 Hello, Longmont. This is your weather forecast for the week beginning, July 1st. We're at the midpoint of 2020. Here we go for the second half. I'm Chief Meteorologist John Unsworth for Longmont Public Media and this weekend we have a full moon again. We're leaving Sunday into Monday. We'll be full that evening with a moon rising just about the time the sun sets and the reverse in the morning. The moon's only gonna be up for about 10 hours, 12 minutes, shorter night times in the summer. Taking a look at drought conditions. This is last week's map. You can compare it to what happened this week. We see lots of dryness across the southern counties. The northern counties where Longmont and all are doing great still. Going to this week, all we get is a little additional dryness on the far eastern plains. The rest of the state is staying steady. So that's better than worsening. A lot of that was helped by the rainfall that we did get in the mountains and out on the eastern plains. The greens are about a half inch or so of water. The yellows, two to three inches right in here, had a severe thunderstorm, even with a tornado warning going from around Castle Rock down to the Black Forest area around Colorado Springs. Had a big thunderstorm sitting out here on the eastern plains. That's sort of the summer pattern. You get isolated big dumpings of water and everybody else gives us a little bit. All right, taking a look at the water vapor satellite image. In the summer, it's important to know where the water vapor is. If we get water vapor, that's usually the missing ingredient to get some thunderstorms and some rain because we have plenty of heat in place throughout the summer. We have this trough coming in on Tuesday, swinging through the state. You probably noticed a cold front came through in the morning, even a little bit of shower activity on Tuesday morning. It brought in cool air. We're about 10 degrees below normal for Tuesday. That's going to swing out very quickly and the big story for the next seven days is this gigantic ridge right now parked kind of far out east. It's coming. But with the grays and the white coloration around, you can see there is some moisture. Down here is the rich subtropical moisture that we can get pretty good rains from and that will be tapped and coming into the state over the next week. For Wednesday morning, we got high pressure at the surface. That little cold front that came through on Tuesday is washing out in New Mexico and Texas. We're settling in for a dry summer pattern. Over the next 10 days, here's our normal high temperature, normal low temperature bracket. You can see the normal high temperatures are starting to flatten out. They're still rising a little bit, but we're about to hit the peak of climatological summer temperatures. The nighttime temperatures are still expected to rise a little bit more because we do get more of that moisture in. And that moisture is a greenhouse gas that water vapor keeps the nighttime temperatures a little higher. And the temperatures bouncing up every day and night are really nicely inside this normal envelope. We do have the Fourth of July Independence Day right here. You can see that the ensemble precipitation runs on the GFS have a little more agreement on thunderstorms occurring around here. So you might get some lightning even if we don't have Fourth of July fireworks in town this year. So here we go off into the next week looking at the upper air pattern. And as I said, the big thing to watch is this high pressure over South Texas and this giant ridge right now on Wednesday going up into the Great Lakes. There's this promising trough in the Northeast. If that were to swing in we'd have another cool down and cool front like we just had. But that won't happen this time. This ridge is going to dominate. With that flow coming out of the West and Southwest out of that trough and up the east side, up at the west side of the ridge. You see our fires down here in the Southwest are putting out some smoke. It's not too bad. We have minimal smoke amounts in the Northeast part of the state Wednesday evening and it looks like a lot of these fires are becoming contained. So they're not putting out as much particular material into the atmosphere. Good news for everybody. For Thursday, the high is getting bigger and the ridge is getting stronger. That trough is crashing up against the Western slope of the ridge is going to fly up over in Canada far from us. Well, no effect on this at all. For Friday noon, the ridge is getting closer and larger. It's now extending from Southern California all the way off to the east coast. Over the next five days with that big high pressure system in place, we see very light amounts of precipitation across the state. Maybe the mountains pick up half inch, three quarters of an inch, but in this run of the GFS, we don't get any rain at all for the next five days. That's probably not true. We'll probably get something, but it is going to be light and it's going to be spotty. Going down to Saturday, the ridge is now anchored on a high pressure system right over in New Mexico. We are, by the weekend, right under the core of the heat. The only thing that keeps us from top in 100 is this moisture flow. We have moisture coming from the Gulf of Mexico up around the back side of the high, some moisture coming out from the Pacific up into our part of the nation. The high pressure system will be depressing chances of the thunderstorms forming, but the moisture at the lower levels of the atmosphere will be helping thunderstorms form. So it's going to be a little tug of war going on and we'll see some fire up in the mountains. By Sunday, the highs strengthen even more, still located in New Mexico with the ridge right over Longmont practically. And by Monday, the high has gone down to southeastern Arizona, ridge right up over Colorado. And by Tuesday next week, the high has now slipped off to the Baja, and the ridge is still dominating the whole inner mountain west, stretching from the west coast all the way off the east coast. There was a little floating low in here I didn't mention. It matters to people in Georgia, but not us. So just a giant ridge, a lot of heat nationwide for this upcoming week. Looking out 10 days in the precipitation, you can see around Longmont still gets about the lowest amount, a quarter inch, tenth of an inch of rain maybe the mountains and the southern mountains get a little bit more and they need the water down there. So that's good news. Every run of this will be different because it's simulating different thunderstorm patterns and they're pretty close to random. For Independence Day, we can look at the simulated radar from the GFS. Here it is actually giving you a picture of what it might look like where thunderstorms will be occurring. And by six o'clock or seven o'clock or so, you see a pretty good amount of moisture up through New Mexico and Colorado. You see thunderstorms in the mountains. Some begin to spread out on the plains. Later in the evening, they become a line of thunderstorms. They're tracking off eastern plains and into Kansas and the panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas. Again, very typical summer pattern. Temperatures will be, background temperatures here are a little above normal. On 4th of July, these blue blobs here are the afternoon and evening cool pools of air created by the rain coming out of the thunderstorms that do form. Again, that pattern is different every time the models run. So let's take a look at the next week. We have temperatures in the 90s, lower 90s, all the way through Saturday and Sunday with more moisture coming in. We have an increased chance of showers and thunderstorms. Not a lot of heat, but it will feel humid out there. Going into next week, we dry out a little bit and you can see temperatures again rise into the low and mid-90s. Since we're at the beginning of a month, before we go today, let's take a look at what the Weather Service is forecasting for average temperatures for the entire month of July and they're saying a lot of heat. We have above normal chance of above normal temperatures in the entire west and also in New England. For precipitation, they have us a little drier than normal in the northern counties and close to normal in the southern counties. These are really broad brush forecasts, but they give you a little indication of what might happen over the region. For more frequent weather updates, take a look at the Longmont leader. I update whether every day or every two days there, put out watches and warnings whenever I possibly can. So take a look there for local news as well. I've been Chief Meteorologist John Insworth for Longmont Public Media. Keep working out.