I was skiing this day at Ski Santa Fe, in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains about 15 miles northeast of Santa Fe, and experienced the effects of the aforementioned Santa Fe area thunderstorm as well as another strong and photogenic squall that passed through a couple hours ahead of it. This earlier squall was approaching the ski area a little before 11 a.m., when I took this picture from near the top of the ski area at approximately the 12,000 foot level:

When you are skiing and see this coming at you, you know something is about to happen. What happened in this case is a heavy shower of snow pellets (graupel) that gradually turned to ordinary snow, with up to an inch coming down in about 20 minutes. Some of the graupel was as large as 1/3" in diameter. In the picture above, you can see what looks like smoke rising from a mountaintop below me, but actually this was a cloud feature associated with outflow from the storm, an arcus cloud of sorts. At this point, I was actually looking down at the cloud base as it approached the ski area. This picture was taken around 15 or 20 minutes before the squall arrived at the ski area. This radar image from 11:15 a.m. shows the narrow line of convection right as it began dropping heavy graupel on the ski area:

Note the areas of yellow on the radar image above the e of Santa Fe. This is where the heavy graupel was resulting in radar returns in the 40-45 dbz range, pretty high for winter-type precipitation. You can also see the negative tilt of the overall storm system, as you could draw a line from northwest to southeast across this radar image with all of the showers, squalls, and storms to the northeast of that line. This imaginary line could be extended southeastward into the Texas Panhandle, with the storms that produced severe weather around and west and north of Amarillo being on the same side of that imaginary line as this activity in New Mexico. Note also that the band of squalls that hit the ski area is quite narrow, which is why the heavy precipitation only lasted for about 20 minutes at the ski area. Then, the sun came out.

The weather stayed relatively calm for a while. But by around 1:20, another band of squalls came in a couple hours after the first one and produced thundersnow. Ordinary snow this time, with about a half dozen long, low rumbles of thunder. This shut down the lifts for a little while (policy is to close them for lightning safety if there is any thunder). What I did not realize at the time was that this thundersnow was occurring in the same storm that was simultaneously producing severe hail! Around 1:25, 1-inch hail was reported near Glorieta Pass, located to the southeast of the ski area. This no doubt explained why all the rumbles of thunder I heard seemed to be coming from the southeast. I tried to get them on video, but they were not quite loud enough for my phone to pick up over the ambient noise. (Note to self - next time this happens, don't stop to take video near the top terminal of a chairlift where the attendant has music playing. The chairlift was shut down, but the music continued.) The severe hail did not just occur in Glorieta Pass, but also earlier at various locations southwest of there. There were several reports of hail ranging in size from .75" to 1.25" between 1:00 and 1:20 p.m. Here is a frame capture from my video showing the snow and wind that were occurring at the ski area at this time:

Here is a radar image from around this time. I have marked the image to show where the severe hail and snow we occurring in the storm:

This radar image is from the exact time of the severe hail report. Most of the green returns associated with this storm likely were snow, since the anvil/stratiform section of the storm where the snow originated were all over the mountains. I would not be surprised if there was some graupel and/or rain closer to the hail core, but where I was it was nearly all ordinary snow with just a little graupel at the very beginning.

Like the first squall, this thunderstorm was moving around 35 miles per hour so it passed over fairly quickly. The sun was already back out before they re-opened the lifts. One more batch of towering cumulus and CB approached the ski area around 2:30 p.m., and this batch, too produced some 1/4-1/3" diameter graupel, but not nearly as much precipitation as the first two storms.

Here is the storm report map from SPC for the day.

Note the several hail reports in northern New Mexico, along with more extensive reports of severe weather in the TX Panhandle. The funnel cloud in southwestern CO near Cortez does not show up, because this map includes only severe wind, severe hail, and tornadoes. Interestingly, there was one landspout tornado in northeast Colorado's Weld County. However, this was in quite a different weather regime from the cold-core storms in southwest CO and north-central NM. The temperature where the landspout occurred reached around 60, whereas the high in Cortez, where the funnel cloud was repoted, was only 45. All in all, a very intersting weather day.

A list of local storm reportss from the ABQ NWS can be found here. This one does include sub-severe hail reports as well as storm total snow reports, including the five inches of snow at Ski Santa Fe which includes both snow that fell the night before (some of that also likely associated with thunder, since Santa Fe had a thunderstorm and there were quite a few lightning strikes in the mountains) and the snow/graupel that fell during the storms and squalls I experienced at the ski area.

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