 Welcome to Longmont Publix Media's forecast discussion for Wednesday through Saturday, February 26th to 29th. I'm Chief Meteorologist John Ensworth, and this is the weather discussion with just a little bit of science. And starting with science, this is a leap year, and so Saturday is a kind of rare, February 29th. This comes about because we have 365.24222 days in a year, which means once you've counted 365 days, the earth is a little behind. It hasn't gotten back to the same location in the orbit that it would, and after about 750 years, winter would be summer and summer would be winter. So we have to put a fix in there. Every year, divisible by four is a leap year, unless it's a century, ending with zero, zero, unless you can divide by 400, then you put the leap year back in, so that's not complex at all. But we have iPhones to help us get through that every year. So right now, Friday night, the moon is coming back into the evening sky, passing Venus. We have a waxing crescent rising nine o'clock in the morning, and get into the weather. We have our ridge in the west. The story for this whole winter has been where is the ridge and how long is it holding on, and it is still holding on. Here it is, big monster thing. We have a high down here near Hawaii, and flow coming out of the northwest down to the southwest and out, and at the surface, going to Wednesday, we have high pressure establishing itself under that ridge. So on the downstream side of the ridge, you get air piled up, and we get too much air around. So that's what we see, clear skies and calm conditions. Coming over the top of the ridge though, you do see a little bit of that northwest flow, snow moisture coming out of Alaska. It peers out in Wyoming and is done for by the time it gets here. The big picture of the next 10 days is how much heat there is. We have a little bit of showery stuff earlier in the week, and the temperatures just soar. This blue line is freezing, and we are seeing daytime and nighttime temperatures at or above freezing for much the next week. It's not until next week that we see some showers come in. Let's see why all this is happening. So with that ridge, with a little bit of snow moving out, we have downslope conditions here in the front range. We have not a lot happening right around town. There's the ridge coming out of the northwest, and then by Friday, the ridge is moving on shore and has gotten really strong. You see the high pressure that was near Hawaii is now moving towards California. The system that we just had is moving off into the Great Lakes. By Saturday morning, the ridge is directly overhead. We should see temperatures approaching record levels this weekend. So this is a great time to get out and enjoy. It's not until the beginning of next week that a new trough cuts into that. Plunging down to the southwest, the ridge is now being pushed off into the eastern states to give them some unusual heat, and we'll see a change tomorrow in some weather then. So here's our heat again through the weekend and the end of the week, and then next week some showeryness coming in. This is an ensemble run of models. So this is many different runs of the same model, changing the data just a little bit to see what happens, and you can see there isn't a lot of consensus as to what's going to come next week. And this last week, we saw almost the same pattern and it turned out to be difficult to figure out what was going to happen right up to the point that the snow started falling. So over the next 10 days, we see next week's unsettled weather bringing lots of snow out to the mountains and in the southern part of the state again, this is just the pattern. The low is going to be passing to us, passing to the south of us. And up here in the northern front range area, it's dry with sinking air. All right, so looking at temperatures. Friday we're up to the mid-50s. Saturday and Sunday we're at or breaking the 60s with really no rain at all, no snow. And next week, when the cool down does come, it's still only in the 40s, upper 40s, for highs. So we're more likely to see a little bit of mixed precipitation or even just good old rain when that happens. All right, before we wrap up today, let's take a look at one of our other big long-term weather predictors and that is what's called ENSO, or you might have heard El Niño. This is the El Niño Southern Oscillation. And this is a map of the temperatures in the South Pacific. Now there's easterly winds that blow around the Earth at the equator, and they're pretty strong most of the time. They push the warm water of the eastern Pacific out west towards the Philippines. And so with the warm surface water out there, we get cold water off of South America and off of Mexico. And that's kind of the normal condition. When those winds weaken or relax a little bit, the warm water sloshes back. It changes how the entire global weather pattern sets up. We have been in a weak El Niño, or modified El Niño phase for about the last two years. And what this graph shows you is just a simplified quick number as to how deep into an El Niño, or the opposite El La Niño that we are. And going off into the next year, you can see that index goes right down to normal. That center line is neither El Niño nor a La Niña signal. So we are trending towards what you consider more normal weather. So what we've had over the last 30 days is a lot of moisture from much of the center part of the state, and then dry air down in the southwest, dry air up in the northeast corner of the state. Then looking at temperatures, it's been kind of warm for the southern mountains, cool for the plains, and cool for the northwestern part of the state. So what this phase of the El Niño, or Enzo signal looks like, is normal for us. We have some more moisture up north, some more drier conditions south of the state for the next few months. And for temperatures, much of our state should be above normal with just the northeastern plains trending towards more normal temperatures. For more stories and more frequent weather updates, please go to Longmont Observer at longmontobserver.org. Get your stories about Longmont and all your neighbors there as well. So for Longmont Public Media, this is John Ensworth, Chief Meteorologist. Keep looking up.