Colorado’s mountains have likely already hit peak snowpack, and record-high heat forecast for the coming days will kick off widespread melting even at high elevations — weeks ahead of normal.

A heat dome that’s expected to hover over the state and the Mountain West through Saturday is forecast to bring temperatures into the 80s at lower elevations and into the 50s and 60s at higher elevations. The heat this week follows the warmest winter recorded in Colorado since records began in 1895.

“It’s possible that many areas of the state at high elevations have already seen peak snowpack,” Peter Goble, the assistant state climatologist, told the Colorado Water Conservation Board’s Water Conditions Monitoring Committee on Tuesday.

The temperatures expected from the heat dome will be high enough to spur melting, said Brian Domonkos, a hydrologist with the Colorado office of the federal Natural Resources Conservation Service. Statewide, snowpack depth typically peaks around April 8.

The National Weather Service forecast for a point near Loveland Pass — at an elevation of 11,020 feet — shows overnight lows are not expected to drop below freezing until Sunday night. Daytime highs could hit 60 degrees.

Wolf Creek Pass, located at nearly 11,000 feet in southern Colorado, is also not forecast to reach freezing temperatures overnight this week.

The record heat is expected to shrink an already anemic snowpack. Statewide snowpack sat at 59% of the median for this time of year on Wednesday, the lowest recorded since records began in 1986. Some river basins in southern Colorado — including the Rio Grande, the San Juan, the Animas and the Arkansas — had less than half of normal snowpack on Wednesday.

“We have very little winter left,” Domonkos said. “There’s essentially no chance for us to get back to normal snowpack.”

Colorado’s mountains and streams will begin to see increased water flows from the melting this week, according to the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center.

Flows in the Yampa River in Steamboat Springs will likely more than double in the next seven days, from 124 cubic feet per second on Wednesday to more than 400 cfs late next week. The Animas River in Durango could hop from winter flows hovering around 300 cfs to more than 1,000 cfs by the end of next week.

Those flows are still far lower than peak runoff flows that will come later this spring and summer. But expected extended warm temperatures, paired with the “extremely grim” snowpack, mean those peak flows will also be lower than normal, said Cody Moser, a hydrologist with the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center, at a briefing Wednesday.

Across the Colorado River Basin — which includes a large swath of western Colorado — those flows are expected to be at or below 70% of the average recorded between 1991 and 2020, he said.

Across the Colorado River Basin, “I think it’s highly likely that we’ve already seen peak snowpack,” Moser said.