 Welcome to the weather forecast for the week beginning Wednesday, December 13th, 2023. This is Chief Meteorologist John Innsworth for Longmont Public Media. We have a first quarter moon visible Tuesday the 19th. We should be close to full on Christmas. The sun has sunspots rotating away from Earth. It should be in about a week off the limb, so that'll be good. Don't know right what's coming around next. Drought wise. We missed last week because the update didn't come in. And so taking a look from two weeks ago to now, it's a little lessening of the drought here, a little worsening of the drought on the plains, but very little change in the colder temperatures. You don't have as much evaporation and plants aren't releasing water to the atmosphere. Nationally, we see a lot of relief in the south and a little worsening in the Pacific Northwest, but very little changing. And our snowpack going through the last month or so, whoops, I didn't think that was there. The 13th is the last update and 82% of median. So it's pretty good. I mean, we're not too far off the marker. We can get a good storm or two. We can get above. And yeah, that'd be nice. So looking at the precipitation, it did fall in the central and northern mountains and the western slopes, primarily a little bit made it out on the plains, but not so much. Looking at severe weather, we do have a system passing mainly to our south. We got some chance of just thunderstorms down there, thunderstorms on Thursday and Friday down into Texas as that system slowly moves by. The National Weather Service forecast of the surface, I've said this a bunch of times. It always overdoes the extent of snow. Maybe not rain, but it's got it way far to north for Wednesday and Thursday. It should be much further south. Friday, it's finally off into Texas. Looking at our temperatures, our normal highs and lows have hit bottom, 42 for high, 17 for low. There's a point where the normal goes back up to 18 and then drops down to 17 again a month or a month and a half or so. This is about as cold as our normals get. Here's our chance of precipitation. It's going to be very light in Longmont, Denver, Fort Collins, really, I don't think much is going to show up at all, but this one's getting a little excited looking. Here's our river moisture starting to come in. Hopefully this starts to actually mean snow and rain since we have a strong El Nino going on. That might go away next year, but I will update later. The upper air features, we have this cutoff low. Cutoff lows go a lot slower because we're not following the jet stream, so it's going to ease on by to our south. You can see snow from south of Denver, southern and central Colorado, southeast corner rain out ahead of that in New Mexico, four corners area. Those places need water. It's good. We should stay out of it by, I don't know, I think, so the formatting on Monday. Monday night, you see a big ridge is back and that's not going to move for much of the week. I've got to go all the way out to December 22nd, so Christmas Eve Eve for that Friday PM. Is that right? 22, 23, 24? No, Christmas Eve Eve Eve. That's not a thing. We have a low approaching from the west. It's actually kind of in two parts. We've got energy associated with it there and a pretty good system with a surface low deepening on the east side of the Rockies, a lot of moisture coming up and over. Snow moving in through Utah, even way down into Arizona. And then Saturday noon the 23rd, we have a low beginning to really wrap that snow around in northern Colorado. And then by Christmas Eve morning there's still some light snow and snow flurries in the area. Now this is a long ways out. This is in that fantasy area where run to run on the models, the storm is a day to later, earlier, not here at all out on the west coast, only dry here. So I wouldn't put money on this yet, but the latest run that I've seen does possibly give us a white Christmas. Now, we had the debate here earlier in the day, is white Christmas just having measurable snow on the ground when you wake up Christmas morning, or do you have to have a falling Christmas morning? I grew up in Phoenix, so if star foam peanuts are on the lawn, I would call that a white Christmas, but no, that's my background. So let's take a look at the upper level moisture, not moisture, upper level pattern that goes to the low here at the middle end of the week, and there comes that ridge. You can see that the low does complicated things in the deep south, kind of interesting. Well, we just have this ridge, it's going to warm us up above normal. It goes to December 19th and 20th, and there you can see a big cut off low drifting slowly, apart from the dread stream, under the 22nd, 21st, here comes another piece to reinforce it, from the 23rd, 24th, they kind of wheel around each other over Colorado, and that's it, moving back to the beginning. Not much to show on the surface temperature map, you can see the cool pool of air with this low, doesn't really do it at night because it's cloudy, but in the daytime it's below normal, but the entire nation is above normal, or very much above normal, there's a hint of a front coming down, and it just tries to kind of get into the eastern coast area, but everything out west stays very warm for a long time. Even as we get close to this Christmas possible storm, it's more of a Pacific cool air coming in, you can see that kind of sneaking in from the west, not a super arctic cold shot like we have had already, here's the moisture for the storm passing us to the south, kind of a nice plume going up into the Great Plains, then we dry out for much of the week, not much to see there, dew points are pretty good at the surface, that's why we have all the clouds moisture out there, but then by the weekend dry air pushes in and we have no more chance of storming it, so there's as close as the snow and the rain gets to northern Colorado and away it goes down into the south, you do see sort of a quasi-tropical system, or maybe it is a tropical system coming up into the Gulf and hitting land, according to the model, going up to the 19th and 20th, let's watch this system come in from the west, you're high and dry through Thursday to the 21st, Friday the 22nd, and then finally we have snow precipitation coming in, the load tightens up, whips a lot of snow around on the north side and then starts to fall apart and we're there, so for the next three days you might see a coating or dusting of snow around the I-25 corridor front range area, but the good stuff is way down here, wouldn't want to go north of your town on Trinidad or anything like that at present, precipitation wise, really no moisture worth talking about over the next five days, so you have that possibility of system coming in, giving us some snow and there is some precipitation there, but yeah, we'll see what happens there over the next ten days, snow like that, so we have 30s and 40s warming quickly to the 50s for the week, staying dry, and that's it, so thanks for watching, check out Longmont Leader for frequent weather updates and lots of local news, this has been Chief Meteorologist John Insworth urging you to keep looking up.