 Welcome to the weather forecast for the beginning Wednesday, September 29, 2021. That's a tongue twister. Here I am in a dark and spooky location. Chief meteorologist John Ensworth for Longmont Public Media. We finally have a change in the weather we're going to talk about today, but we do have a new lunar cycle starting with new moon Tuesday, October 5th. I can't draw conditions as we always do. Unfortunately, the own dry week that we just had made everything along the plains and the front range get a little drier. So going to the next day, next week, we have abnormally dry conditions spreading over areas that were drought-free. Nationally, not much more than a little more of this short-term drought spreading from Colorado into the Oklahoma, Texas area, and then up in the northern plains. And this tells the story that over the last seven days, really nothing fell. There was a little shower in the mountains, highest mountains. We got some monsoonal moisture that snuck into the Fort Corners area in the southern part of the state. It's just not much. Very, very little rain occurred this last week. That's changing though, so it's good. So here's what's changing it. Wednesday noon, we have a deep trough approaching the state. Lots of little ripples, short waves in it, like one that's passed over here. We have a ridge that was over us as being squished in the Ohio Valley, Tennessee Valley area, and pushed to the east with another giant cutoff wall up here over the New England states. For Tuesday PM, the setup for the rain that we are receiving on Wednesday is all this great moisture streaming in from every place that it can. For smoke, things aren't bad. The stealth fire is in California. We have a fire locally, and some smoke that's kind of circulating around. This is the smoke at all levels, and here on the right the end on the first. There's a little extra smoke sneaking in on Southwest really flow. Here we go again. It's kind of coming in right there. It's not much, but it's there. Let's take a look at the surface though. Let's see what you're actually breathing. And there's some smoke pushing down with the cool front, cold front that's coming through. Something up in Canada is creating some smoke up there, but down the surface we just get really pretty good. Not bad at all. So you should see the mountains whenever the clouds and rain clear. For severe weather, there isn't anything nearby. There's a chance of some convection, some storms on Wednesday, normal storms. Not much on Thursday as the atmosphere stabilizes and things warm up a little bit. A little more moisture comes back for Friday giving us a chance of showers. The big picture for the next 10 days are normal high temperatures dropping from 72 to 68. So the temperatures that we should be seeing Wednesday, Thursday and even Friday are much more close to normal than we've been. We have been fantastically hot, which also helped make the drought conditions worse. Low temperature, normal low goes from 42 to 39. We're finally into the 30s. So there we go. Normal low temperature in the 30s. Not quite to the point you want to blow out your sprinklers, but you might want to be thinking about it. Here's our really good chance of rain on Wednesday and some showers into Thursday and then stuff kind of becomes spotty. These are ensemble runs, so some of the runs pick up storms, some don't. So it doesn't look like a widespread event as expected over the next few days, but it is unsettled and seasonably cool. The next big change comes Monday. The ridge is re-establishing itself over in the west, but since it is west of us, we have pretty stout north winds aloft. We can get those northwest winds, can bring in short waves, so you can get surprise storms kind of come together. That trough that we had, we'll see in a moment, kind of leaves behind a cutoff down here that's going to be interesting to watch. So let's do that. Here is our trough narrow, scooping by the state on Friday, a little secondary low in there. That overall trough leaves a piece down here that's spinning off of the Southern California coast as the ridge builds up over it. Here's our trough not moving far. It's just going out into the eastern two-thirds of this nation. Then that cutoff flow pulls on in, kind of helps keep us in this northwest flow until the ridge finally comes back around October night. For temperatures, the heat pushes away with that cold front on Wednesday into Thursday, and we stay quite chilly, relative to normal. As we go into Saturday, it starts to warm up a little in the northern part of Colorado. Then not too horribly warm temperatures return for Monday, another cold front on Tuesday. Warm temperatures to our west, kind of trying to push back in. We got Monsanto Moisturo, Arizona, and Mexico cooling them down, and then the heat finally comes back on 8th to the 9th as that ridge comes back. For moisture, all the moisture is here in the beginning, in a Wednesday and Thursday timeframe. Another push of air from northwest, kind of starts pushing that away by Saturday. So our chances of rain do go down as the deeper moisture leaves, but it's never completely gone. You can see that there is some moisture hanging around until you get into the middle next week or we dry out. Look at how much moisture is in Southern California, Arizona, and New Mexico now. It wouldn't take much to pull that back up here if a trough pulls in like this one. For surface precipitation, big rain and storms Wednesday into Thursday in the mountains, and then southeast Colorado, and then it's off in a way on Saturday. Just afternoon stuff might pop up, but bigger organized showers are not expected on into next week. So for the next five days, pretty good rainfall in the Northern Mountains, down to the Palmer Divide. Some of those are one and a half, almost two inches of rain. If you're on the plains, you get skipped. I-25 corridor is about a quarter inch to a half inch area. So yeah, see what we can get. Most of it's going to happen Wednesday. Then the snow, yes, we have some snow for higher elevations. Might get two, three, four inches above 10,000 feet or 10,500 or so for Wednesday night and Thursday morning. So looking locally for the next seven days, start out in the 60s, very chilly. Thursday is kind of cool and stable. Friday we start seeing a chance of showers come back in the weekend, then it fades out pretty quickly. I might, looking at the models, take away some of those rain chances for Saturday afternoon and Sunday that are on this graphic. Things kind of keep changing. Finally, we'll take a look at the tropics. Nothing is threatening the U.S. We have Bermuda here, and a major hurricane, Sam, is kind of arcing away and not bothering anybody. It's a fish storm, as some meteorologists will jokingly call those. Another one is tropical depression 20. It's supposed to become a tropical storm in a hurricane shortly and then fade out way out here, far from anybody by shipping lanes. For local news, frequent weather updates, check out the long amount of gear.com or have my column over there. This has been Chief Meteorologist John Ensworth. Keep looking up!