 Welcome to the weather forecast for the week beginning Wednesday July 22nd. I'm chief meteorologist John Ensworth from my public media This week we have the first quarter moon So it's back in the evening sky for binoculars and telescopic viewing Monday the 27th and it rises at noon and sets around midnight Also in the evening sky if you look west below or and so much to the left of the big dipper You can see comet Neil wise. I was able to see it last night from Northeast Longmont, I just had to put my arm up and block the nearby street lights and front porch lights, but if you do that you'll see the little streak of comet tail going upward into the sky and It is actually visible till almost midnight. It's just kind of skirting off to the right towards the north Let's take a look at the last three weeks in drought So this is back in June. You can see the northern tier of counties doing great The southern tier of counties doing very poorly as drought goes a Week later a little more drought in the southwest and up in the eastern Plains this week Little more in the eastern Plains a little more up in the west and now the northern counties are Becoming abnormally dry. The only complete county really that's drought free is Mulder where we are We're in the center of some of the wettest remaining soil in Colorado. I guess that's good news But we need water more everywhere Looking at Wednesday, we do have a little backdoor cool front over the northeast You'll see it that's gonna cause just a little chance of severe weather out there in a moment We have mountain showers in the afternoon pretty much what you've seen recently We also have some smoke coming in the flow around the big high We're gonna look at a movie in the 500 millibar level of what this big ridge over here is doing Actually should be that way with my arrow You can see the circulation coming around bringing smoke from various fires in the west across mainly northern Colorado So you I saw the haze today This guy had a kind of unnatural kint to the blue before the clouds came in a Lot of smoke coming up into the west and flowing off into the Pacific the other direction around a low off the shore For Thursday, we have pretty much the same thing this front's kind of pulled away as a warm front We are definitely getting hotter for a couple days. We have showers in the mountains in the afternoon the typical summer story Over the next 10 days Here are the temperatures and precipitation with the ensemble again if you're new to the channel here an Ensemble are multiple runs 20 or so here of one computer model called the GFS global forecasting system and They vary things slightly and see how robust a forecast is for precipitation They also get error bars for temperatures and you can see When there's a lot of agreement You're more likely to have showers, but this is the summer Thunderstorms wander around where they want to they miss a lot of people most days if you're not up in the mountains And our best agreement is out here next week Monday Tuesday You can see a drop in temperatures associated with a front coming in and a trough pushing in from the west The red line here is our normal high temperature. The blue line is our normal low And then they are beginning to drop they are both a one degree lower at the end of this 10 day period And they are at the beginning so yay here. We here we come to fall Okay, this is a movie of the 500 mill bar pattern will go through this a few times here's Thursday noon And what we're looking for is this big swirl of the high pressure as it kind of rocks between the Mississippi Valley and down in the Texas sometimes west Texas sometimes back out here for, Oklahoma Missouri again, but all the way around the west side you have this flow from the Gulf bringing moisture up in We do have just gonna start over again. Here's July 30th at noon back To the 22nd here at this trough out here in the west you can see it kind of rocks in a little closer Really amplifying the ridge for the end of the week then into the weekend This is called weakness in the atmosphere. We have sort of a Trophiness or lower heights out to the west of us and we move into The Tuesday Wednesday frame here even though there's a big ridge to our east The heights are a little lower out here to the west and there was a passing trough All that will help cool us down to give us a little better chance of showers Here's a big bigger trough coming in at the very end of the month this is the Precipitatable water, so the it's a measure of how much water there is in the troposphere So ground level up to the top of the weather producing layer in the atmosphere Greens are abnormally moist Compared to climate how? Scientological norms Browns are abnormally dry And you can see through this entire 10-day period or 9-day period We just have a lot of moisture is a big surge coming up across Texas out of the Gulf pushing up as a front coming through Thursday Dry over right behind it the moisture comes right back in so here we go again for this 9-day period moisture Pretty consistently above normal over the state with this big surge coming up across Texas so the Ingredients are there To give us a thunderstorms in the rain. We need at times over this next 9-day period This is not going to be record setting heat like we had recently and it's not going to be bone dry drought Mentioned that little backdoor front in the northeast for Wednesday and Around that front into the east there's a marginal one on scale of one to five and severity chances And severe weather out over Nebraska mainly a little bit of Colorado we're just gonna have general thunderstorms from here But look how much the nation from northern California all the way off the east coast has a chance of thunderstorms There's a lot of moisture being pumped into The United States and up into North America in general So with that moisture and with some passing Troughs to the north and a little weakness in the west we will get Most days at least mountain thunderstorms with some areas getting up to two inches two and a half inches of rain down here That's great for the southern mountains. They really need the precipitation there There are other mountains don't do too badly either the eastern plains where the drought was kind of spreading upward And it's minimal rain But there is some chance over the next five days of bringing in some moisture It's looking at though next week. We have our real heat right up front on Wednesday We dropped down to the 80s low 90s for the weekend There's 80s again Sunday, then we go to the low 80s Maybe even the 70s early next week. That'd be really nice better chances of rain with that moisture coming up in and that Traffiness to our west The Climate Prediction Center has put out an early look at what they think August is going to bring looking at overall patterns looking at the sea surface temperature patterns in for August we have abnormally hot from New Mexico, Texas up through the Midwest up in the New England in the mid-atlantic and a little above normal and most of Northwestern and Central Colorado as for precipitation will dry the normal to ourself moisture the normal to the north kind of normal here that does seem strange to me, but Well, I see a good river of moisture that's been established for weeks up across Texas Seems strange that would shut off in August, but maybe so So that brings us to the end take a look at Longmont leader for more frequent weather updates throughout the week and Discussion maps on the nuances of the summer weather that and the big picture doesn't change too much to day-to-day But we can always get some excitement some big hail now man So take a look at Longmont leader for that and Longmont Centric stories. This has been the weather forecast for Wednesday July 22nd and the week beyond chief meteorologist John Ensworth keep looking up