 Welcome to the Longmont public media forecast discussion covering the day Saturday through Tuesday, February 15th through 18th I'm Chief Meteorologist John Innsworth and I've been playing with the new sound system here and getting a little bit of a whine So if you hear that I apologize, and we'll try to fix that in the future Recording, but this is a story of Longmont's weather with a little bit more science. You might be used to starting with the moon Saturday night, which is sort of in the middle of our window here We're at last quarter only 50% of the moon visible rises after midnight and sets in the morning We just had a nice little snow storm. We're not tired of snow already Wednesday So let's look at some of the snow totals up and down the front range Fort Collins got anywhere from our three quarters of an inch up to three inches across town Where birthed did much better than normal with about two to four inches as this part completely missed out with Trace to an inch of snow and spots Hopping down south to Denver north side Denver got one two three inches of snow There was a snow squall the one over Fort Lupton South Agrily and then down Into Adam Southern Adams County out of Weld and I'm sorry northern Adams County There are six inches of snow around Fort Lupton, so they are quite a bonus there the western foothills Usually do pretty well and they didn't this time just one to two inches out of DIA two to three Inches or so down Palmer divide again only a third of an inch to an inch so the real winners were Us in Boulder County Longmont getting two to three almost four inches of snow And Boulder getting all about two to three inches three and a half inches of snow So even locally Longmont one we got they we got the most out of out of this system So the dominant weather pattern now is a ridge coming in this weekend And that's why we're gonna have clear skies and Bug normal temperatures for much of the weekend. You can see the big blue Ridge line here with north flow coming down This is going to give us a little down slope low compressional heating of the atmosphere Trough kind of parked over the Great Lakes and down into the Southwest Looking at the moisture or water vapor satellite image you can see the Clouds don't show the pattern as clearly as they do in the nice big strong Trough is in place But you can see there's some tropical moisture coming up into the Southwest here and some moisture coming into the Western US and that's going to matter at the end of the weekend Look at Saturday noon. We're under high pressure behind a weak little front. That's coming through. It's very dry But there will be some northern mountain snows Here in Colorado because that's all it does is give us snow in the northern mountains Jumping forward a day to Sunday noon. You can see the moisture that we saw flowing in the Northwest on the Water vapor satellite image is now really becoming a pretty good snowstorm up here with snow increasing in the northern and western Mountains of Colorado again We're still on the dry side with down slope winds and original loft giving us very warm temperatures How warm well some spots will be close to normal some places will be up to 10 degrees above Normal for Sunday. Most of the state is trending above normal for Sunday Then that trough on the west coast moves in is just a pink dot for a long amount right here I try to remember to put a pink dot on all the maps to show where home is and this trough comes in This is for Monday morning. You see the entire Jetstream flows kind of flattening out across the US got this ridge off the west coast What's really interesting is the snow begins here and may continue all the way to Wednesday and look at the difference In the upper level pattern. There isn't much this trough is still just bought in the same spot I'm gonna go back. There's that trough going forward. There's a trough What does change is the position of this ridge off the west coast it moves in and intensifies a lot But isn't pattern over the US isn't moving very much So we get in a few days of very much the same weather with a very Northerly fetch of air. This is now coming from North Canada north of Alaska Down all the way across North America to us so the temperatures will be dropping into Wednesday How much snow may we get through Wednesday noon with this next Monday through Wednesday storm? The GFS is not impressed. They're giving us a Just a little bit of snow not much more than that Coating or maybe an inch on the west side of town or over by Boulder The mountains do well as always with a foot a foot and a half of snow or so Look at the ensemble map again This is multiple runs of the GFS where things tweaked and changed a little bit going through the weekend We're largely above freezing here and even Saturday into Sunday We almost don't go below freezing on night, which will help with the melt Let's get you get the old stuff all the way before we get some new stuff through Monday and You can see the precipitation starting early Monday morning at about midnight or so But the temperatures don't really start dropping until midday Monday So some of this early precipitation may be rain and then going Monday night Tuesday into Wednesday when the precipitation Peers out that is all snow and we stay way below freezing day and night until Touch freezing on Thursday and we find the climb back up into the 50s maybe on Friday a Little chance of showery stuff next weekend because the daytime temperatures are staying very warm So we might only have nighttime snow flurries Looking out the next nine days the GFS still doesn't give us very much other models are giving us more like two to three inches For this early part of the weekend And so this may be under done at this point It may be overestimating how strong down sloping drying and warming will contribute to the snow buildup But we'll keep an eye on that in the Day-to-day forecast so looking at the big picture here is Monday and Tuesday are really your snowiest times temperatures below freezing from Monday afternoon to Thursday morning and A very nice weekend this weekend and it looks like we're going into a very nice weekend next weekend So when you're hunkered down at work, it'll be cold and nasty outside. Of course. That doesn't make the commute nice. Sorry for forecast discussions maps and Much more frequent updates than these videos offer go longmontobserver.org Check out my weather column there take a look at all the other long mop focused news stories as well It's a great great location to keep in touch with your community So this has been chief meteorologist John Ensworth with the forecast discussion Sorry to do Tuesday February 15th here 18th. See you next time. Keep looking up