 Welcome to the weather forecast for the week beginning Wednesday, July 14th, 2021. I'm Chief Meteorologist John Insworth for Longmont Public Media. This month, the moon is back into the evening sky. So if you're out taking a walk, you can see that first quarter moon on Saturday, the 17th, rising in the afternoon and setting just after midnight. All right, we've been keeping an eye on drought and the drought conditions for the last year and a half or so. And this time nothing changes from last week to this week. The date is the same. Naturally, though, we do have going from last week into this week a little worsening of the drought in the northern states, a little lessening of the drought down in New Mexico, which is good. But we definitely need rain and moisture out in the west coast to stop all the horrendous fires. Locally, we got a little bit of rain. You can see we've been on the downhill side of the ridge that we're going to be talking about in a moment, making all the storms track from the northwest to the southeast. That's Northwest flow. All these gray areas here are just missing data and there's nothing I can do about that. The weather service doesn't have that data this week for some reason. But right here, we're along the northern front range I-25 down at Denver. You can see it was spotty. A few places got up to an inch or so. But most places just a little wetting and nothing more. So the big story is the ridge out west and what it's doing. And that's what is baking all the western states, bringing record temperatures out there. I think Las Vegas was close to 120 over the last week. So pretty amazing. And that's this ridge. When it's sitting close to us, our temperatures soar, winds die, thunderstorms get suppressed. And then when it inches down here like it is currently in Southern California, we have this northern flow bringing in actual cool fronts in the middle of the summer. This also allows the smoke to follow this black line up and over the ridge coming in towards us. We're going to take a look at an animation here of the fire sources. You can see Oregon, Nevada, California, even Idaho fires. We'll put it into motion here and you can see it's just cycling around that high. Some of it's spilling out over the northern plains and getting carried off by the overall westerlies with some of it's getting pulled back and around. So you do see here, it's only through Thursday morning. And we do get a little bit of clear air coming in aloft just in the end of this little two-three-day cycle. Now this is the entire atmosphere worth of smoke. We can take a look at the surface and these are the surface winds added in here too. You can see where the fires are going. Every afternoon when the temperatures go up, relative humidity goes down, the fires activity increases. You can see that low level smoke is not bad at all. And even in the end of this cycle here, you can see this cool dry air pushing down, removing some of the low level smoke. So we will get relief now, men, as these little pushes of cool, drier air come in. We're also watching severe weather and this will probably be the last week. I need to talk about severe weather going back into the last week of May and then into June. You can see the bullseye of higher chances of severe weather and expected severe weather. Inch up towards northeastern Colorado in the front range. Going to the second and third week of July, that's where we are this week, it all really shuts down on the Great Plains and in the Rockies. So the atmosphere is not as dynamically active. We're going to the summer. The jet stream is far to the north. Not a lot of cool layer loft expected. So we probably won't see a lot of widespread severe weather. So here's our high in Southern California. It's bringing around moisture. This is a water vapor satellite. The reds and browns are very dry atmosphere column and the whites and grays here are a lot of moisture up through the atmosphere. The pinks are cloud tops. I see cloud tops. So lots of moisture there. So around the ridge, we are getting this feed of largely Pacific moisture. There is some Gulf moisture is being pulled around into the circulation as well. And that will give us chances of storms for the first few days of the forecast period. Looking at Wednesday, the computer models can be made to look at the same column of moisture precipitable water. And there it is coming up out of the southwest and up into the mountains and pushing on into the northern plains. So with that, do we have severe weather actually coming this week? No, we have a general chance of thunderstorms throughout all of Colorado. Wednesday, Thursday, even into Friday, the severe stuff stays up north, close to where the jet stream and things are still happening. All right, so for Wednesday PM, we have this little cold push of air coming down. It's dry, cool air. We have a little front draped over northern, northeastern Colorado, little showery storminess as that interacts with that incoming moisture going into Thursday. It's still favoring southern Colorado. Could still get a few things right along the front range as the front, the moisture, and the mountains all interact. So the next big feature is Sunday. The high does move back out of the southwest towards the Utah Colorado border. We're going to see everything kind of calm down and temperatures go up for the weekend. So over the next 10 days, our normal high is just 90 degrees for the next 10 days. Normal low inches up from 59 to 60, and the GFS idea of what the temperature is going to do every day is just bounce around within normal ranges. It may feel warm out there, but that's just because we've had a lot of cool weather, and so we've kind of gotten used to it being cool. Every afternoon, more so in the beginning of the forecast period, and less and less as the time goes on, we get these chances of the afternoon thunderstorms kicking off in the mountains, going across the plains and fading out to our east. So we'll put this into motion, keeping an eye on what this ridge and high pressure circulation will be doing down here. We've got this kind of persistent trough in the center part of the nation, big ridge, here we are on the weekend, and it kind of intensifies just to our west and kind of grows and expands, but even though it's there, we have northerly flow over Colorado. That keeps us from seeing the most extreme temperatures. And we'll look at those temperatures. We have a lot of unusually cool air. Unusually cool could be 82 instead of 90, but that would be shaded blue here for high temperatures. Every afternoon, you can see the little bubbles of cool air created by those thunderstorms. You can kind of see the days tick by, and we're just here on the edge of the super hot out west and abnormally cool on the plains, and it just kind of sloshes back and forth with us overall, staying really close to normal. Looking at the moisture, we can see that flow coming up out of the southwest over the next few days, get into the weekend. It dries down out a little bit, but then the gulf starts to connect with this. If it wasn't for the high pressure system, we'd have enough moisture for a lot more rain, but the moisture's here just moving around. There is a hint that next week, the West Coast might see some more moisture. We've got that high atmospheric moisture moving out there. So across fingers, maybe those states can get some rain. We don't want thunderstorms with lightning. That'd be bad. More fires, but something to keep an eye on. So I'll just show a little bit of the precipitation pattern here. In the winter, you can watch a nice winter storm, crank up snow over us, and that's a nice multi-day event that's happening here. All you see is every afternoon, thunderstorms popping up and then moving out on the plane. So every day a little bit more, a little bit less, small variations on a summer theme. So over the next five days, we have spotty rainfall. Overall, less than a quarter inch, less than a tenth of an inch. The next model run would probably just have the same similar pattern, but just in different places. It's random trigger spots for thunderstorms. Add another five days. If you look out 10 days, not much changes. The southern counties in Mexico get more moisture than we do up north, but that's about the only overall trend that you can pull from this. So over the next seven days, we get a nice cool down at the beginning in the 80s. We heat up as that high comes back for the weekend into the low 90s, still not far from normal. Next week we go right back to normal with 50s and 60 at night. Again, very normal. The better chance of thunderstorms is early on in the week, fading out, but not entirely going away into the beginning of next week. And before we go, I'd like to take a look at the tropics because we had Elsa last week to track and no place on the entire planet is there any tropical system going on. So nothing to report there. For frequent weather updates and local news, check out the Longmont Leader or LongmontLeader.com. I've been Chief Meteorologist John Ensworth. Keep looking up.