Thinking of doing some gardening this weekend?  Might have to wait for the snow to melt first… Colorado Springs got hit with a nice spring snow storm today, closing many school districts.

We’ve gotten several inches so far and it keeps on coming down…  At least it means you can delay watering the lawn for another week!

And to think there were tornados in the area last night!

[carrie]

The National Weather Service just released the annual report on weather patterns for Colorado.  Some interesting data, whether you’re a new resident to Colorado Springs or a longtime resident.

Image from KevinDooley on Flickr

The hottest day in 2009 was July 24th – it hit 93º that day. The coldest day is in the not-too-distant past: we hit -15º on December 9th.  The average high temperature was 61.9º, while the average low was 35.1º.

Colorado Springs received 15.72 inches of precipitation last year, just over 1.5 inches less than average. I found it interesting that the record maximum precipitation was 27.58 inches in 1999, while the record minimum was a mere 6.07 inches way back in 1939. Let’s hope we don’t come anywhere near setting a record minimum again!

In 1999, we received 22.7 inches of snow – 12.7 of those inches were after July 1st.

Colorado Springs often touts “300 days of sunshine per year”, but that all depends on how you decide what “sunshine” is. In general, you could say Colorado Springs is primarily sunshine, but that all depends on where in the city you live, and whether or not you’d consider a day with clear blue skies from sunrise to 3PM and then clouds from 3 PM to 6 PM a “sunshiney” day.

Regardless, the National Weather Services says we had 261 “fair” days, 71 “partly cloudy” days, and just “33″ cloudy days in 2009. Whether or not you’d consider that 300 days of actual sunshine, you’d be hard-pressed to argue that it’s anything less than a great clmate!

There’s more information on 2009 weather averages and records on the National Weather Service website.

From the National Weather Service:

Preliminary data for Colorado Springs indicates the December 2009 average temperature was 23.3º F, which is 5.7º F below the normal December average temperature of 29º F.  This makes December 2009 the seventh coldest on record and the coldest December since 1983; the coldest December on record with an average temperature of 18.4º F.

December 2009 was certainly cold, but typically, January is the coldest month in Colorado Springs, with an average temperature of 28.1º F.  The average low temperature in January is 14.5º F, while the average high is 41.7º F – quite tolerable, really, especially with Colorado Springs low humidity!

[carrie]