 This is the weather forecast for the week beginning Wednesday, June 24th, and I am chief meteorologist John Ensworth. Taking you into the weekend, we have a first quarter moon at Sunday night, and with the summer solstice occurring just on Saturday, our very close to having 12 hours of daylight, 12 hours of darkness. So the moon is actually rising at noon and setting at midnight. Up in the sky for 12 hours, kind of a neat coincidence there. Alright, let's look back into the past before we move forward with our weather forecast and take a look at the drought conditions nationwide. You can see the eastern U.S. is doing great. It's moist out there, it's doing great in Alaska, and why it's not bad either. But the western U.S. is really starting to dry out. West Coast is moderately rough, but is really bad around the four corners of the area and over into Kansas and the Panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas. This is too early in the summer for us to really want to see this level of drought. So let's take a look at Colorado itself, and there's our southern counties already into pretty severe drought and up onto the eastern plains. Storm after storm, coming out of the winter and through the spring, have favored the northern counties of Colorado. So we're doing great up here. Boulder, Larimer, Weld are all drought-free. It was about a year ago that we had the entire state drought-free. So all of this has happened in just the last 12 to 16 months or so. Here's the last two weeks of rainfall. This is very indicative of what we've had, and the rain really has been Colorado Springs northward. Right along the front range, you can see two, three inches of rain in places. We had some pretty good rainfall amounts down in the southern part of the state, and a little bit out on the eastern plains, but not enough to relieve that. Over the last seven days, we see again rain in the south and rain right up here around Lawnmont and along the front range. The front set up this last time right around Colorado Springs and up onto the plains, and the overrunning upslope flow helped keep storm after storm going right over the same track. We call that training, and gave us a pretty good shot of water. All right, let's start with Wednesday and move forward out into the week here. So we have a big high pressure system, the beginning of our forecast period sitting down here in the southwest, record heat setting up in California and Arizona. We have the wildfires in Arizona, and we have this ridge extending up the Rockies up into Canada. This is giving us northwest flow, though. This arrow here shows the direction of the air aloft coming right down over Colorado to the southeast. Cool air is close nearby. We got the heat just to the south. So any little ripple, and many of these ripples are hard to detect in our network, can kick off extra thunderstorm activity in the afternoon when the heating reaches a peak. Our next weather maker is way out here in the Pacific Northwest. That trough doesn't look like much on this map. It's going to become a big change in the weather come Friday. So Wednesday morning, we have high pressure system at this surface, but we see rain showers around on this map, and that's again due to the northwest flow. Any little ripple can kick off some storms and shower activity, and by Wednesday evening, the first round of thunderstorms have moved off to the southeast, and we just have showers continuing in the mountains. Very typical summer pattern. Taking a look at the big picture for the next 10 days, the top graph is temperatures tracking each day, so you can see the highs and lows. And the bottom is multiple model runs, trying to see whether it's raining or not, or in the winter whether we have snow or not. And they change things between each run, so we call this an ensemble. It gives us a, how confident we are, measure of the rainfall coming up. You can see for Wednesday afternoon, we have a pretty solid line going down, so we probably will get some showers and storms around here. But the more significant system is here on Friday. You can see multiple hours of sometimes very heavy rain coming down. Temperatures up on the top here, we have a normal high now of 86 and a normal low of 50. You can see that the normal lines, red and blue, are still climbing a little bit. I just said that we had the beginning of summer, the longest day of the year on Saturday, so why is that happening? Well the earth is always cooling, it's radiating off energy and infrared day and night, but we're getting a surplus of sunlight still in the northern hemisphere for about a month, month and a half after the first day of summer. So the normal high temperatures will continue to climb for a little while. And our temperatures over the next 10 days definitely hover at the upper part of this normal range here, except for Friday when our next storm comes in. And that next storm is this trough. It was sitting up in the Pacific Northwest in our last graphic. It now has all cut off low in Montana with the trough approaching the state from the west. Cool air coming in. We get the yellowing colors here as the tendency of the atmosphere to turn in the way that a low pressure system or a storm turns. So the more yellowy color or the redder color here, the more left there is in the atmosphere, the more instability, better chance for rain and thunderstorms. We also need moisture for rain and thunderstorms and we have that too. As the storm is approaching Thursday night and Friday, it's pulling in moisture from the Gulf of Mexico and some moisture is being dragged along with the trough from the Pacific. So we have the fuel that we need for some rain. At this time we don't see the ingredients coming together for severe weather though. So how much rain might we get out of all this? It's not bad, about a half inch to three quarters of an inch right around Longmont. In the nearby foothills we can see one to even two inches down on the Palmer Divide. By Sunday noon that's gone and the heat is back. And what we see is another trough is a completely new trough coming into the west coast and in between this and our trough that's departing, we have a little shortwave ridge. Yes, you can get small ridges as well. That will rock the temperatures up into the 90s. This is a progressive pattern. The lows and highs are traveling rather quickly across the nation, but this low won't advance very far. It is going to kind of stall there, leaving us in the heat. Moving to Monday noon you can see that the low is closer, but we have switched from a northwest flow now to a very strong southwest flow. So even though there is a trough and there's cool air kind of close to the state, we're getting a very strong warm flow from the desert southwest where there already is a lot of heat building. So we're not going to get as much cooling and relief from this trough as we have the one for Friday. And if you add another five days to what the GFS is predicting for rainfall, it's not a lot more. We maybe pick up another tenth of an inch over the following five days. Last week we had a problem with the haze and the smoke around. That was due to wildfires in northern and central and southern Arizona and also fire in southwestern Colorado. With the northwest flow blowing over the entire region, we're just completely clean. There is no smoke at all in Colorado. But as that trough approaches and we switch back around to a southwest flow, you can see this smoke is starting to head into around Durango and the southwest counties. It'll be returning probably over the weekend and in the beginning of next week. Sorry about that. For fun, we can take a look way out into the future for the Fourth of July Independence Day celebrations. And this is a GFS again, model of actual convection, what you would see on the radar. This is for about sunset, so seven o'clock, eight o'clock at night. A little bit later. You can see some showers popping up around eastern Colorado. It's not a lot of activity. There's not a lot of organization to it. If you go later in the evening, you can see it kind of consolidates into a more solid line of thunderstorms. You can see Kansas with a little bit of shower activity left in the mountains. It doesn't look really wet. It just looks like you might get hit by a wandering storm, a little bit of lightning nearby. For temperatures, we definitely have a little ridge projected to be over the state at that time. These are temperature departure from normal, so reds are warmer than normal, blues are cooler than normal. And there's a good ribbon of some hot air from Arizona up across Colorado. And if you go later in the evening, you can see it's even warmer than normal, so there's going to be more humidity around. But these funny little blue blobs here, it's the cold air coming out of the thunderstorms. So the model is actually seeing the rain cooling the air, the cool air hitting the ground and spreading out. Kind of like milk splashing out on a tabletop. So for the next seven days, I'll step out of the way here. We have temperatures in the 80s and 90s, Wednesday and Thursday, small chance of afternoon showers. We have our cool down on Friday, kind of extending into Saturday with a much better chance of rain and thunderstorms. Then we shoot back into the 90s for the end of the weekend and the beginning of next week before we kind of cool down as that trough tries to make some advancement forward. For more local news and more rapid weather updates, please check out the Longmont Leader, formerly the Longmont Observer at LongmontLeader.com. This is Chief Meteorologist John Insworth for Longmont Public Media. Keep looking up.