 This is John Innsworth for Longmont Public Media and the forecast discussion, Wednesday through Saturday, March 4 through 7. This is, again, the story of Longmont's weather was just a little science. In the middle of our forecast window for Friday night, we have a moon getting bigger and bigger, heading towards full. 80% illuminated on this face. And so if you have any planets to go out with your telescope, it's not going to be a great weekend with this much light. But otherwise it will be clear. Looking back, kind of a storm of the weekend on Sunday, we might not quite a while. So let's take a look at the snow on Sunday. We're on Longmont. We've got about an inch and a half. Boulder and areas just south of town pulled in two, three, four inches or a little bit more with a snow band that set up. We saw in the models last time a big snow band was predicted somewhere near Denver, kind of North Denver. It only shifted north about 15 miles from what the major models had. So that's pretty good. That's a nice resolution. Going up into Laramoke County, we see that Fort Collins only got about a half inch. It was pretty far away, but up around Red Feather Lakes and higher foothills regions, it got almost a half a foot. That's the spark being above a lot of the cold air flow and moisture source only pulled in a couple inches. Down in Denver where they were sort of bracing for that big hit of snow, northern suburbs got a half inch out by the airport about an inch or two and then about an inch in the southwest area that normally gets a lot more. So it was an unusual storm for that. Before we get into the future, let's take a look at what we have right now. We have a really interesting feature going on. This is a storm that could have been hitting us pretty significantly in the middle of this week. It's a low down here in northern Mexico. We've got a ridge kind of above it and then a trough up in the center part of the nation here. If you look at the satellite image, you can see this feature down there very clearly in the Water Vapor satellite. The whites and the gray colors on this image here are moisture throughout the entire column of the atmosphere. And what this is doing is bringing a little pool of cold air down into Mexico. If you take a look at the GFS for the next 48 hours, the mountains down there are picking up some pretty good snow and even some very southern mountains in New Mexico are getting just a nice little hit of snow, very unusual for that far south. So we're left high and dry in the north side up here. And looking out the next 10 days, as that trough goes by, Thursday is our coolest day. There'll be a cold front that will pull in just north of that low as the skirt's on by. We really see those for the next five days bone dry temperatures way above freezing all the way through the weekend. This is just going to be fantastic weather. Out next week we see shower chances showing up and it's all kind of a scattering mess. You see temperatures kind of cooling down still above normal but closer to normal. And what we might be seeing in the model here is what's called a climatological trend that as you get further onto the future, you don't want your model to go crazy and have errors blow up on you. So they start mixing in the normal weather that you would expect at that time. And that just may be what we're seeing that this will turn out to be much less interesting weather than it looks like on this graph. So let's go out into the future now. By Thursday morning, that low that's gone through Mexico is now tracked into the Gulf. It's kicking off some severe weather in the deep south. We already had tornado just the last day or two in Memphis, Tennessee. So the springtime thunderstorms and severe weather is starting to show up on the map nowhere close to Colorado. And what we have by Friday for us on a super beautiful weather, high temperatures is just monstrous ridge sitting over the west. You can see there's a trough in the east. It's kind of connecting to that trough that went across Mexico. And you've got a trough out here in the Pacific. Now let's jump forward to Sunday. You can see that the trough in the center of the nation is just tilted a little bit away from us. It's pushed this trough out into the Atlantic, but the trough out here in the Pacific is not moving much at all. When the overall wavelength, when the distance between this trough and this trough get to be about the width of the United States, the troughs and the ridges stop moving to the east. And when they get wider than the nation about like what we see here, you might see it actually go backwards. You'll see the ridge drift back towards us next week. That's why I'm thinking the storminess next week may not amount to much. All right, so jumping into snowfall for the next 10 days, I'm just letting the model tell us whatever it thinks is going to happen the next 10 days. And there's some good snow in the higher mountains, but right around Longmont, it's just a tiny bit. Maybe or maybe not. What we're more likely to get because of the warm temperatures is rain. So we have precipitation, total water amounts here, and you've got the high mountains ringing some nice moisture out. You've got some dry spots on the plains, but maybe a little bit of moisture up in Northeastern Colorado. So let's wrap up with just a glimpse into the future, looking at the NOAA forecast for a new month, March. And they have the Eastern U.S. with a really good chance of above normal temperatures. We're right on the boundary here with really close to normal temperatures in Central and Western Colorado, maybe a little above normal on the Eastern Plains. The only cool weather would be up in the Pacific Northwest. For precipitation, it's kind of spotty, but maybe with all that additional moisture, we'll see some more thunderstorms and precipitation on the Mississippi and Ohio Valley. And we keep seeing the lows digging down into the Southwest and traveling through. That looks like it's going to be happening a few more times. The pattern is kind of set up, and this is what you see, what you get type situation. All right, so putting it all together for the next seven days, we have temperatures far above normal, which are normal highs right now are in the low 50s, 51, 52 or so for a high and about 20, 21 for a low. The temperatures are staying above freezing day and night with nothing but a little chance of rain, showers, activity Sunday into Monday. Same timing as the storm we just had, but a lot warmer. So for Longmont Public Media, this is John Ensworth. Please take a look at Longmont Observer for news of Longmont and your neighbors and more frequent weather updates throughout the week. Keep looking up.