 Welcome Longmont to the weather forecast for the week beginning Wednesday October 21. I'm Chief Meteorologist John Insworth from Longmont Public Media. The moon this week becomes first quarter on Saturday the 23rd. So right before our snowstorms, spoiler alert, we get to see the first quarter moon. Checking in on drought still, well it's very obvious that drought is continuing and still worsening. This is last week's with some on the lighter levels of drought here, some pretty severe drought in the west. And if we go to this week, we've lost ground right around the I-25 area in the plains. So we need water, that's just no secret. Looking at the entire US, everything west of the Mississippi is looking pretty dry to extremely dry. So we have a pattern change coming, if it holds then this will start to lessen over the next month or so. That's what we've got to hope for. We did get a little bit of rain over this last week, happened earlier in the week with some showers where moisture got lifted up by the mountains. We have nothing on this side of the divide worth speaking about. And what we have going now is a big broad trough over most of the nation. We have this mean dip center someplace out in the middle of the US for the next week and beyond. We have quick moving shortwave troughs kicking up winds, bringing in some clouds, that's what we see on Tuesday. But really overall the winds are coming out of the northwest, going to the southeast. And that's also the direction where the smoke from the fires is blowing. This flow is starting to bring in more Pacific moisture, so this is coming straight off of the northern Pacific. And you can see the high clouds there, the whites and purples and blues, some of those colorations are icy clouds, high cirrus clouds. They don't mean rain for us yet, but it's nice to see some moisture coming back. The real dry air now is south of us across Arizona, Mexico and Texas. So there's our wind direction and the local fires of the Cameron Peak and the fires just west of Boulder, with the smoke going right over Denver, Longmont, Loveland, Fort Collins. So it's local though, the big fires out in the west that is being suppressed down to the south and dragged up with that dry air to the south of us. So yeah, we just need to get these things put out and fast. And this is your hope. This is the big storm right here coming in on Saturday night through Sunday, Monday, and a little bit beyond in some models, keep it sitting around into Tuesday. That may be a little overdone. We go from a normal high of 63 down to 60, 35 down to 32, so now we're normally hitting freezing at night. So we're definitely getting it through fall and beginning to approach winter. And temperatures are still above normal at the beginning of the period. We get a good hit of cold air Thursday night and Friday with our first cold front. Just a little shower activity possible. Again, this is an ensemble run, so the computer model runs with varying data and varying emphasis on the physics going on, just to see how solid the storm is, and that's not a very solid storm with only one run really showing any rain. But then the next cold front comes in Saturday afternoon and it brings in a really good chance of rain and snow. You can see temperatures go below freezing on Saturday and stable or freezing all the way into the beginning of next week. So some temperature is going down around single digits. We're talking really cold, we're talking very moist, we're talking mostly snow falling in this event. The winds are a concern right now. If any fronts like the Thursday front, when it comes in, it's going to kick up some strong winds. That's the red coloration on the map here. This is northeast winds, though, and the hope is, at least down here, it's actually coming out of the northwest again, for the northern rocky fires, that that will sort of blow the fires back over some previously burnt ground, so it won't have new fuel to work with except on the southern edges. So this should be brief, you've got maybe a 12-hour period of stronger winds before things calm down again. Looking out in the next 10 days, this is the Thursday trough traveling by. Most of the energy is staying north of the state so we just get the winds. Then the flow is straight west to east until we move into Saturday and Sunday and look at the size of this trough digging down all the way into the Fort Corners area, bringing lots of cold air, getting it to tap some moisture from the gulf coming in, and then that finally passes out on Wednesday off to the east. Big ridge out west, but another trough seems to be nudging its way in. Taking a look at precipitation through this time. Of course, for Thursday, the front going by to the north brings a lot of snow to Montana and the northern Dakotas, but slips on by as you see the cold air spreading down here. Then our storm moves in for Saturday night. It pretty much starts with snow because the cold air is coming in. We have upslope flow for our day and a half after that. Cold, high pressure center, traveling right down I-25 for a little bit there. So this is looking really good. The models, different models are agreeing. The TV stations are going ahead and calling it where we have a storm coming. So this is the best of the storm. This is Monday morning and see snow over the entire eastern plains. And we can watch these bursts of cold air over this next week. So here comes the Thursday cold air. We don't get rain or snow, but we definitely get very cold air right down, cut off by the altitude of the Rockies. Cold air is dense. It stays close to the earth. Here comes our Sunday, Monday cold. That one's so big that it does cross the Rockies. It goes all the way down and even brings cold air into Arizona. Deep down into Mexico, probably making a Mexico City. This is a really strong cold front traveling down. So for the next 10 days, the amount of liquid precipitation melted snow and a little bit of rain at the beginning that we get. It's going to total about a half inch to maybe three quarters of an inch right around Longmont. We have spots up here getting up to about an inch of liquid. But the snow is the interesting one because it puts us in about the four, five, six inch area for total snow over the next 10 days. And that really is the Saturday through maybe Tuesday morning time period. But we had snow all the way out into the western slopes. We get snow where all the fires are occurring. This would be really great, really cold, moist air, snow falling. Just what we needed. So looking out for the next seven days, we started abnormally warm Wednesday with the 70s. We begin to feel the cold front when the winds on Thursday with a little chance of rain. Friday, we get our first real good taste of cold weather with 30s for a high dry though. Saturday afternoon with a recovery to 60, the next cold front comes bursting down. We have a really good chance. It might even go higher than 50% right now, but I'm being a little conservative. It looks good. 20s for highs, low 20s for high on Monday. And we might even see single digit temperatures before things dry out and just start to warm up on Tuesday. So for frequent local news and frequent weather updates, take a look at the Longmont leader. I've been Chief Meteorologist John Insworth. Keep looking up.