 Hi, Longamount. This is your weather forecast for the week beginning Wednesday, September 2nd. I'm Chief Meteorologist John Insworth for Longamount Public Media. And this week we have the same full moon that we had last week because that's just the way it worked out this time. So we're starting this forecast period with our full moon, just putting a beautiful light out through clear, smokeless skies. We're going to get into that as we go here. We've been watching the drought over the last couple of months. I've kind of started here in June, and we're going to jump right to the recent time. So back then we had drought-free conditions in the northern tier of counties. We had pretty severe drought down in the south. And jumping into August, we see it expanding into the west, even some of the exceptional drought out here on the eastern plains. Looking in the entire U.S., we are becoming joined by Nevada, Utah, and Arizona with some pretty severe drought conditions as well. But the seasons are changing, and the moisture will start coming back into the nation at some point here. Over the last seven days, the precipitation that we have had has mainly occurred right down the foothills. The I-25 corridor has gotten nothing but a little sprinkle now and then. Some pretty good rains in the southern I-25 and out on the southeast plains. But of course we have the fires going. These are the Pine Gulls, Grizzly Creek, Williams Fork, and Cameron Peak Fire. With higher humidities, cooler temperatures in just the last few days, the level of burning has gone down significantly. In fact, you can't see smoke over the mountains right now. And because of the new Northwest air flow that we haven't had in a long time, we are smoke-free again. Speaking of smoke, back on Tuesday we still had pretty good flow right over the state. But you can see this cold front was just starting to come out of Montana. By Wednesday it's beginning to push it down into Arizona and out onto the plains. By Wednesday night, we'll be smoke-free in the northern half of the state. Even with our local fires, there aren't any smoke sources put in the model. This is all very good news for the inner mountain west. So for the next 10-day period, we have normal high temperatures going from 84 to 82, normal low temperatures from 54 to 52. And for most of this period, the temperatures are really close to normal, right in that envelope there for us. What's really noticeable is how unbelievably dry it will be through the weekend. Almost zero chance of any rainfall. We're going to get to this, but next week the bottom drops out and we have almost freezing temperatures coming to I-25 folks in the mountain communities. We'll go below freezing for the first time this season. So what we had on Monday was a low coming down out of the Rockies. We had moisture coming in on the north side. We had a brief period of showers in the evening, about two, three, four hundredths of an inch of rain around town. We had moisture coming in from the tropics out ahead of that. By Tuesday, the low had gone down into the Oklahoma Panhandle, and we began to get some really dry air flowing into the state from the northwest. That trough passed us, began to deepen down there. There's a significant amount of rain down in Texas because of that. Here's our summer ridge. This is the thing that baked us for a month or two, and it's now retreated out to the west coast. That's keeping the smoke from the fires out there just pooled up in a much smaller area. The fires are really serious in California. There's a tremendous amount of smoke out there, and we just hope that it gets some relief. For Wednesday and Thursday, there was not even a chance of convection. You probably won't see much of White Puffy Chemo's clouds either. Rainfall for the next five days, again, a little bit in the mountains maybe, out in the southeast plains, northern part of Colorado, bone dry. Over the next five days, we do see a little bit of snow chances for the highest elevations. There's near Vale, there's north of Durango. It'd be just a dusting, but with those little showers occurring up there, the temperatures will be low enough now for snow. The next big change after we have 90s and some heat for the weekend, as that high comes back briefly, will be another trough digging down out of Canada. It's going to switch our winds around to almost due north. So we have the heat in place with the ridge nudging over us, and we get some rain showers with that next approaching system. So there's a little sprinkle or two coming into the northeast plains. So Tuesday is when the real action happens. Look at the strength of that trough poking all the way down to New Mexico. The ridge gets pushed way out west again, and we have winds again coming almost out of due north. And so with that comes cold air. This is an animation showing temperatures that are above and below normal for about the next 16 days or so. You can see blob after blob of cold air coming down into the great plains. You can see the west just continues to bake out here, just very hot temperatures, extreme temperatures on the west coast while we get hit again and again by cold air. So we have a cold front almost every three or four days for the next half a month. That one spreads all the way down to the Gulf Coast. So we are no longer locked in a summer heat wave pattern. We'll still see 90s, but we're also going to see temperatures far below normal. We're going to just start swinging, and hopefully some moisture will get in with some of these systems and we'll see some rain return. So for the next week, we have temperatures rising back to the 90s. We even get mid-90s, upper 90s for Saturday. Then the next trough starts to come down on Sunday, knocking temperatures down to the 70s on Monday, 60s on Tuesdays. The latest miles actually had Tuesday down in the low 50s with nighttime temperatures in the mid-30s. Estes Park will drop down to mid to lower 20s. So they're going to get their first freeze. Now, keeping an eye on our records for 90 degree plus days, we are getting relief now, but Sunday took us to 68 days at 90 degrees or higher. We're still in second place. Wednesday, we might break 90. Friday and Saturday will, and that'll take us to 71, and the record is 73 days set in 2012. September, almost all month long, we have had record high temperatures in the 90s historically. So I think it's a pretty good chance we're breaking this record this year. We do have a little tropical system off East Coast. It's moving out to sea, not going to be any consequence to anybody but the fish. And since it's beginning of a new month, we can take a look at what some different forecasting sources say September will look like. From NOAA, the official forecast there is a greater than average temperatures above normal chances. I know that's a strange way to think of it. You're looking at the chance that it'll be above normal. I'm not actually a value above normal. But with the surges of cold air coming down, some of these surges look really significantly cold. I'm wondering if they're going to update this maybe back off a little on the warm air. For precipitation, they have this almost in the center of the bullseye of below normal precipitation values. And that's pretty reasonable right now. We don't see a lot of moisture in the near term. Of a farmer's almanac, if you buy the farmer's almanac, does have their winter forecast out and they have this in the snow pelting then melting and it's snow time on the eastern plains. Sure, we'll keep an eye on that, see what that looks like. Weatherball has a winter forecast out also and I think they probably have a better handling on it. They have us for temperatures close to normal, maybe a touch above normal for the entire winter. And then for precipitation, snowfall at least, they have us above normal for snowfall at least in the northern part of the state. So we'll probably see the drought relief occur similar to what we saw last year. So from our local news and frequent weather updates, please check out the Longmont Leader, longmontleader.com. I've been Chief Meteorologist John Innsworth for Longmont Public Media, keep looking up.