 Welcome to the weather forecast for the week beginning, Wednesday, January 18th, 2023. I'm Chief Meteorologist John Insworth at Longmont Public Media. We have a new moon, Saturday the 21st, sorry, nothing to see, but there's a lot to see on the sun. If you're interested, there's a ton of sunspot activity going on. Looking at drought, not much changed last week to this week, a little worsening down here in the south and over here at the Kansas border, but a large portion of Colorado is now drought-free. Going nationally, a lot of drought relief in the west, really it's only this little patch out here in the Great Plains, southern Great Plains that has a large-scale problem going on. If you look at our snowpack animation, it's the best I can do that. This is the current, you can see we're heading way up into the positive territory, we're way above average, 134%. And that's even better now that we've gotten some more snow. So up to 7 a.m. Wednesday, it's 7 o'clock is the official observation time and so the storm continued beyond this, so I'll have to take a look at today's data in just a moment. About 5 inches around Longmont, about 4 or 5 inches bolder, a little less up in the mountains, and then another inch or so, inch and a half inch, came in the next day. Looking at Denver, it is near the airport, got about 6.8, taking a look at the official Denver storm total is 9.2 inches, so I definitely picked up a few more inches. Then the next day, up in Fort Collins, they got about an inch more the next morning, but you can see totals just to the west of the city, 5, 6, 7 inches in town, 4.5 or so, and lots of good moisture with that. It's just fantastic stuff. Okay, take a look at the severe weather, that storm is kicking off some severe weather in the south as it moves. Then the bulk of the energy goes up into Canada, a little teeny area there, and then off and away. Looking at Wednesday, we had the wraparound snow, a break between storms, and another one that comes in that you might see a little bit of snow around Longmont and Denver, but this one's going further south, and this is going to help put a little moisture down in those southern counties of Nisto. Looking to talk about with smoke, normal is 44, for high and 17 for low, and we are hugging the low end of that normal range with Friday showers, Sunday, Monday showers, and unsettled weather going into next week, so we're going to stay cold and have repeated chances of snow. On Wednesday, we had the storm wrapping around and heading out, looking at highlights into the future. For the upper air pattern, looking at Saturday morning, Friday night, there's that low passing kind of to our south, and there's the best closest snow to Longmont, still could get some up there. Sunday night in the Monday, we have another trough coming in, and some snow for the northern part of the state. And Tuesday, we have a little ripple coming behind a sharp trough, and some snow again. Some models have that Sunday, Monday storm a little bit more serious, and so I have a higher percent, I could be in trouble on that one, but we'll get to that in a second. So you can see that there's a ridge off the west coast, this is turning off that continuous shot of massive storms in California giving them a break. Northern west coast, Oregon, and Washington state are going to keep getting stuff, but we are just seeing north winds keeping us cold, and trough after trough coming through this northwest flow. Just little ripples like that one right there, could kick off a brief snowstorm. Yep, looking at temperatures. The west stays kind of mild, this is more Pacific air, and this is not coming from northern Canada or the pole as much as it's coming off of the ocean. You can see it's chilly, definitely cooler than normal in the west, this is up to Monday now, and lots of heat out east, cold fronts are pushing into Texas and trying to get into the Ohio valley and like that, and then we warm up and a real cold shot comes down, but largely it's going to graze us, we're going to back to our cold front out of that, but it's not a direct hit of the coldest possible air by next weekend, but it does hit about two thirds of the nation, east of us. There goes the storm from Wednesday, Tuesday, here comes the Friday storm, digging south, it's definitely giving Kansas some snow and moisture, here comes our Sunday Monday storm that could be bigger, I'm kind of suspecting it will be, but it's not in the models, all the models, yeah, the GFS doesn't see it. Alright, taking a look at precipitation over the next five days, we do have some moisture coming in, this is less than an inch of snow or an inch of snow around Boulder, so whatever happens on a weekend Friday, going into the weekend is not much, over the next ten days it's about a quarter of an inch of liquid, and so you've got, you're in the three inch, four inch area, going ten days out, so with the cold temperatures, the snow that's there isn't going to go far, so on there the cold temperature is 28, 30, it's 20, it's 30, right around 30, we just don't leave that cold regime with that northwest, the north flow, maybe overdoing this with Sunday Monday snow, but we could have an impact on the Monday morning commute if the more snowy models verify. Taking a look at precipitation, just nationwide for fun, do some bonus here at the end, over the last seven days the West Coast got hit a lot again, ten, fifteen inches plus, twenty inches in small spots, over the next ten days you can see southern California gets a break, but the northern West Coast and northern California still has it coming in, Rage is still going to send the storms their way and the southeast gets a lot of precipitation as well, over the last ninety days you can see places on the West Coast have received forty to fifty inches of water, that's amazing, that's just colossal, and taking a look in the future, there finally looks like the La Nina that we've had for a few years is shutting off and we're switching over to an El Nino pattern by next Christmas, as it sets in, the week episodes of El Nino typically make the West warm, or at least neutral, but cold on the east side of the Rockies, if it gets to become a strong episode, you get so cold, unusually cold here, for all the different periods of time, November to January, December to February, it's a winter impact thing, working in precipitation, on week episodes we kind of stay neutral, a little wet on the west, bringing slopes, and for moderately strong episodes, the winter months are still kind of neutral here as well, so we'll see what happens from that, Longmont leader or Brunfield leader has frequent weather updates and local news, this has been chief meteorologist John Insworth, keep looking up.