 Welcome to the weather forecast for the week beginning, Wednesday, February 17th, 2021. I'm Chief Meteorologist John Ensworth. Let's take a look at the moon. We have a first quarter moon now at Friday. Now this is just barely into Friday, within additional day in January, and just the time, the universal time that the phase is changing. It's just into February, Friday, strange. But it'll be drifting back towards Thursday and Wednesday again as we watch the phases drift through the calendar, through the rest of the year. With drought from last week, not much has changed. Take a look right down here in the southern counties going from last week to this week. There's a little rain, a little snow down there, and a little moistening of the soil situation. And nationally, not much has changed either. Now Texas is getting a lot of precipitation right now. It's going to melt pretty quickly next week when the warm-up hits. But right now, they have drought just a touch worse. Down in Texas, a little bit less north of there. Nothing really changes much in the winter with the drought index. We'll see what happens with the snow melt and the returning spring precipitation. Of course, we did have some snow over the weekend. And taking a look up to the reporting time at 7 AM on Sunday, Longmont got about an inch and a half to three inches almost. I forecasted twice that or more. And what happened with that storm is in the evening, a dry slot, drier from the southwest, got pulled into the circulation, and it just cut it off. And I saw that happening, went, hmm, that's the end of my forecast right there. So even bolder, I think I had in the upper six, eight inch area, and it too just got about two to three inches, not much more. So that can happen. Here's the amount of precipitation we did get, though. Water-wise, it's about a half inch north of town. We got, again, every week, a half inch to an inch worth of moisture up in the mountains, where we want it. This is great. And we'll see a little bit more on the plains this week as well. As I was coming into record today, there was an interesting phenomenon up north with thunder, snow. It looked like a mid-summer thunderstorm with a big updraft, a big overshooting anvil, everything that you would expect with severe weather. But it was just snow and not that severe. So taking a look north of Fort Collins, there it is, the core of the precipitation there, and then the snow trailing off with the jet stream flow this direction. We had another one down here, not far from Boulder. I think down to those are the dark clouds you saw Tuesday afternoon as you were driving home. That could happen. We'll see who gets snow. But if someone does, that'd be a quick two, three, four inches of snow when you really weren't expecting it. What's helping cause that is we have this big trough in the central US. That's our polar vortex, or at least the cold air and associated with that. Still making its way south and east. Little ripples in the flow, this northwest flow aloft, can kick off thunderstorms like that any time of the year. We can get some really good thunderstorms and even severe weather activity in the spring with this exact pattern. You just have more heat and more moisture to work with. So you can see the trough way down here in the water vapor satellite into Texas. Of course, Texas is making news with all the ice, the snow, the extreme cold, and that is this trough axis right here. It's not going to go away immediately. It's going to take a while before the weekend warm-up begins. So looking at the surface map on Tuesday, we see a messy system out in west. It's just a moisture flow coming in off the Pacific with the northwest flow aloft. Every little ripple is able to make stuff happen. It stops pretty much right at the continental divide. That last drop off of the airflow warms it a little bit, dries it a little bit, and we don't get much, but except for the lucky thunderstorm if we do. And here's another earlier ripple, causing some snow in North Texas and Oklahoma. And at least on Tuesday and Wednesday, they're precipitation free, but that's going to change. So taking a look at the GFS ensemble for the next 10 days, notice that our normal high temperatures and low temperatures are rising more dramatically now, going from 44 to 49 as a normal high just in 10 days and a normal low going from 17 to 21. So spring is coming and it's coming. Taking a look at the predicted temperatures, though, they are all bouncing right around the normal low temperature through this time. It's kind of amazing how closely that follows the bottom end of the temperature envelope. Here's our convective snow on Tuesday. Here's our better snow chances Wednesday, Wednesday afternoon and evening, a few inches along I-25, a lot more up in the mountains. And we have a little chance of something Saturday night as the warmup continues. It'll still be cool enough for snow. So let's put the upper air pattern into motion. And here is the deepening trough for the Wednesday storm. That's going to go down and kick off more stuff in Texas and keep the cold air in place. Then we start to get a big ridge out west. That's our warmup for the end of the weekend. Then we get another trough coming in for a bit of a system at the beginning of next week. So we'll see what that does right now. Most of the energy should remain north of the state. And not a lot of cold air will come down with it. Taking a look at that cold air, this is amazingly cold. This is far, far below normal. 40 to 50 degrees below normal. That's making the news. And then as we head into the weekend, start to see warmth returning to the west. The cold air is shallow. So this is the shoreline of the cold air on the eastern, western side. A little cold front for the weekend. And then more abnormally warm temperatures start taking over every place as we go into Tuesday, Wednesday next week. If you want to see a hint of something for the end of the month, there is another pool of cold, really cold air starting to form in a western canvas. We'll have to see what it does then. Taking a look at the snow and precipitation rain down here in the warmer areas. There's another ice storm in North Texas moving through. Here's some severe weather coming in on Friday, Saturday out in the southeast. Our weekend storm, like the Wednesday storm, is not huge. It's not a big area covering the snow. It'll be upslope stuff right along the front range on the plains here, gone in 8, 12 hours, and that's it. So how much snow can we get out of these little shots? Well, not much. Right around Long Mountain, it's about an inch or two over the next four days. So that's kind of scooping in the weekend snow. Mountains doing much better, six inches to a foot in some of the snow favorite slopes in the higher elevations. Going out 10 days, not much gets added except the snowpack up in the mountains. We maybe get another half inch or an inch over the entire 10 day period. So not a lot of shoveling going on, some warm up coming as well. So let's take a look at the seven day. We are still below freezing going through Thursday. Friday, we finally start to see the warm up through the 40s in the weekend and then 50s next week. That's going to feel hot. We have our good chance of afternoon snow for a few hours on Wednesday into Wednesday night, tapering off Thursday morning, and then Saturday could be some more of that convective snow you see coming off the mountains. This situation is not too unchanged by then. So for frequent weather updates, check out the Long Mountain Leader and local news there as well. I've been Chief Meteorologist John Insworth. Keep looking up.