 Welcome to Longmont Public Media's forecast discussion for Wednesday through Friday, February 12th through 14th. I am Chief Meteorologist John Ensworth, and this is the story of Longmont's weather with a little more science than you normally would expect. In the middle of our discussion period Thursday night is the moon. It is not going to be visible if you go out at night right after sunset. We are past full moon now and we're losing a little more moon each evening. It rises about 10.30 and we'll be setting after sunrise. The atmosphere is still dominated by a large ridge off the west coast of the U.S. This is giving us that northwest flow that we've talked about for a week now. This time though, there's a low down in the southwest. It's bringing rain and thunderstorms to Arizona and Southern California and brought showers across the state just in the last couple days. In the water vapor satellite image, this is the amount of moisture in the atmosphere seen by the satellite with the reds and the oranges off from the ocean here being very dry air and the whites and the purples being moist air or even icy cloud tops over the system. You can see the same pattern, this big U down in the southwest and the trough up into the midwest above that. What we get on Wednesday is another front. As another ripple comes down the jet stream flow, we'll get a quick shot of snow coming down the side of the Rockies. The front is just entering the state mid-morning and precipitation will start to pick up quickly after that. Another notable feature of this storm is the clicker not working. There we go. Strong winds and the low elevations just off the front range. We have a lot of wind coming with that front. Now it's cold air, it's dense, it's going to stay close to the ground so the winds won't extend up to even as this park or any of the ski resorts. So they're going to have sort of a calm day as we get things blown around and even some blowing ground snow with that. But the amount of snow that's going to fall, the new snow, not the amounts blowing around, are very minimal, right? Around Longmont we're in a coating to maybe a half inch or so again. The snow moves in late morning, 10 o'clock or so, may continue until about 8 o'clock or so in the evening. So this will be another system to give you a slippery commute home on Wednesday. The big picture for the next 10 days, you can see the Wednesday storm here. This is called a computer ensemble map. What they do is they run the same computer model, the GFS in this case, over and over and over again making little changes in the parameters and the data coming into it each run. If you can tweak the weather and have the same answer every time, you can have pretty good confidence that people are going to see some snow or precipitation like we do on Wednesday here. If you look out on Saturday, you can see the same as not the case. We have a little bit of a showery stuff on a couple runs here, but many of the models runs don't have anything at all. So we don't have a lot of confidence that this Saturday storm is going to matter very much. What we can also see is this blue line up here is freezing and so right up to the Friday morning we stay at or below freezing for the week. It will be chilly so the snow that does fall and the stuff that's already sitting around is not going to go anywhere right away. So get your sidewalks cleaned off now and try to make it the best of the sun that you're going to get. Going into the weekend, a ridge does move in and temperatures soar. For this time of year, upper 40s to 50 is soaring. So we're going to be about 5 to 10 degrees warmer than normal out on the eastern plains. This map shows departure from normal. So it doesn't get fooled by mountains being cold and the plains being warm. It just compares the temperature that is coming to what you would expect. You can see patterns better that way and the entire state is warmer than normal. That warmth on Sunday is this little lump in the jet stream pattern, a little ridge over the state. There is another cutoff load just like we have passing the state at the beginning of the week, but it's so far south it's going to go through Mexico instead of the US. So going back into the weekend, we got the warmest temperatures are up here on Sunday. And then going into next week, we have another front and another cool down about two or three days where we are back below normal and a couple of days of stormy behavior again. We have the model showing a couple of days of rain or snow. It's a little of everything. Now all the models agrees. You can see there's big gaps in the plot here, but this could be our last shot for a while as we go back to a ridge in the west in the long range. So this next system for the beginning of the week is with another big trough coming into the western US and it is a much deeper trough. It's connected to the jet stream. It's not cut off and isolated from us like the last two have been. So looking out 10 days on the GFS to see what kind of snow we might get, it's not a lot. Remember the system coming in on Wednesday is only going to give us a little coating. So all this snow is going to be coming from what moves in Monday, Tuesday, next week. And it's mainly in the mountains. You may have five, six inches and spots up to a foot in the southern mountains. Up in the northeast plains, it's just three, four inches at best. We'll keep an eye on this as the week goes on. So looking again out into the week, first few days from Wednesday forward. We're at or below freezing. We warm up into the upper 40s and 50s for the weekend. And then we have our chance of showers out Monday and Tuesday next week. As a bonus, let's take a look at how we're doing water-wise in the state. This is the drought index. And the white areas in the map, all the northern central counties show that we are drought-free. Even though we went through January with really nothing to speak of, we had enough moisture left over from last year, the big snows that we got, that we're doing great as far as drought goes. The western slopes and the southern counties of the state are in a moderate drought. And so we are always hoping for some more snow down there. But as you saw, just a couple of charts back, that snow is coming. So next week's snow and the snow we get this week is much more focused on northern New Mexico and southern southwestern Colorado. NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, puts out a monthly forecast chart. And so we can also get an idea of just overall trends for the rest of the month. And for Colorado, we're pretty close to normal as far as temperatures go. We have some abnormally warm weather out in Nevada and California and in the southeast U.S. We have cooler than normal in the northern Rockies, and we're sort of on the edge of that. But since we've already been cooler than normal, that probably means the rest of the month will be very close to normal. As precipitation goes, it is just a little moister than normal. We are already ahead now in Denver for the amount of snow that we expect at this point in the season, which again, surprising with January being so dry. And that trend looks like it's going to continue. For this more details, you can always look at the forecast discussion at longmontobserver at longmontobserver.org. I am Chief Meteorologist John Ensworth. For Longmont Public Media, keep looking up.