 Welcome to the weather forecast for the week beginning Wednesday, March 3rd, 2021. I'm Chief Meteorologist John Ensworth for Longmont Public Media. This week begins with a last quarter moon occurring on Friday. Back to the drought. We keep an eye on this. Just about a year and a half ago, we were at a record zero drought. There's not a single square foot in the state that was lacking water. We dipped pretty deep into drought this summer and fall. We had the fires, but now we're starting to see some relief. So here's last week's map. You see pretty good drought here on the I-25 corridor. A little lessening last week down south. Going to this week, the drought has retreated from Longmont area and also down in the southern part of the state. If we get a warm spell, which we are, we'll see some melt out on the western slopes and we'll probably see those areas start to see relief as well. Naturally, the long-term drought has shrunk a little bit too. So we see the black line there, not here. And now that's jumped in to kind of scoop out some of these areas, showing that everybody's getting some water in the west. This is a good pattern for that. And this next system that we're about to talk about will bring a little bit more. For precipitation, we did have our snow and rain. Most of that occurred south of Longmont down in Denver. Denver got a good hit of snow. Didn't get the mountains in the west as much as every other system has. This one was an upslope storm focused right around the Palmer Divide and Denver area. The surface map for Tuesday night, you can tell that it's really warm and dry out there. High pressure every place. Just nice and clear in the mountains. And when you go to Wednesday night, the upper air pattern shows that big ridge stretching up over the Rockies. Sinking air, warm temperatures, just really beautiful. This is a great preview for spring for us. But here's our little fly in our ointment. There's this little cutoff low down in California rolling this way. Now, cutoff lows do their own thing. They are hard to forecast. And definitely when you're five, ten days out, it's really hard to tell where they're going to go. So five days ago, didn't look like we were going to have any precipitation this week at all. And now this low, and this is a recently updated map, is going to head right over Colorado before it dips back south again. It's going to ride up over this ridge, depressing it slightly, but it's having to follow the overall flow. Here's the precipitation for Thursday night. You can see the upslope here. The low at the surface is right down here in the Oklahoma Panhandle. Got some snow in the mountains, but temperatures are going to be warm enough that most of this will fall as rain. Taking a look at the GFS ensemble for the next ten days. First thing to note is how rapidly our normal temperatures are rising from 50 to 54 degrees in the day. 22 to 26 for lows at night. Spring is definitely coming. Here's our precipitation block right here. And you can see all the different model runs with things tweaked, different runs all the way down. The column here, all of them are pretty strong agreement and we're getting about 12 hours of some rain. Maybe it'll snow at the end of the night. So let's take a look at this happen. So here we are at the beginning of the forecast period with the big ridge over us. Here comes that low. It rolls right up into Colorado down here that throws up moisture for about 12 hours. And it heads down to Louisiana off into the Gulf and then raining on Walt Disney World. The next trough comes in on Sunday and Monday, but right now doesn't look like it's going to get any moisture with it or cool us down much. But change next week is visible as a large trough begins to descend in the west. The overall pattern brings trough after trough in kind of depressing the pattern to the south. So it will get cool and it will get snowy again. We're not completely out of it. But that's what we see in the future. Looking at temperatures, reds are above normal and blues are below normal. Really extreme warmth all over the west as we expect with that big strong ridge. Here comes the cool temperatures with that low and then it's out of here. It's placed by the ridge again. Really warm temperatures again. And then as the pattern kind of starts shifting, you start to see the west get cooler and cooler. And some of that does spread towards this mid to late next week. So there's a nice front sweeping down across the plains right there. So precipitation is not that impressive, but we can take a look at it. There's a little swirl down here off of the California coast. Again, it starts kicking up mountain snows, plains get rain. It's only here for a little bit. Fizzles out and heads down into the Gulf Coast. And nothing really big comes in after this. There's some more western sloped snow. So with that possible change next week, the 10-day GFS shows some good snow back. So there's a few inches along I-25, maybe a foot or so total over the 10 days up in the mountains. Yeah, we're not completely down. We're not going completely in the spring and being done with winter. It's got a little more to go. So over the next seven days, we start now 60s amazing temperatures on Wednesday, just cooling to the 40s, just getting slightly below freezing a night for Thursday. We shoot right back to the 60s for probably the best weekend in memory and then start our little cool down in the 40s next week on Tuesday. Let's take a look at a few long-term trends here at the beginning of a month so we can see what the Weather Service thinks might happen for March. And for March, they have everything east of the Rockies with a good chance of being above normal. Just the west coast has that below normal temperature. So we're probably going to be warmer than we've been and drier. So the southern Rockies down to Texas drier than average and only the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes region see above normal precipitation this time. Let's take a look also at our snow packs, see how we're doing. We've been watching a lot of snow fall in the mountains, at least the western slopes for the past few months. What does it look like compared to the past few years? Well, the red line here is the average and the other red line is mean and they're very similar, so I'm not going to make a distinction between them. The green line here is 2020 and we're pretty much following the right-and-step. It's below normal, not tremendously below normal, but we're about in the 80%, 85% area for a snow pack. So not bad. Recent years have seen some serious snowfall going far above normal. So just the last five years here, I'll kind of cluster it around average. Looking at the watersheds, the greens out here on the plains show that we've had just a little bit above normal snow on the plains and then around I-25 and up in the mountains we're just a little below normal. Not really bad. We've got plenty of time to get more snow in the next few months. Remember March is the snowiest month for Colorado. For more frequent weather updates, check out the Longmont Leader at LongmontLeader.com and local news. I've been Chief Meteorologist John Innsworth. Keep looking up.