snow. The typical snow season starts in October and ends in May. According to Bouldercast, a website that monitors snowfall in Boulder and Denver, there were four separate snowfalls in December of 2020. There were three in November, one in October, and one in September. Although it may seem like we’ve missed a lot of snow, there aren’t actually that many snowfalls in the months leading up to January.

When we take a step back to look at snow in the past, the lack of snowfall this year doesn’t look as bad. Our first snow is late, but Denver has a pattern of snowfall increasing in the early months of year, so the lack of snow we’re noticing may not be as substantial as it looks.