 Welcome to the weather forecast for the week beginning, Wednesday, April 14th, 2021. I'm Chief Meteorologist John Innsworth for Longmont Public Media. Start out with our moon as normal. We have a first quarter moon back in the evening sky looking pretty on Tuesday. The problem will be clouds. Now, maybe Tuesday the 20th, we'll have a little break between systems and you'll be able to go out and enjoy this. As drought goes, we're keeping an eye on what's happening with the water supply in the state and we're probably about to get an awful lot of relief, but going from last week to this week, there's no change in the data whatsoever, so nothing to see here. Let's move on to the national level. You can see a little bit of drought lessening up in the Dakotas, also down here in the Southwest as I go forward a click, but not much. All right, so we did get some rain this last week. Most of it was confined to the Northeast, a little bit of upslope hit earlier in the week. There was snow, flurries, a little bit of rain showers. I think my backyard station got about three-hundredths or four-hundredths of an inch of rain. It wasn't much, so got things a little wet and that was enough. So what we do have coming up though is a system, a system of systems that are going to continue to affect the state for many, many days. This is going to be a long stretch, but starting Wednesday early morning, we have the first system coming in. We've got a low out to our west, got a little front draped down here south of us, and we have upslope flow north of the front and heading in towards the low. And if it weren't for temperatures being marginal, I mean, it's pretty warm out there. We've been in fifties and sixties recently and last week we were in the eighties. So it's going to be hard to see stuff stick. We're going to have it hard to create snow except maybe at night. So we'll look at that in just a moment. But we do start this system with that upslope period. In the upper atmosphere, we have what's called a blocking pattern. We have this big cutoff-ish low over here, a big trough in the west, a ridge in the middle of the nation, another big trough out east, and the wavelength is such that these are not going to move very much. There will be another blob that comes down. We'll see and some energy comes out, kicks a little cold front past us again. We've got another period of upslope. And that's just going to keep repeating on through the weekend now. It looks like maybe even into Sunday. Again, maybe a break early next week and then it all repeats again. The GFS ensemble really says it all. Here is the normal low temperature, which is now above freezing. And these are too low. But the forecasted temperatures, highs and lows are going to be hugging the low end of normal. The normal highs would be off the graph. I couldn't even show it on the scale. And the interesting aspect is rain, rain throughout all, rain and snow chances all the way out to about the 19th. So just the end of the weekend. We'll see. So what is going on in the atmosphere that causes this? Well, again, the pattern isn't shifting around much. You've got this big low just spinning around over here. You can see it kind of fills in a little bit, skips out and then you've got another low coming down out of the canada down the flow straight south. Just keeping a trough over the state. So we stay cool and we have the lift to take any moisture in the atmosphere and create rain and the day and snow at night. Finally, at the beginning of next week, we have this little ridge coming in. So we'll see a little warm up, a little bit of glimpse of that moon. And then another trough starts to come in to take the place of the one that just left. Same pattern. So for temperatures, because we have some of our easterly to westerly flow, it's going to keep this cold air just dammed up against the Rockies. You see the western side of the mountains warm up really quickly after each cold shot and the cold air stays kind of anchored in place out on the plains and up against the mountains. Locally, what's called a Denver cyclone will continually form and reform. It's a little low created by the topography around Denver and that kind of pushes the cool air back in. It just keeps it entrenched. If you don't have precipitation, you also can get pretty bad pollution that way building up. So the precipitation map is not as convincing as the ensemble map earlier. Here's our first system. We've got snow, got rain out on the plains. It does kind of hit. There's a strong belt going by with another cold front. We're out to Saturday into Sunday now. You can still see some stuff happening in the mountains and on the plains adjacent to the foothills. There's our break at the beginning of the week and then something else coming down next week. So the big news, more than snow, really is water, actual liquid precipitation. So the white or blue colors here are two and a half inches of liquid. We are sort of in the two inch area right here. So we could see just a long, gentle, repeating, soaking rain through this period. You can see it's out on the plains. It hits almost everybody who needs water except maybe the western slopes. As for snow, just over the next couple of days we are starting a little cooler. We'll warm up a little midweek. But you can see maybe one, two inches, three inches of snow around Longmont. Just go to Lyons and you're up to five inches. Go to the interstate, you're at a half inch. Very tight gradient as far as snow goes. It's all elevation. So I-25 impacts will probably be pretty minimal, slushy bridges in the mornings and melting throughout the day. Looking out the next 10 days, though, if this is to be believed the mountains do pick up a good foot, even foot and a half, two feet in some spots, through these repeated drenching from the system. So that'd be great. That'd be fantastic for the hydrology because our warm snap actually put us down around 80% of normal snowpack at this time of year. So people are already getting concerned about what the crop and water availability be and the forest fire danger could be in this next year. So keep it coming like that. So over the next seven days we start out, 40s drop to the 30s for the weekend, maybe pick up a little more snow with that band that we saw come down on the model on Friday. By Sunday we get a little bit of a break, a little bit stuff returns on Monday. Really some of the details for each day are going to be best understood about a day, day and a half out. Just looking out this far out in a situation with a cutoff low that can kind of do what it wants is not too valuable. So take all that with later forecast with a grain of salt. For local news and frequent weather updates, check out LongmontLeader at LongmontLeader.com. This has been Chief Meteorologist John Ennsworth. Keep looking up.