The winds that have blown through the Estes Valley and over Colorado’s Front Range foothills are not all that unusual, according to Colorado State Climatologist Russ Schumacher, who called December through February “the windy season.”
Due to the strong Chinook winds, the Estes Park School District canceled classes on Wednesday and Friday, and the Colorado Department of Transportation closed roads, including US 36 south of Estes Park between Lyons and Boulder.
With downed trees and toppled utility poles, residents were warned to stay home and off the roads to reduce the risk of dangerous incidents.
Local winds were clocked at 70 mph by some locals, with gusts registering 100 mph on anemometers. Power lines came down on Thursday evening and into Friday morning, leaving an estimated 1,900 residential and business customers without electricity. As of yesterday, the Town-owned utility identified 14 broken power poles, 10 of which were on main power lines.
Crews from Estes Park Power and Communications, with assistance from the City of Fort Collins Utilities, have been working to restore service. It is expected that power should be restored by Saturday evening to affected customers.
According to the Town of Estes Park, not all power outages are due to the Town’s electrical system, and “some residents may need to hire an electrician to repair damage to their individual service lines.”
Schumacher said strong downslope winds in December 2021 fueled the Marshall Fire, a conflagration that raged for three days and destroyed more than 1,100 homes in Boulder County.
Questions about the connection between climate change and wind come up a lot, said Schumacher, “and it’s one that we don’t know a lot about, partly because it’s not something we have a lot of good long-term data on with winds in comparison to temperature and precipitation. And, obviously, wind is so local. Wind can change so much from one place to the next.”
Schumacher said that to accurately compare wind speeds over time, a monitoring station in a fixed location would need to record data over an extended period.
Researchers in Boulder published a paper this year in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, “Earth, Wind and Fire: Are Boulder’s Extreme Downslope Winds Changing?” that looked at changes in recorded data which, at first glance, suggest that wind speeds in Boulder have decreased over the past thirty years and are not as strong as they were in the 1960s through the 1980s.
Upon further analysis, the team of scientists from the National Science Foundation National Center for Atmospheric Research, the University of Colorado in Boulder, the University of Washington, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and National Weather Service suggest that a change in instrument location, changes in building codes, and increasing roughness length from tree growth have affected the way wind data have been recorded, but climate change caused by humans, such as increasing human-produced greenhouse gases, emerged is the chief culprit.
To further analyze their findings and test their hypothesis about the cause of the decrease in Boulder’s winds, an additional study is underway to examine historical data and conduct future modeling.
The Colorado Climate Center, located at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, within the Department of Atmospheric Science, collects data to monitor the climate and place individual events into historical context. The center also disseminates climate information to the public and provides expertise on climate for policymakers.
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