 Welcome to the weather forecast for the week beginning Wednesday, December 14th, 2022. I'm chief meteorologist John Ennsworth for Longmont Public Media. Here's our reused third quarter moon from last week. We are back on track with our one lunar phase coming up each week. The sun is pretty active with sunspots north and south of the solar equator and there's pretty good amount of rural activity out on the earth. Again, drought conditions, things got a little drier out on the plains and a little better on the eastern slopes. It's sort of been the trend that the storm has been dumping everything out west. This latest storm kind of did a bullseye of moisture up here, so we'll see over next week or two how the soil responds to that. Looking nationally, there's a relief on the drought, like the east central south area and in the intermont west. Looking at our snowpack going on through the above and slightly below and back above normal again. We're at 108% on average statewide. So it would be nice if it would go up into the purple area here and really replenish some moisture for the Colorado River basin, but if we're holding our own then we can take what we can get. This last storm, though, Tuesday did not give us any significant moisture here. Traces in Longmont, totally dry and boulder. I was forecasting a trace to three inches for Longmont and I think I said one to four inches in boulder. Totally lifted that, totally not what happened, even mountains, very dry. Looking statewide, there's an observation out here in Washington County of 20 to 23 inches of snow. Some of these others over here are in the 5 to 13 inch area, but that's just out here. You go along I-25, it's traces southeast of Denver, there's half inch to an inch or so up in the mountain and there's a few inches here and there, but it really hopped the state and then just cranked off to our northeast and dumped stuff there. This mountain precipitation has come from earlier storms in the week. This is our precipitation from the lizard that I'm going for more than a day out there. A lot of roads were closed with drifts and very low visibility and just dangerous conditions extremely low wind chill. Also match up I-25 caused by the downslope, but it was very noticeable with just about nothing along there, nothing at all down south of the springs. As the storm was sweeping out, consternation, we have a lot of tornado activity, some tornado outbreaks occurring, very dangerous in southern Alabama and Mississippi. Then going to Thursday, a slight risk into northern Florida, southern Georgia, coastal South Carolina, a little bit chance of storms on southern tip of Florida on Friday. Going to the national maps, we see this giant low, the surface is centered here, everything been wheeling around, here's the sugar weather, heavy heavy rains, hitting the color area, you got ice snow, everything wintery possible, heavy snow is up here in the decoders and part of Montana, still going there, wrapping around behind, you have some snow circling all the way back to Utah and Oregon. This is just a massive system. Going to Thursday, it's still back in Utah, I mean Montana with some snow and the western mountains of Colorado, they tend to really over do this, I don't see the snow coming down south of Denver all the way down to University of Illinois, I just don't know what that is. Lots of mixed, nasty winter stuff up here, freezing rain over wide areas of Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia, Toronto, crazy, there's very weather and heavy precipitation down there for Friday, still getting snow in the northern tier of states as the low pulls up the east coast in front of this exiting Florida. Smoke in Asia wide, nothing much there, there's a little fire activity in California, heading off, looking at the next 10 days, temperatures staying at 42 for expected high and 17 for an expected low, temperatures to this time are in the lower part of that window until we hit this Wednesday, Thursday cold front, things get real cold again. It's a little chance of showers on the 16th, and this is our better chance of strong, it's about to 22nd, that would be our really only good chance to get some snow on the ground before Christmas. So, at the low here in the Dakotas, all this moisture in the Water Vapour satellite image wrapping around it, it pretty much dominates the weather story from coast to coast. At the upper level of 500 millibars, the low is cut off from the jet stream here, so it's not moving very quickly, that's why in the surface maps, just a little bit ago, I went to the Great Lakes and then over to New England over three days. By Tuesday, we have ridging over the West, so it would be pretty mild. For Thursday, this is 22nd, this is our next good chance of precipitation coming right there, but it's kind of a strange, all right, the low up here, it's the cousin of what we decided to go by, and it's trough all the way back with a lot of the energy down here in northern Mexico, too far south for us, and so there's the snow down there with snow all the way down to San Antonio, ice into Houston, freezing rain all the way over to almost New Orleans, and then rain off the coast. So, yeah, this looked really good a week ago, but that's fantasy time for models, this is much more realistic probably. Christmas Day is a little bonus here, there's a little snow in the northeast, a little snow in the western slopes, and it could come down and get us, we'll take a look at that next week. So, we're getting close to the end here with the 500 millibar animation, there's a low rolling around with a little load passing by, those are our little chance of showers coming off Friday, but it's not much. There's a little ripple in the southern branch of the jet stream going through Texas, that's on my 20th, and then we have the big low coming of the trough steaming to our north, there's our chance of storming us on the 22nd, as the low kind of spins up into New England. Temperature is really interesting because with this block up in New England, we have this fetch of cold air coming out of western Canada, Alaska, and the polar region, you can just see it's a river coming down over the nation, the blues are below normal, and the purples are way below normal, 16, 15, 25 degrees below normal, you can see that front hit on the 20th, and we get a little bit of local warming before the real cold air comes, you can see how extremely sharp that is sweeping up on the 22nd, this is our chance of precipitation, real heat just on the other side of Iraqis, you go over Grand Junction, it will be about 20 degrees above normal, or Denver will be 20 degrees below. You can look at the precipitation, we got this little bunch coming through on the 16th, there goes the low up into Great Lakes with another low off of New England, and here comes the 22nd watching that progress, storminess down in Texas, not much on that one, then the snow comes down in on the 22nd, kind of dies on the Wyoming border, it looks a lot better in earlier versions of the storm, on the 24th and 25th there's a little Christmas chance of snow, I'm not going to say we're going to get snow then, but we'll see next week, we'll have a much better idea. All right so over the next five days we'll precipitation in the northeast and southern mountains, snow very spotty, mostly in the higher elevations, next 10 days concentrated in the northern Iraqis, we'll have good snow up there, here's all the snow for the next 10 days, pretty good to fall, and since this is sort of a new cold ray over the nations, it's sort of a map of the white Christmases that we could see, now some of this may happen earlier in the cycle and be melted by the time of Christmas, especially here in the southern states, but yeah this pretty good fraction of the nation is going to be affected by snow right before Christmas, so 40s and then dropping in the 30s with our cold front at the end of the week, and we want to about normal on the weekend and then drop again with the cold air coming in, this could be a monday significantly colder than this, I just don't know if all the models are figuring out how cold that is going to be, so too early to be probably true, but I'm going to call it for partly cloudy skies, high of 30 and low of 20 west winds at 8 in dry conditions, set to the mountains and to the northeast where we could have some snow, for our frequent weather updates and local news check out lawnmowerleader.com and rootingfieldleader.com, this has been chief meteorologist John Asworth, keep looking up!