 Welcome to the weather forecast for the week beginning Wednesday, April 28th, 2021, I'm chief meteorologist John Innsworth, Ford, Longmont Public Media. I couldn't get the studio again this week, so I'm back in the home cam here. Tuesday, May 3rd, yes, we are almost into May. We have the last quarter of the moon in the early morning sky, rising in the early hours and setting right around noon. We've had some good improvement in drought. The water is soaking in and the measurements are coming in and it's looking better. As I record this, we're beginning what is probably going to be about an inch to inch and a half rainfall period. So yeah, this is going to be just better news in the next week or two. This is last week's with some abnormally dry conditions up in the northeast, moderate drought, still kind of bad in the west and mixed in the south. Going to this week, we actually are back to being drought-free in north, eastern, boulder and up into Lerner County. That's amazing. So we'll see even more improvement next. Looking nationally, there's spots here and there, but not as noticeable as what we had locally. And some of that is from this last seven days of rain. You can see the half inch to one inch mark in the light green and up to two to three inches in the yellow. For Tuesday, PM, we still have this storm moving through. We'll have the rainfall tolls from this next weekend and it will also be posted on probably Wednesday morning at the Longmont leader. So you can check over there at any time for frequent weather updates. So Tuesday and Wednesday's storm is caused by this gigantic trough in the west. There's a long mount of pink out there. We've got to ridge out west and ridge in the east. So they're enjoying some really warm temperatures while we chill back into the 40s. We had on Tuesday PM a chance of some severe weather. This is a marginal risk going right back to the I-25 corridor. Some thunderstorms are popping out there right now. I haven't seen any storm reports, but I will include that in the Longmont leader and try to remember to put that in next weeks if there are any hail or even tornado reports in this area. Tornado chances are pretty small, but hail certainly is a possibility in northeast Colorado. So taking a look at the next 10 days in the GFS ensemble. This is the big rain and storm period, Tuesday into Wednesday. So this video might be up as the rain shower chances are fading out. You can see our normal high temperature is going from 65 to 68. Our normal low is up 240. It's amazing. It's really climbing quickly now. The actual temperatures are cold with that trough passing. For the weekend we go up abnormally warm. If we hit 85 round Longmont, I would not be surprised. These are, this is an average of a bunch of different runs. You can see it doesn't quite get to 80, but I'm seeing some mild data that's really toasty. Then we go next week back to normal with sort of general showery chances. So by the weekend, that heat comes from this big ridge. You can see the ridge center down here over the Baja. Right up the spine of the Rockies basically. As put into motion, take a look at the evolution of this big trough. Is it kind of starts to fill in and gets scooped into the flow. Here comes our ridge out west, gigantic high pressure system over Southern California. Kind of a nice time for that with Disneyland opening after more than a year. For the weekend we have this big ridge. Going into next week, sort of a zonal flow with a trough beginning to push down into the mountains in Colorado for Tuesday. It's not as big and deep at this time, so it may not be such a problem. And we have a ridge coming in later in the week with some serious heat. In the spring 90s, it's not impossible, but we'll see. So let's take a look at the oscillations of temperatures. We've got the cold air associated with the trough at the beginning of the week and then that pushes out quickly. Here comes the heat for the weekend. Look at those abnormally warm temperatures just spreading out into the plains. Eastern U.S. chills, we begin to bake. Sunday is just going to be amazing. Then going off into Monday, let's see a little cold front. It's not big, we're definitely pushing down the eastern side of the Rockies in the plains. By Wednesday, us pushing out, here comes that next blowtorch of heat as the next ridge begins to advance eastward. So we have the rain showers and thunderstorms at the beginning of this period. They pull out, at least by Wednesday and midday, Wednesday afternoon, the sharp rain chances go to almost nothing. And then we just are dry. So off goes the front, off the east coast, we have a little bit of showery stuff in the Pacific Northwest, but that's always there going into Monday and then Tuesday. You can see the better rain is up here in Wyoming at first, then it does spread over northeast Colorado for much of a day, Tuesday and Wednesday is almost the exact same timing as this week's storm. So with temperatures warming up, over just the next five days, I didn't want to scoop in the next 10 this time, you can see there could be a dusting down to boulder, lions maybe, but the snow is really going to be confined to the higher elevations. The snow level may get down to about 6,000 feet Wednesday morning, but should be 7,000 feet or higher for most of the storm. Got a mountain here that are up to a foot. So there's a winter storm warning that will be expiring about the time this video comes out. For rainfall, well, we have good water here, it's one to one-half inch and that's been very consistent across the weather underground, the GFS and the Canadian model, all different patterns, but they all had about inch to inch and a half for many, many days in the forecast. So that's probably what we're going to wake up to on Wednesday. So looking into the next seven days, we go from the sixties before the front, we do return to the seventies after the front, the sun comes back out, here's our mid-eighties for Saturday, maybe eighties on Sunday, we cool a little bit with the showers returning next week. Again, for frequent other weather updates, take a look at the Longmont leader and I often put the link to this week's video there as well, just kind of cross pollinate. This has been Chief Meteorologist John Unsworth, keep looking up.