 Welcome to the weather forecast for the week beginning Wednesday, May 19th. I'm Chief Meteorologist John Nintz with Fort Longmont Public Media. This week, Tuesday, we have the full moon out there. It's going to be beautiful. We also have a lunar eclipse in the early morning. It'll be very hard to see, but check out the astronomy video for that. Alright, just take a look at the great news that we have going on in drought right now. You can see last week we do have our maps back as well. Last week we had no drought at all right around Longmont and up into Larimer County, much less in the way of drought conditions out on eastern plains, but it's just kept raining, so a huge area of northeast Colorado is now drought free. This is the best we've been in a year or more. You can see the southern plains are also getting much better. The only thing we have is out here on the western slopes, they really haven't changed. A lot of our water for agriculture comes from, and so we need the pattern to start wetting up those areas as well. Nationally, the long-term drought outline now excludes the heart of the nation here, and going forward a week, you can see it's gotten better in this large area through here and all the way down. Keep watching it, see if these storm systems give us some relief. Some bad drought up here, and as we will see, this system really will favor the northern Iraqis and Montana regions with some precipitation. Let's take a look at the snowpack also, giving a lot of climatology here, but here is our mean and average in red, the two different red shades here for the snowpack in Colorado. This is the entire state taken as a whole and here's where we are right now, which is just a little bit below normal, but it's not bad. Recent years have been a touch worse, and a lot better as well, but we are at 80% of normal snowpack at this moment. Going forward, you can see the rainfall here. We've had almost an inch in last night's storms. It's like the whole storm got compressed into just a few hours, but we had enough continuous thunderstorm activity that we got to about 0.7, 0.8 inches, 1.1 inches around Longmont, and very similar amounts built up around Boulder, so more water, better conditions. Looking to before that storm and a week back, you can see some areas on the eastern plains really got saturated. We got 3 inches, 4 inches of precipitation, a few slow moving thunderstorms. Up in the mountains here, the foothills got some good additions. There's our western slopes still staying dry. Sorry, we'll see what we can do. But this is where the good news has been coming from is that we've had low after low roll into the west. This is the water vapor satellite image. So the reds and the browns here are very dry atmosphere throughout the entire column of the atmosphere because this is a satellite looking down from space. The grays and the whites here are very moist column of atmosphere. The greens and some of these pinks here are actually high clouds, ice in the upper parts of the clouds. So you don't get as good of an idea of what's going on there. But if you have thunderstorms going on, it's probably really moist. So we have the low here. You can see the swirl around the low out in the west and this moisture plume coming on out. We're going to see the future of this moisture plume remains healthy for most of the next 10 days in just a moment. So on Wednesday we have our cool front down here into New Mexico and Texas. We have thunderstorms firing in Texas. In spring, that's what happens. We have some small chance of showers around the eastern plains and the mountains just because it's warm. We have moisture in the mountains can help trigger the storms earlier in the afternoon and then they move out of the plains before they die. And the storm prediction center, Norma, Oklahoma sees that the light green here is just a chance that some light, normal thunderstorms will occur non-severe. Down here we have marginal risk of severe weather down in Texas. But the next day, Thursday the front is reformed to our northwest and the moisture flow is open again across the state. And so we are back to having a marginal and even slight risk of severe weather right along I-25 and just east of the interstate. In this green, dark green shaded area, we might see some large hail, strong damaging winds with the few thunderstorms in the yellow bigger hail and maybe even isolated tornado or two. So we're in spring too. We can get some of this as well. We have a lot of hail going from May into especially June. So we're entering hail season as I speak. Looking at the next 10 days you can see the departing chance of showers here Tuesday into Wednesday and then Wednesday we have another pretty good chance of afternoon storms. We still have the moisture around. We have that cold front backing up. You see the normal temperatures rising from 72 to the mid-70s now and the low temperatures are ending up almost 50 at night. So we are rocketing through spring towards summer. Beyond that you can see these little pulses in the afternoon of a chance of a thunderstorm and they kind of continue all the way through. We'll see some drying at the end of the weekend but still not impossible to get a storm or two to form. Everything is really moist and we have the energy available for that to happen. So the story is what this high is doing. This high sitting out here to our southeast. A ridge line extends back over Texas and up into Colorado and Montana for Friday and that's going to bring on a really good warm weather. You can see this big trough digging down like so many of the storms of the last month and a half have but this one's going to take a different path. This high is going to intensify and move backward a little bit west and now force this low to go up and over the ridge. So this time the ridge is fighting back and it's going to win. So we won't see another big soaking storm out of this one. So let's take a look at how this evolves. So here's our current system our little trough moving out while this lingers through Wednesday into Thursday we have a chance of showers. Here comes that cutoff low down the west coast but watch this big ridge strengthening down here in the south. As we move through the weekend and into next week we see it's taking this trip up and over all the way up into Canada. So that's a long trip and we see some other little short wave things moving down next week towards us. Those will kick off and enhance the afternoon storms a little bit but we don't have another big low that's just going to roll over us and dump rain for a day or two. Temperatures are kind of a mishmash. We are going to be staying pretty close to normal as you saw in the graph just before but we have lots of little battles around. So we have cold air to our southeast, we have warm air for the weekend little blobs of cool air trying to come in and then they get pushed right back. So it's just back and forth overall this side of the Rockies we're going to just feel pretty normal as temperatures go. So this is the future water vapors future water vapors satellite image. Here's the big high rotating out here in the east. We have the low rotating the opposite direction in the west and this is just funneling this big plume of moisture all the way up into Canada from the Pacific and from the Gulf of Mexico. Now when the front comes in, dry front for the weekend in the beginning of next week dry air does push in kind of shoves this moisture off to our east just briefly but it quickly recovers and it's coming back to give us more afternoon storms. Looking at the future radar basically every afternoon you see these things pop up over the mountains and move off to the east. Here comes another afternoon and thunderstorms are random in nature where they form and how long they last is going to be different. Every day even if the circumstances look very similar and so the model 12 hours from now will show a very similar pattern but where the thunderstorms actually form will be different each time. You just get right down into the randomness at that point. So looking at rainfall for the next 10 days the planes are going to get a lot. We see the same bulls eye that we saw last time and this did verify in the data last time. So you can see a lot of thunderstorm activity rolling off the palmar divide doing a lot of water out here on the planes in the center right along I-25 not as much often the dry line forms just on the interstate or near it and then moves quickly east so you see the thunderstorms go up to east of us and then vanish into the sunset. So we miss out on a little bit of the extra precipitation but the foothills get some a little bit over on the western slopes maybe. Hold on to that hope. Well just the extreme highest mountains 10,000 feet higher will be anything significant. So I'm just leaving a 30% chance every day because you just never know. Keep an eye on the western horizon around 2-3 o'clock on to 5-6 o'clock see if something dark is moving your way and be ready to protect your car and temperatures staying in the 80s and 70s throughout. We're getting closer to that more mundane type forecast. For frequent weather updates and local news check out Longmont Leader as well. That's where I write a weather column over there I've been Chief Meteorologist John Wentzworth. Keep looking up.