In the world of Meteorology, December 1 marks the first day of the winter season. Meteorological seasons are different from astronomical seasons (the normal equinoxes and solstices.) Weather folk break down the seasons more by the temperature patterns and the type of weather seen in those months. With that, let's take a quick look at how November finished for the Castle Rock area.
Temperatures started out very warm for the first part of the month for Castle Rock. In fact, we saw no below average temperatures until the later part of the month, a trend that continued from our very warm October. By the end of the month though, more cold fronts and even a bit of snow made its way into the area. Despite the cooler second half of the month, it was not enough to break out of our "warmer than average" pattern that we have seen since about June.
The monthly mean temperature for Castle Rock finished at 40.51 degrees which is 1.41 degrees above average.
In terms of snow and rain (precipitation) we didn't do as poorly as October, but we didn't do well either. I would say the amount of rain and snow we got didn't necessarily help our drought situation, but helped it from getting too much worse.
The Castle Rock area saw around 4 inches of snow (highly dependent on location of course) which was about 3 inches below average. This is much better than seeing no snow (like we did in October) but it still wasn't quite enough. At any rate, we will take whatever moisture we can get and November is not known as a particularly wet month anyways.
Total liquid precipitation for Castle Rock finished at 0.24 inches which is 0.76 inches below average.
Snowfall for Castle Rock finished at 4.03 inches which is 2.97 inches below average.
Castle Rock has now seen 5 consecutive months with below to well below average precipitation and has not had a month at average or above average since June 2016.
A Few Other Interesting Weather Articles for Castle Rock
- Read the entire November 2016 Castle Rock Review Here (Includes a preview of December 2016)
- Arctic Blast Moving Into Colorado First Week of December -- Will Affect Castle Rock!
- We now have nearly 2 years of Castle Rock Weather Data Available!
We are approaching 2 years in operation here at Mountain Wave Weather. Thank you all so much for following along with us and we've truly enjoyed chatting with everyone!