 Welcome to the weather forecast for the week beginning Wednesday, August 12th. I'm Chief Meteorologist John Ensworth, following up public media. This week the moon is new on Tuesday the 18th. So it will be right around the sky with the sun and not interfering with the perceived meteor shower. This meteor shower peaks at the beginning of this forecast window Tuesday and Wednesday, but they are visible from mid-July all the way through mid to late August. So if you're out at night, get a lawn chair, maybe lay down east of town, close to midnight, a little bit after midnight, it's a better time of night to see these things. You don't need binoculars or a telescope. Just go out and look and you'll see little streaks of light zipping out of the east. We've been watching the drought get a little worse as the last month and a half have gone by. So let's keep that going. At the beginning of July, we had no drought conditions in the northern counties and a pretty good drought darting down in the southern part of the state. As we went through July, it closed in on us with a little bit of relief from thunderstorms that trailed over the same regions, dumping enough water to back this off a little. And then here at the beginning of August, it's closing in a little bit more around into the northern counties. So other places seem rain and relief, places around the northern mountains and the northern plains are getting a little drier. Nationwide we are at the edge of the worst of the drought and this is stretching from west Texas up to the west coast. And this black outline here is showing you where drought conditions are slowly getting worse. The heat we're about to see, that trend will continue. The rainfall that we did get over the last week, we saw some up in the foothills, some rain out on the plains. Right along I-25, it's pretty dry, western counties got nothing. So that's going to continue. What we have happening is a lot of dry air coming in from the ridge out west, sinking air in the ridge dries the atmosphere out. We do have Lydia down here, Hurricane, sending some moisture up into the southwest. And that just a little bit of tropical moisture creeping up with the heat that we're experiencing will give us some afternoon thunderstorms, they're just going to be widely separated. The ridge is centered right now in southern New Mexico, there's the high right there, we have some of the ridge poking off the west coast, extending up into Canada. This is a big high pressure system. There's a Lydia down here. And with the flow, we have pretty much winds straight out of the west. So it's coming over the mountains, sinking down, warming and compressing. This is called downslope flow and that downslope makes the heat a little hotter. For thunderstorms, the good stuff is out here where the jet stream is interacting with the moisture that is out on the Great Plains. Those little short ways are coming over the ridge. So the northern central part of the nation is getting some good thunderstorms. We had that small chance of thunderstorm, this light green shading here. These are normal everyday thunderstorms occurring with that moisture coming up out of the tropics. Going to Thursday, it's almost the same pattern. Things are just not changing very much in the upper atmosphere. What we also have is a lot of smoke coming over from fires near this time. There's some fires way out west. But the biggest fire is the Pine Gulch fire and then the Grizzly Creek fire just closed I-70 today. I don't know if that's opened up yet this evening. But what we have is a daily pulsing of the fire. When the temperatures get higher, the relative humidity is dropped and the fire can flare up, producing more smoke. So in the morning, you can see yesterday's smoke is trailing off into Nebraska and Kansas. The fires are experiencing kind of low activity. And as you get to the afternoon, the smoke plume is really coming over the mountains. So I've already been smelling it out there and you probably will get some smoky smell and some irritation on your lungs, nose, eyes until they start to get these contained. As of Tuesday, they're only about 7% contained. Looking out for the next 10 days, the normal high and low temperatures are dropping very slowly. They don't really start to drop week by week until we get into September. Most of the time, we are getting high temperatures slightly above normal, except for this little weekend period and we're going to talk about that in just a moment. As for rainfall, the ensemble does not show anything big and organized happening at all. We're going to be dry. Going out to Saturday, the high pressure system centers over Arizona and gets even stronger, if that's possible, that western lobe and the slob out here going all the way up into the New England states. It's a big summer high and you'll probably be hearing of airies in the southwest hitting 120 or more. This is real heat and we're underneath that ridge, so we're going to have some of that heat as well, but we now get a little more of a northwest flow. This little ripple up here, traveling in the actual jet stream up north, will cool us down and just give us a little chance of thunderstorm activity over the weekend. Taking a look at the GFS, though, for the next five days, it's a prediction of where rainfall is going to accumulate. Almost nothing. We have some down here or a little more of the tropical moisture is available. Then out here, we have the moisture that comes up from the Gulf all through the spring and summer. I'm going to show you now as a movie of precipitable waters. This is another way to measure how much water is in the atmosphere. Precipitable water is how much you could get out of the atmosphere if everything was right and a thunderstorm rained at its maximum. The white coloration is a normal amount of precipitable water. That's what we would expect on that day in this season. Greens are above normal and the brown colors are below normal. Obviously, with a hurricane down here, there's a lot of abnormally high precipitable water values in the atmosphere down here. We're going to watch as these plumes of moisture come up into the southwest. What's really interesting in this movie is the eastern Pacific is about to go crazy with tropical storms. Here we go. Starting out at the beginning of the forecast pair, we're really dry in Colorado, especially the western side of the mountains. Here's Alidia heading up off to the northwest and it encounters colder water and dyes. But there's some of its moisture plume making it up for the weekend into Colorado. So a little bit of a trough, a little more moisture, we get that little thunderstorm chance. Then into next week, another system doesn't even exist now so it doesn't have a name, really pumps a lot of moisture into the atmosphere off the west coast and that starts getting dragged by the westerlies into the US. It goes off to maybe die or maybe threaten Hawaii again. I'm not sure what it's going to do. Bigger storm, about a week, a week and a half from now. Even more moisture is being fed into the western states. Very extreme amount of moisture in this storm. That could go up to category three, four or so. At the very end of the month, another storm just popping onto the map there. So with each storm, the western US are getting more and more moisture. So there is hope that the rains will come back and we'll start to get more of that monsoon like weather later in the month. So for this week, we are hovering very close to 100 degrees going into the weekend. Our trough passes, a little more tropical moisture comes in just for the weekend taking us down to normal. And then next week we begin our heat climb again. We are at the beginning of a new month. NOAA has put out its forecast for temperatures and precipitation. The western US has the heat and for this month is expected to keep the heat. I feel bad for people in Arizona and Southern California. And that's really going to bake out there. The Midwest is going to remain cool as it has. So what you've seen is what you're going to get. For precipitation, the west stays dry, especially west of the Rockies. We're kind of close to normal around here. So for more local news and frequent weather updates, check out longmontleader.com. I've been Chief Meteorologist John Ensworth. For Longmont Public Media, keep looking up.