A high-pressure system is bringing a heat dome that will cover much of the Western United States this week. Weather forecasters are expecting the system to push temperatures into the 80s at higher elevations and even close to 100 degrees in the Southwest—breaking records for mid-March.
The heat wave comes in the midst of a winter that has been unusually warm and dry for the Rocky Mountains, with record high temperatures already broken.
Russ Schumacher, Colorado’s state climatologist, said he and his colleagues can usually point to past events as precedent for some of the trends and patterns we see in the climate.
“But that's pretty hard to find for what's about to happen in the next few days,” he said. “It looks like it's just going to be record after record for warmth for this time of year falling as we get into this heat wave later this week.”
Schumacher also serves as director of the Colorado Climate Center at Colorado State University in Fort Collins.
In Colorado, and other Mountain West states like Utah and Wyoming, Schumacher said the biggest concern with the heat wave will likely be the impact it has on snowpack, as the region relies heavily on snowpack and runoff for its water supplies.
“I think that'll be the big question, is exactly how much of that already poor snowpack do we lose with the really anomalous warmth coming in over the next week?” he said. “The warmth will maybe last five to seven days at that really extreme level, but it doesn't look like it's going to really cool off or get real snowy the week after that either. So it is not a great outlook for the snowpack.”
He said one big cause for concern is that even during the state’s worst snowpack years on record, there were still some major storms in March and April.
“That's obviously not what we're going to see in, really, the next couple of weeks, is not more snowstorms and continuing to build up the snowpack,” he said. “Instead it's going to be this extreme warmth for this time of year.”
Schumacher said if we do get some of those spring storms that are typical at this time of year, they could stave off some of the most dire consequences, but the current trend is not optimistic.
“The years that have poor snowpack that runs off, melts out early, do tend to be the years that we've had some of the big wildfires in the past,” he said. “So those are all potential drought impacts that we'll all have to be paying close attention to as the spring and summer proceeds.”
Fire danger is already on the rise in Colorado.
Tracy LeClair, the public information officer for wildland fire in Colorado’s Division of Fire Prevention and Control, said currently, wildfire conditions in Colorado are trending worse than they were in some of the state’s other big fire years, like 2000, 2018, and 2020.
“The snowpack and snowcover are so sparse that—especially on the Front Range—we’re seeing that activity picking up earlier than usual, and I think then we’re going to see statewide an earlier and longer fire season,” she said.
The snowpack has also impacted vegetation, which serves as fuel for fires, LeClair said.
“Grasses have not started to green up yet, we don't have leaves on trees,” she said. “It was a low snow year, so all of those grasses that would normally have been compacted down are now standing tall, which would facilitate rapid wind-driven fire.”
A few smaller fires have already broken out near Front Range communities.
Schumacher said the warmth we’ve experienced this winter likely won’t be the new normal for Colorado and the Mountain West.
“But at the same time, we are warming,” he said. “Warm months, warm seasons, warm years are getting more likely. And so the frequency of having a warm winter will likely go up and the probability that we get a winter that is as cold as some of the ones we've had historically will go down over time.”
Schumacher said that once the high pressure system moves on, climatologists will collect data and do more definitive research to officially attribute an event like this to a changing climate.
But he also noted this heat dome is coming during a period of extreme weather events around the country, likely exacerbated by climate change, including record-breaking rains in Hawai’i, infrastructure-straining blizzards in the Midwest, and tornadoes on the east coast.
Copyright 2026 Rocky Mountain Community Radio. This story was shared via Rocky Mountain Community Radio, a network of public media stations in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico, including Aspen Public Radio.
