You're hot then you're cold: Rain and snow enter New Mexico after warm, blustery weekend

After a windy Easter weekend, New Mexico settled into a wetter start to the first week of April.

Whereas the weekend brought some warm and blustery weather, the state saw a “relatively drastic change” on Monday, National Weather Service meteorologist Randall Hergert said.

“We saw warm temperatures, blowing dust, high winds and critical fire weather across eastern New Mexico this past weekend. (It) was all ahead of this winter storm system that’s coming over New Mexico today,” he told the Journal Monday afternoon, adding such a change was fairly common.

On Monday, the NWS issued winter storm warnings — which can indicate heavy snow — for a swath of northern New Mexico near Raton and Taos and extending down to areas near Santa Fe and Las Vegas.

As of early Monday morning, the agency was expecting several inches of snow on the northern mountains, with the higher elevations of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains potentially seeing 5 to 10 inches of snow.

The NWS also issued a winter weather advisory for a large area of the western part of the state, which encompassed areas near Gallup, Grants and Glenwood. On the flip side, there were high wind and red flag warnings in the southeast corner of the state.

That all being said, the agency early Monday morning expected minor to no impacts to travel throughout the state, with the exception of Interstate 25 at Raton Pass, where it expected “major” impacts Monday night.

While Albuquerque had no warnings or advisories, the city faced rain through much of Monday, with some showers producing a bit of hail — Hergert said the agency received a couple reports of pea-sized hail — and graupel, which is also called snow pellets or soft hail.

As of around 4 p.m., the NWS measured less than a quarter-inch of rain in Albuquerque over the past 24 hours.

While some of the winter storm conditions are expected to persist over parts of northeastern New Mexico, some of the showers over central and western parts of the state, including Albuquerque, were expected to taper off Monday evening, Hergert said.

The NWS on its website predicted partly sunny skies and a high around 58 degrees for Tuesday.

“We’ll generally see this clearing from west to east across the state starting tonight, and through tomorrow morning,” Hergert said. “We’ll see clearing conditions really for most areas by tomorrow afternoon. Warming up, very pleasant weather for Wednesday, and then we’ll get another round of increasing winds for the end of the week.”