 Welcome to the weather forecast for the week beginning, Wednesday, March 31st. We're at the end of another month. I'm Chief Meteorologist John Inseroth for Longmont Public Media. Sunday, April 4th, we will have our third quarter moon, last quarter moon, rising in the early morning pre-dawn sky and setting just about noon. Well, let's take a look at the good news and drought. We've had so much water hit the state that some places are two to three inches, even up to five inches near Fort Collins. And some of this is still melting, some of it's still yet to be registered on their devices that measure the soil moisture at different depths. But this is last week and you can see a huge amount of the more severe drought conditions that are eliminated from the central part of the state all the way out east. Looking nationally, you can see that big bite taken out of the drought conditions. We already have lessening in the northern Rockies and the piece goes away right there on the east side of the Rockies. So this is just great. We're bringing in the water and we're getting some improvement. Now, I found a new product. This is a prediction of drought conditions going forward. And this is seasonal. So this takes us up to June 30th. And Noah is expecting drought conditions in the west to pretty much still hang around. We'll see if that happens. This was one big storm that gave us the precipitation, something like that could happen again. Overall, though, they think it's going to be kind of dry. So over the last week, we have had very little precipitation out on the eastern plains. We had up to half inch to an inch in the mountains. Keep it coming. For Wednesday noon, we see the beginning of a lot of niceness. This is now spring coming on the way you are used to feeling it. The entire west, high pressure, every place. And looking aloft by the end of the week, now much changes there with a ridge that switches from over in the western states to kind of curving across the great plains in the northern states. But we're still right under the ridge axis from maximum heating and great weather. So this little green bar here at the beginning is our departing storm on Tuesday. Just put a little bit of snow trace to quarter inch or so on grassy surfaces on your car, trash cans, and the roads are just kind of damp. The warm up from that is very rapid. By Thursday and Friday, we're reaching above normal temperatures. You'll know that normal is now reaching 60 and the normal low at night is hitting freezing. So we're saying goodbye to winter. Could we get a really good cold shot? It's possible, but you can see this forecast map takes us all the way into the end of the first week of April. So it's really hard to get super cold anymore. You can see complete dryness until about Monday, Tuesday next week. It starts to see some little systems affecting the state. We'll look at those in the animation in just a moment. So over the next 10 days, there's a departing Tuesday storm quickly replaced by this big ridge. And even though a little bit of low, the weakness in the pattern drifts by. It's not enough to change anything. The big dominant ridge. So it's going to warm up the west and most of the nation in the week to come. As we get to the middle of next week, we do start seeing trough coming in the west that heads down our direction. That does not look like a big precipitation producer. It's a nice big open wave and off it goes. Another one is following in on its heels, but we'll see what they do. So there's our cold temperatures that we have now being pushed off to the east. You can see that the southeast, east coast, even Florida, are going to get some real abnormally cold weather while we reach up into very abnormally hot weather. So sea salt and the sea salt is tilting now. Looking at precipitation, there isn't much to show here because a Tuesday storm is out of here kind of merging with that. And then it's just boring, high pressure weather off into there's Friday, there's the weekend. There's just not much to show here. Alright, so over the next 10 days, for precipitation, we might get some of those showers middle late next week. This is 10th of an inch, less than a quarter inch, definitely. And looking at snow for a long amount itself, nothing there for the next 10 days. Stuff in the nearby foothills, stuff in the higher mountains, but this is going to be a very quiet 10 days ahead. So looking in the next seven, we see 50s on Wednesday, climbing to the 70s on Thursday and Friday. Some of the model data is even showing mid to lower 80s for Saturday and Sunday and almost 80 on Monday and a little bit of cool down starting Tuesday with one of those next little ripples coming in. We'll end with a look forward into this next month, see what the Weather Service is expecting and they're expecting a pattern that very much mirrors what we're starting the month with is a big ridge. So we have a big dome of abnormally warm air and we have below normal precipitation from the west and down into the southeastern part of the nation for frequent weather updates and local news, check out Longmont Leader. I've been Chief Meteorologist John Insworth. Keep looking up.