 Hi there, this is the weather forecast for the week beginning Wednesday, July 15th. I am Chief Meteorologist John Insworth for Longmont Public Media. I'm still at large in a library in an undisclosed location. Monday, July 20th is a new moon with the moon rising with the sun setting about the same as sunset in the sky for 14 hours because the days are long at this time of the year. Let's take a look at the drought index. Going back two weeks, you can see that around Boulder County and North still drought-free, much of the rest of the state is slowly sneaking its way into pretty severe drought conditions. If we go to this week's map, a little drought in South Denver and a little more up in the western slopes and a little more out on the eastern plains is kind of creeping northward. Looking at the 10-day GFS ensemble, our normal high temperatures and low temperatures have flattened out. We're sort of at the peak now. The actual temperature expected over the next 10 days is this bouncing morning to evening temperature line. You can see the end of the week and through the weekend, pretty good deal above normal. We sink back below normal Tuesday, which is very similar to Tuesday last week. There's a rhythm here of early week showers and cool temperatures, hot weekend, and repeat. But what we do see new is almost a daily chance of thunderstorms and showers. For Wednesday noon, we have a high pressure system at the surface, dry in the west, a little frontal system out on the plains and in the Ohio Valley. What's changed this week over the last week's baking dry record high temperatures is that the high has shifted just far enough south and east to allow some tropical moisture to come around the western side. You can even see in the water vapor satellite image here, this flow of moisture up across our state, both from the Pacific and from the Gulf of Mexico. Looking Wednesday noon at the 500-mil-bar map, you can see the pattern hasn't changed much. We still have atmospheric flow across northern Mexico and up across Arizona and to us because of the heat and the available moisture, thunderstorms are possible for most of the state and some severe weather again is possible from mainly Denver south. It's a slight risk of severe weather from Colorado Springs south on Wednesday and the risk for this is in hail and high winds. Those maps are almost the same. For Thursday, we have a marginal risk just east of Ohio 25-quarter out on the eastern plains. Two days out they're usually pretty conservative about this and so this may expand further westward once we get a better idea of the timing of upper-level short waves, the available moisture in the area. By Friday, the high pressure system is really hugging the Gulf Coast. We have elongated high here with the circulation in the western side almost identical to what we've had all week with moisture able to make it in from both the Gulf and the Pacific. The ridge extending out here though does mean we get higher temperatures Friday and into the weekend. Looking at that moisture on the GFS, the green shading is an abnormally large amount of available moisture in the atmosphere. It's called precipitable water and there it is. We've got that river of tropical moisture coming up into the west. I don't know if you would technically call this the summer monsoon flow but I guess it is. Over the next five days this incoming moisture is going to interact with the heat and the terrain more in the southern part of the state. That's where the heavier rainfall amounts are. As always when you're dealing with convection don't get excited about any one pattern that's created by the model because the thunderstorms are kind of random but some places could get up to an inch and a half of rain under situations where the thunderstorms travel over the same location repeatedly called training. Up around here we're a quarter inch to a half inch of rain. By Saturday we still have the high in the Mississippi valley an extension of the ridge horizontally or westward across the west so we have more heat that's probably I think the highest state of the week and the moisture is having to make a little longer trip to get here so rain chances will be lower. By Monday very similar the precipitation needs that moisture flow and it's really having to go quite a distance to get to Colorado so we should see things a little quieter next week. Looking again at the same GFS ensemble for the next 10 days the heat is the end of the week sort of normal next week with daily chances of rain so for this next seven days we've got down to the 80s some places we only get up to the upper 70s on Wednesday then we rapidly climb to 100 on Saturday and then cool back down to normal for the beginning of next week with some chance of rain or thunderstorms throughout the week. For more frequent weather updates check out the Longmont leader at longmontleader.com and also get daily news updates from around Longmont. This has been your weather forecast for the week beginning July 15th chief mural of this channel is with the Longmont public media keep looking up.