 Good day! This is a weather forecast for Longmont covering Thursday through Monday, April 2nd to the 6th. Jumping into the moon Saturday night, if you're out walking around, this will be after our storm. You'll have some nice illumination. 75% illuminated face of the moon rising in the afternoon and setting well after you've gone to bed with 12, almost 13 hours of the moon being up in the sky. But between now and then we have a storm to get through. You can see on the water vapor satellite image here where dry air is the reds and oranges over here like off the east coast and down in the Caribbean. You've got moist air in the whites, even very cold icy cloud tops in the purples and blues here. The grays and darker gray colors here are kind of a moderately moist air. You can even see mountain ranges and interesting features here, the patterns in there as the air lifts and drops over those ranges. But for us we have the big trough coming down the west coast. We have a flow of moisture coming across southern California and a deeper source of moisture coming across Mexico into the Midwest. Yes, there will be severe weather out there in a few days because of that. But for us we have that trough pushing on shore by Friday morning and you really have a large northern branch low pressure system. You can see these closed circles in the 500 millibar lines here and that trough extending down across us, but really heights are low across all of the western U.S. So it's going to be chilly. Lots of cold air in the west. Kind of a warm hot ridge we're pushing to the east, giving them a little bit of early summer taste before the cold reaches the east coast. Going six hour chunks at a time, midnight Wednesday into Thursday, cold front is pushing down into the northern tier of states. We have a lot of snow in Wyoming, some watches and warnings up there and into South Dakota. For us not that strong. Again the center of the cold air is going to stay kind of the north and so we're going to be on the boundary of the sort of conflict zone between the the jet stream of the colder up there and the warmer moisture to the south. Moving forward to Thursday night we have a lot more precipitation in the northern mountains, the western slopes and a little bit going on in the northeast plains as the front pushes down into New Mexico and the Oklahoma Panhandle. It's not well organized. You can see Lowe is trying to consolidate here in southeastern Colorado which will give us some upslope flow and help enhance the snowfall once the cold air arrives. Going to Friday morning, the front's pushed down, that Lowe's moved south as well. We still have some overrunning snow, kind of upslope snow here, some snow in the mountains. You can see that with that trough going by, we have some northwest flow now over the western U.S. and that's going to allow little ripples like this Lowe to come down and give us some additional precipitation later Friday night. Once that goes by the ridge comes back and we warm up very nicely for the weekend and beyond. Let's take a look at that 10 day trend. I've highlighted the freezing line here with the dotted line going through here. We're starting out really warm Wednesday going into Thursday. See the temperatures drop right down to below freezing Friday. They don't go far away from the freezing line, drop back down again. The GFS sees three distinct periods of precipitation. So we have, as temperatures are dropping Wednesday night into Thursday morning, we have a chance of precipitation error. It should start to rain, maybe a little bit of snow later on. Then the front comes through and we have snow for Thursday afternoon and we have that late night Friday chance as well. Other models show more continuous so it'll be interesting to see what comes of that. Beyond that we really warm up. Temperature is going far above freezing. Really nice. We probably should be seeing some 70 plus temperatures beginning of the week and then the end of next week, fifth week in a row, that we'll be seeing another storm system move in. Take a look at that in just a moment. Look at the GFS for what kind of snow we might get. With that jet stream coming in, again the boundary between the cold pool of air to the north and the warm to the south, we get the jet stream there and that's going to create banded precipitation over the state. So some folks are going to really win. There's six, eight inches of snow in the northern mountains there. On this particular run of the model, Longmont gets hit with about three inches of snow. That does not mean that's definitely what's going to happen. We could end up in this little gap between bands and just get a coating to an inch. One to three inches seems pretty good from the GFS. The North American model is much less excited. It sees the banding pattern. I've drawn the red lines here again too but it keeps temperatures kind of warm and doesn't bring a lot of moisture in for the plane. So here we just get a trace to maybe a lucky inch or a boulder gets maybe an inch. It's not really impressive. That'd be kind of sad but I'll take all the moisture we can get. The gem, the Canadian model, is trending the other direction. You can see some hint of the banding here. It's a little harder. Maybe I connected dots. I shouldn't have here you can see the mountains getting 10-8 inches just nearby and we get maybe two to four inches here in Longmont. Boulder gets a lot more. Maybe five inches or six inches of snow. So some disagreement between the different models and how they're handling the cold air and the moisture availability. We'll see. I'm calling for about one to three inches for Longmont. Taking a look at the cause next week's storm. This is early in the week so we're still under the ridge and nice and warm here. The center of the ridge is out here in the midwest or in the east but this truffle started digging as they have every week down the west coast and that'll be heading in for us by the end of the week. So maybe some more rain and snow then. Looking at the next seven days. Thursday cold snowy windy Friday chance of evening showers again warming up in the daytime though to where we would not get snow if we did have some precipitation occur if I could speak. Saturday we get back close to 60 some day and beyond 70 mid 70s possibly on day and Tuesday and then Wednesday we get that cool down and the hint of the beginning of our next system. For more local news and state news go to longmontobserver.org. You'll also find my weather column there for more frequent updates and graphics. This has been Chief Meteorologist John Unsworth for Longmont Public Media. This is the weather forecast for Longmont. Keep looking up.