 Welcome to the Longmont weather forecast for April 25th to 29th taking you almost to the end of this month I'm Chief Meteorologist John Ensworth for Longmont Public Media This week we have the moon coming out of new phase by Sunday night It's just a little sliver in the southwest sky look should look really nice with Venus nearby and The big picture for the weather Now you got one more chance of rain and then a lot of heat really possibly serious heat Summer heat. Well, we'll get to that The big picture is this pattern in the 500 millibar math This is how high up in the atmosphere you have to go to find about half atmospheric pressure or 500 millibars sea level It's just over a thousand millibars space is zero this big ridge marked by a blue line on the west coast is coming But before it gets here, we're gonna have this Northwest flow now the air is going along these black lines from west to east and out So Northwest flow is kind of interesting it can have these little ripples You can see it barely resolved here in the you know all these little wiggles in the map here And some of these are real troughs. I kind of think that one is and this one definitely is but the Other ripples could be there that we don't know about All these little ripples can create Little period of storminess bring a little cool air in with it the overall Northwest flow pattern Brings this cooler air because the air is coming from more northern latitude down towards us In the water vapor satellite again, this is really dry sinking air down here across the Gulf of Mexico and out Moist some some of its rising air up across the northern tier of states We have a little disturbance out here that's visible in some high clouds some ice and there's a thunderstorm there Thunderstorms off of the east coast and the picture over here, but you can see Some of these are real this use some of these ripples like here weren't picked up Clearly in the 500 millibar map, but they're probably there You can see them on satellite image this time of year you really have to look at other Forms of data like a satellite image to try to pick these little features out, but once they move over you get a little enhancement of a convection Lifting motion in the atmosphere and if there's moisture around you get some rain And that's what we'll get or we're getting on Friday By Saturday p.m. That ridge is heading in you can see this big Kind of sneaky pattern to the ridge, but it's coming in for for Colorado There's still ripples in the flow, but they won't matter to us as much as one here I didn't mark one down here kind of a bigger trough Looking for Saturday p.m. You can see with the Northwest flow still in place the ridges in here yet by Saturday p.m You can see some showers being picked up by the model happening over northeastern Colorado We're camping in the front yard again, so we'll have to keep an eye on that and if they go into the camper into the house All right, let's take a look the next 10 days and then we're going to look at animation of The upper-air pattern over the next 10 days. We'll look at how Really amazingly above normal the temperatures are going to be over the next 10 days So Friday and Saturday Morning are probably gone by the time you watch this these are showers that we had on Friday I'm recording just before the Stuff is forming on Friday We should have gotten about 10th to maybe a quarter inch of of water Friday afternoon again overnight Friday into Saturday morning but With the Northwest flow the temperatures are still be kind of cool and then the warm-up starts what I've marked in red here is The normal high temperature and blue the normal low temperature and all of normal low temperatures approaching freezing now so we are definitely moving through spring and You can see the nighttime temperatures are just Ignoring the normal low temperature. It's above freezing and pretty fantastically warm By Thursday Friday, we see some really serious Heat over here That's the showers for Friday Saturday We see a cool down next weekend and a little chance of showery stuff doesn't look really organized at this point I'm not going to get too excited yet, but we'll keep an eye on it through the week All right, here comes the animation take a look at this Ridge. So we're on Sunday And we're heading through Sunday and the Monday you can see how it expands to the east lots of abnormally high heights of the pink certain Reds are our Heights above normal. So just this giant Ridge by Thursday, and then the loop starts over again You can see it's a trough out in the east heading out That's what created the severe weather in southeast over the weekend and then that's moving off the east coast another little blob coming down Wednesday into Thursday, and it's when our Ridge really gets going Let's take a look at the temperature anomalies. This is surface temperatures. This is how far above or below Above reds below purples and blues Normal they are and you can see the west is just baking. This is Tuesday there's Wednesday about nice little cool air passes in and This is an emission you can go all the way to Thursday. I'm sorry really gets hot then So let that play through one more time Lots of abnormally warm temperatures day and night So putting it all together here from Saturday into Sunday. We're beginning the warm-up little chance of showers Because of the Northwest flow and then we just dry out with the ridge coming in sinking air over the state We probably break 80 for the first time Monday little cool down with a little passing ripple through the ridge on Tuesday, and then we head for 80s upper 80s Maybe even 90 Friday, so the same week We may hit our first 80 plus and our first 90 plus that little chance of showers coming in wouldn't be surprised if some of This is just daytime heating afternoon thunderstorms. So this would be more of a summer like pattern Fall or more frequent weather updates and News around Longmont take a look at Longmont observer at longmontobserver.org take a look on there also for The article talking about changes coming to the Longmont Observer it will get a new name and become a little different in the next month or so so Go over there. Check that out This has been chief meteorologist John Ensworth your weather forecast for Longmont keep looking up