Click the link to read the article on the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel website (Dennis Webb). Here’s an excerpt:
Mark Miller, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, discussed the prospects for summer monsoonal rains Tuesday during a meeting the agency held in Grand Junction to discuss monsoon planning and preparation with partners such as the Colorado Department of Transportation and area emergency management planners.
Summer monsoonal moisture pushing into Arizona and New Mexico and sometimes farther north can bring welcome relief from dry and hot conditions. But it also can pose challenges such as flooding, sometimes exacerbated by previous wildfires that leave slopes more flood-prone. That can lead to results like last year’s shutdown of Interstate 70 through Glenwood Canyon for about two weeks. Flooding also occurred last year in the area of the 2020 Pine Gulch Fire north of Grand Junction…
While monsoon moisture can largely fail to arrive locally some summers, Miller said La Niña periods, like the one that continues to persist now, tend to be associated with above-normal monsoonal rainfall in Arizona and New Mexico. That is helping create expectations for an active monsoon season in western Colorado as well…
[ Jaime Kostelnik] said vegetation recovery in Glenwood Canyon over the first year after the fire, while not uniform, was good, and experts are watching to see what happens this year in terms of further recovery. But she said understanding watershed response in year two and beyond in a burn area “is a complex problem.”
