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567 FXUS65 KBOU 311754 AFDBOU Area Forecast Discussion National Weather Service Denver/Boulder CO 1154 AM MDT Tue Mar 31 2026 .KEY MESSAGES... - Cooler today behind a cold front. Mountain snow develops late in the afternoon and continues into Wednesday. - Better chances for precipitation (50-70%) across the plains Wednesday afternoon and evening. - A brief warm up on Thursday, but an unsettled pattern continues with another storm system possible Thursday night into Friday. && .DISCUSSION /Through Monday/... Issued at 1139 PM MDT Mon Mar 30 2026 A well-defined cold front is pushing through Wyoming tonight, and should reach our forecast area by the early morning hours... leading to a much cooler Tuesday across the plains. A couple showers may try to develop behind the front, but cross sections and model soundings don`t show sufficient moisture for more than a a few areas of stratus and a sprinkle or two across the plains. High temperatures during the afternoon hours will likely be about 20F cooler than Monday, with highs generally near 60F. Meanwhile, we should see a gradual increase in precipitation across the higher elevations through the day as a broad upper level trough begins to sharpen and shift eastward. A broad plume of moisture embedded within the west-southwesterly flow aloft should spread across Colorado during the latter half of day. Moisture content is rather anomalous for the region - with integrated vapor transport values peaking near 200 kg/m/s across the western edges of our CWA, with both IVT and 500mb specific humidity values near or outside of the ECMWF/GEFS ensemble climatology at times Tuesday night into Wednesday. It will likely take most of the day to fully saturate the column, with rain and snow gradually developing during the afternoon and evening hours across the higher elevations. The more meaningful QPF is expected to come Tuesday night through Wednesday, with synoptic scale ascent gradually increasing as the trough strengthens and continues to push towards Colorado. Mean 700-500mb winds out of the southwest may limit overall precipitation coverage/intensity over the high country, and unsurprisingly guidance heavily favors the western half of the state through the first half of Wednesday. Mean winds are generally expected to turn towards the west/west-northwest by the latter half of Wednesday as the primary shortwave pivots across the region and ejects into the Central Great Plains. Rapid lee cyclogenesis is expected over southeastern Colorado Wednesday afternoon, leading to a more pronounced push of north/northeasterly boundary layer flow across the plains. If the plains are going to see precipitation in this setup, it should come sometime late Wednesday afternoon into the overnight hours. Guidance remains reasonably consistent developing precipitation across the I-25 corridor and northeast plains, though QPF amounts are generally unimpressive (generally