I get to tie two threads together!!!
Harken back to the discussion of how an air conditioner or refrigerator works. When cold wind comes down a mountainside it compresses. When it compresses the heat energy that was in it at the top of the mountain is more concentrated. Hence the air is warmer. Chinooks are quite common in the Denver area as we are on the lee side of the Rockies. Chinook means snow-eater in some Indian language.
The opposite wind, one blowing up the hill, turns very cold because the air is expanding as it goes uphill. The dreaded upslope in the wintertime in Denver often leads to huge snowfalls since the expanding air is less able to hold water so it falls out of the sky as snow. This happens a couple of times a winter when a low pressure mass moves across the Rockies down around the Colorado NM state line. The counterclockwise swirl of the low pushes warm moist wind up the slope out to the east of us and the air turns cold and dumps huge blizzards on us. I remember one on Christmas day 20 years ago that dumped more than an inch an hour on us for almost two days.
Thank God most of our electric lines are underground, so loss of electric power is not a huge problem.
This particular snowfall led directly to the Denver mayor's losing the election the next fall because he couldn't get the streets cleaned of snow.
