 Hi, Longmont. This is the weather forecast for the week beginning Wednesday to December 23rd. I'm Chief Meteorologist John Enzworth for Longmont Public Media. We have a full moon next Wednesday, December 30th, rising as the sun sets and the reverse in the morning. So lots of moonlight out for taking any strolls around Christmas. Looking at our moisture, it's an interesting pair of maps here from last week to this week. We had precipitation in the mountains. We picked up some snow. We'll look at that in just a moment. But going from last week to this week, there was no change in the data. It really is updated maps, so that's good. We're not getting worse. We're holding steady. We're waiting for some precipitation to come back. The west is still really dry out here though. We have long-term drought for all the mountain west and out to California coast. Precipitation that we did have pretty much missed the I-25 corridor. We had a little bit on the plains. Anything that added to some good moisture occurred in the mountains. High elevations, western-facing slopes. Our next system, hitting Wednesday at the beginning of the forecast period here, is this cold front sweeping down into the west. It's a strong one, but it's moving so fast. We're going to have what's called downslope or a Bora cold front, that we'll just not have any precipitation with it at all in the lower elevations. We have strong trough powering this thing as it comes in. By Tuesday evening, it's already sweeping halfway across the state. We've got the mountain snows and snows back up into the northern Rockies. By Wednesday, it is already pushed all the way down to the Gulf Coast. We still have some moisture forming on the western slopes, the higher elevations of the Colorado mountains, which is great. That's where we get our drinking water, but the lower lying elevations, the I-25 corridor, we're missing it all. Take a look at the temperature anomaly. This is again Wednesday. You can see the cold front is already made down into Texas. You can clearly see the below-normal temperatures in blues with a little extra cold air in the higher elevations. We do have a high wind warning from Tuesday night to early afternoon on Wednesday with sustained winds 35 to 45 miles an hour gusts of 65, mainly along I-25 and out on the plains. This is the actual wind speed Wednesday noon. You can see behind this front, these are very strong winds. So tie everything down outside, secure those Christmas decorations, keep it from ending up in your neighbor's yard. Here's the actual warning area for the high winds. We are right in this corner here, and it's just how they draw boundaries with county boundaries that we get missed, where Longmont is certainly going to have a lot of strong wind. Take a look at the next 10 days. Our normal high temperature now over the next 10 days rises one degree from 42 up to 43. Nighttime lows 17, staying the same. We are bouncing up and down to the bottom end of this cold envelope, but it's still normal. We're in the normal range for this cold front coming in on Wednesday. Look how quickly we recover before Christmas. We're all the way back up to normal high and then a little bit above normal on Christmas Day itself. For the presentation, really nothing out here on Tuesday, Wednesday. But afterwards, as we get close to the new year, January 1st, you do see some general showering-ness showing up in the models. This could be a change that we are needing, and we'll take a look at what's going to happen with that. Let's put it in motion. Look at the 500-millibar trough zipping by Tuesday, Wednesday into Thursday. By the time we get to Christmas, we have this ridge axis over us. There's a little ripple down here that's going to affect Arizona and New Mexico, but that's staying south of us. As we get into the beginning of next week, another trough pushing down, slipping by, and then another ridge passing, and then we get this big cutoff flow coming into California and heading towards us. Cutoff flows slow down. They can get a hold of some of that oceanic moisture, and there it is, sitting in a good place to really pump moisture on to Colorado upslope, going right before the new year. So this has the potential of being really moist. Here goes the heat with the cold front Tuesday and Wednesday. Right after that, that ridge builds. We get some downslope warming as well off of the Rockies. So just east of the Rockies, abnormally warm weather. The ridge comes back, and then that low starts to form out in the west, bringing the cold air to a lower latitude and towards us by the end of the year. So here we are at the 29th and the 30th. So we've got the cold that we need. We've got the storm. Let's take a look at what the precipitation will be. This Tuesday, Wednesday storm zips by. The snow stays far north of Colorado, except in the mountains. That front sweeps off the east coast. Then we move into the weekend after Christmas. There's a system up in the Pacific Northwest, but we're waiting for that mid-week system to really start to crank up off the California coast. The rain that they really need, the whole west needs this. Then we get a surface low forming right in a good sweet spot to pump moisture right onto the plains and the eastern slopes of the mountains. So this could be good. We'll keep an eye on it. We'll still have another video next week that happens before we get to that storm. The next 10 days, snowfall, this is that second storm right before the new year. You can see many areas with 5, 8, 10 inches really close to Longmont, over a foot right in the foothills here. So this could be good. We'll keep an eye on it. Over the next seven days, we bounce down to a high of freezing or below on Wednesday, shoot right back up to the 50s for Christmas. A little cool down at the beginning of next week is the stages set for that wetter system. For Christmas stay itself, we have a high of 54, low of 23, mostly sunny with light southwest winds. It'll be great to ride a bicycle around, but you just got under the tree. So local news and more frequent weather updates. Check out the Longmont leader, longmontleader.com. And then chief meteorologist John Ensworth, keep looking up.