 Welcome to the weather forecast for the week beginning Wednesday, February 22nd, 2023. This is Chief New Yorker's John Innsworth for Longmont Public Media. Sorry if you hear a little extra sound in the background. It's cold. The heating system is not working well here. I've got a space seat to run in. Monday, the 27th, and yes, we were almost at the end of a month. First quarter moon in the evening sky looking very pretty. The sun is pretty active still. Lots of sunspots going around. Lots of reports of beautiful aurora at the poles. Looking at drought conditions, of course a lot of it's locked up in snow, not going into the soil quite yet. So nothing changed from one week to the next. But nationally, things did get better on the Great Plains and a little bit better in the West. So this is looking like a much nicer map than back in August. Looking at the snowpack. Let's see if I can stop on the right. It's 18th and 25th of January. First, 8th, 15th of February. Second, I think that's all I can do. And we are at 121% snowpack. We definitely got a lot more in the last couple of days. So that will reflect next week. Looking at the snow in Boulder County. First day of the storm gave us two and a half to almost three inches. Just a little bit further west of town. We did get three and more. Boulder got about four-ish, three-ish four-ish, and about an inch and a half down by Broomfield. And if you look at this morning's Thursdays, snow totals, we picked up another couple inches. I think that's personally two days in one report. About three inches more out in Boulder. So my forecast turned out really well. I'm happy. I haven't looked at Arizona Fort Collins or down by Denver to see how I did there. I got Boulder well. Last week worth of precipitation, seeing not a lot of water content, half inch to an inch in a few spots, but everybody got a little bit. Again, severe weather from Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. We actually have chances of thunderstorms all through that time on California because the storm track is back for them. And Wednesday's storm was massive. And look at this. We had this huge Arctic outbreak. Really cold air coming down from due north and snow and rain from coast to coast in this giant system. In fact, almost nobody wasn't being affected by some type of weather. Things got a little quieter on Thursday. Still storm out in the west and it's still cranking on Friday with just a tremendous amount of water. We're just waiting to hear lakes levels like need and power going up. Eventually this stuff is going to start to make it into the riverways. Nothing to talk about the way of smoke in the air. There's our Wednesday storm. We do have a chance of afternoon snow, maybe a coating of a half inch or so along our 25 on Thursday afternoon. Normals are climbing quickly, 48 to 51 for high, 20 to 24 for low. The highlights for the upcoming week. This is the Wednesday storm. This is what it looked like. General troughiness in the west. A little trough embedded in here. Big cutoff low off of California. Going very slowly. And our old trough here gave us the snow that we had on Wednesday. You can see it in the water vapor satellite loop. This big circulation here. Another over here. We have the coldness up. I should be saying Thursday morning. Thursday is extremely cold. We are way below normal. 30 to almost 40 degrees below normal. Like I said, probably is 40 degrees below normal. Out here. That won't last long. We'll be above freezing again on Friday. And then trying to climb towards 50s after that. So Sunday a.m. is the heat coming back. We have the ridging here. And next Thursday we have another chance of a storm. This one looks like it goes pretty far south. So it may not get as much at all. There's the little bit of snow that might come through. So let's put it in motion. Let's see the Wednesday storm. Pulling up into the Great Lakes. General troughiness out west. It digs on down on Saturday the 25th. Cutoff low just rolling over California. Going into Arizona then it pulls out on Monday. Probably too far south to do much for us. And then going into Tuesday and Wednesday next week. A trough from the west again. Still a week away. That could become a more significant storm for us. Let's take a look at the temperatures. That purples are way below normal. Light purples are far, far below normal. 28, 30 degrees below normal. And you can see it just kind of hit most of the top half of the nation. The warmth is still trying to hold on in Texas. It's not being invaded as much this time. There goes a cold front across Texas. But it washes out pretty fast. Cold air still sitting in the west. And warmth in the southeast. And that really doesn't change for the next week. Again precipitation. There's our Wednesday snow. There's Thursday. Going into Thursday right there. And mountains more on Friday. You can see the low in California. Some thunderstorms. Snowpacking this year in Nevada is just tremendous. That one pulls past us but doesn't do much on Monday. Then we have on Tuesday snow hitting the western slopes again. That feeds the Colorado. So keep the moisture coming as deep as we can. And that next storm on Thursday Friday kind of goes south of us. So that could change. Keep an eye on it. So the next five days we have a fair amount of moisture. A little bit of stuff on the plains. Good inch or so in the blue areas. And more in the western slopes. You can see that translates to a foot and a half of snow. Especially down here in the southwest. That's going to help with the drought there. Over the next 10 days not much more on the plains. But we do have more in the mountains. And the snow really keeps piling up. So we start really cold. Wednesday, Thursday in the teens. We start freezing on Friday. And we shoot up into the fifties for the weekend. That's a nice pattern. Midweek might get a day off. Or during the school system. And then the weekend you have wonderful stuff. So it's not that bad at all. Longmont leader, Bufin leader have frequent weather updates and great local news. Check them out. This has been the weather forecast for this week of February 22nd. This is Chief Meteorologist John Ensworth. Keep looking up.