 Welcome to the weather forecast for the week beginning Wednesday, April 26, 2023. This is chief meteorologist John Ennsworth for Longmont Public Media. Tomorrow, Thursday, April 27, the first quarter moon will be in the evening sky. You should be able to see that because it will be mostly clear. The sun's bots are pointing away from us now, but there have been reports of aurora seeing all over the place, all the way down to Florida and like that. If we had been clear, we would have seen it this week as well. Looking at drought conditions, things are getting a little worse with dry conditions kind of creaking towards Longmont and this area, but we did get some rain. We'll see that and that should hold things at bay. If the forecast is correct, we'll get a lot more water yet to come. Pre-sphere drought here in Kansas and Oklahoma Penn handles still ongoing getting a little worse, expanding a little bit, expanding towards us. This coast not much change. Looking at it out of snowpack, my rough crude animation here and you can see that it shoots way up with those bigger storms and even with the heat and fewer storms, it's still doing really well. We're way above normal, 131% statewide for the snowpack. Still have a lot of the ski resorts are closing, so, oh, there's one more. Sorry, sort of leveling off right here. This latest round did bring a foot of snow to some of the favorite locations. And speaking of that storm, it was rain in the lower elevations, we got a third to a half and an inch around Longmont, about a tenth of an inch up at Fort Collins, down around Broomfield, Boulder, you can see three quarters to eight, and then even right down here over an inch of water, so good stuff there. Looking at the overall map for the state for this last seven days, it's good for the Northern Mountains, a little shot down here south of Pueblo, so some drought conditions there. Okay, here's my severe weather animation, and here in the fourth week of April, we are in severe weather climatology time. Not great chances, but we do expect them to be kicking in at the end of April and May. And if we take a look, we got some bad stuff in Texas today, and then we have a marginal risk of severe weather, almost down to, looks like love land, and that will probably expand a little bit tomorrow when we get there. It's for strong damaging winds in the thunderstorms that do form. It's not for tornadoes or hail, but I saw that we did get a lot of hail in Longmont out of this last storm. One good freak storm did a number on cars and stuff. Then we'd go down here for the slight risk in Texas on Friday. So we're looking at the national map for Wednesday, Thursday, here comes our next chance of showers overnight. Right now, it looks like about a fifth or quarter inch of water out of this one. They always overdo the snow stuff. It seems very unlikely. Then Friday morning, and then it pulls out in the morning on Friday. Looking at normal temperatures going from 65 to 68, low temperatures from 36 now up to 40. You can see the ensembles are keeping us in the lower end of the thing, but there's some really big error bars here. We see this is Thursday into Friday morning's storm, and then we see a pulsing every afternoon of storms. So I'm going to show the water vapor prediction or the precipitable water animation in a moment. It looks like we have a bit of the spring pattern coming in where there's just enough warming, enough moisture every afternoon that there's a chance that the thunderstorms form and drift off the mountains into the plains. Here's our departing storm Wednesday from Tuesday. Next notable is that Friday morning storm, pretty strong old shortwave rotating around this big broad trough, another one up there. We see snow in the mountains and rain snow stuff right close by, but it should be too warm for snow. Next Friday is the next big event. There's little shots of storms throughout the week, like I said, but the next big one is this low moving in order to keep an eye on that because I see that it does some weird stuff. Here's all the embedded thunderstorms and the large amount of rain next Friday. So we'll put this in motion, and there goes the Tuesday storm. Here comes the Thursday Friday storm rotating through, big ridge on the west coast giving them heat and dry conditions, once that rotate out, big low rotating over the Great Lakes. It's kind of cut off low moving down the California coast for Tuesday and Wednesday. Then Thursday it kind of pushes towards us, the trough, a front coming down the plains, and it kind of backs off to the west, kind of interesting, a really weird pattern. Let's take a look at our temperatures above or below normal for each spot on the map. The blue and purple are below and very below normal. You can see a Friday cold front moving down to Texas, lots of heat on the west coast melting snow a little faster than I'm sure they want. We are right on that battleground between the heat and the cold, right there. You can see the cold turning back up, and the warm air takes over for the end of May 4th, and then there comes the next storm. There's thunderstorms. You can see the thunderstorm cold pools there, so kind of interesting, so making a change over to spring. So here's the precipitable water, the amount of moisture in the atmosphere. Green is above normal, and brown is below normal. You can see the moisture moving away from Friday, and then we have moisture in place over the weekend, and the heat is building in the west. At this time we're into Tuesday, Wednesday, May the 3rd, and May the 4th, and here comes that blow. Moisture really converges over the state for Thursday, Friday, and next week, and then it moves on out. So let's watch these storm chances, there goes the Tuesday, Wednesday storm, here comes the end of this week's storm, sweeping down the state, giving us hopefully the drought areas some good water. Looks like this area got skipped though. Unfortunately, there's another shot right there on Monday, there's some little shot of storms again on Tuesday, there's another pulse of afternoon storms on Wednesday, there comes Thursday, and this seems to just really intensify quickly, give us rain and thunderstorms, it could be quite stormy, we could see severe weather, we'll see, it's a whole week away. So over the next five days, we see an inch of water up in the mountains, more down here in the drought areas, so that's fantastic news. And over the next five days, sorry about that, we've got very little snow expected, it's going to be warm and not that big of a system, but other than this weird little hole right around Boulder and up to four towns, there's a lot of water that the GFS is expecting, so this is three inch, three and a half inch total over the next ten days, and this pattern will change, no doubt. More snow for the front range, some higher mountains, but nothing on the lower areas. So sixties, almost seventy and thursday, cool down with that storm system that comes in Thursday night, for Friday then we're back to the seventies, going to next week with an increasing chance of afternoon pulse slender storms, just keep your eye on the west, see if the sky is getting dark. New month is coming up on us, so taking a look at the also reliable NOAA map, they have below normal temperatures in the west, equal chances of above and below normal chances here, and equal chances for most of the nation, at least west, for precipitation, low amount leader, field leader, has frequent weather updates and great local news, check those out. I'm the chief meteorologist, John Insworth, keep looking up.