A hot, dry mass of air has settled along the Front Range and could fuel record-hot temperatures in some areas, the National Weather Service said.
A high-pressure system is driving the heat wave, said Russell Danielson, a meteorologist with the weather service’s Boulder office. The weather pattern is similar to the one that baked the state earlier this month but likely won’t be quite as hot or long-lasting.
Still, daytime temperatures are expected to climb to the upper-90s for much of the Denver metro on Monday and as high as 100 on Tuesday, Danielson said. The temperatures will likely drop out of record territory after Wednesday.
“The rest of the week it'll be still hot but a couple degrees cooler,” he said.
The weather service has issued two heat advisories for the Interstate 25 corridor: The first advisory is from 1-6 p.m. Monday and covers El Paso and eastern Fremont counties; the second advisory is from 11 a.m. -8 p.m. Tuesday for the Denver-Boulder metro, Fort Collins and Longmont areas.
The hot and dry weather will likely mean elevated wildfire danger in some areas, especially on Tuesday and Wednesday, but Danielson said relatively light winds should mean much of the state avoids the most potentially risky fire conditions.
“Since it's so hot and so dry, any ignition could develop into a wildfire pretty quickly. Luckily the winds aren't terrible, but we do still have elevated fire weather conditions,” he said.
The northerly wind flow that funneled in large amounts of wildfire smoke from Canada and the Pacific Northwest disappeared last week, but there is a chance that westerly winds could still pull in a little bit of smoke from those fires Monday and early this week, Danielson said.
