 Welcome to the weather forecast for the week beginning Wednesday, February 14th. Happy Valentine's Day, 2024. Chief Mayor Aldous John Ensworth here for Longmont Public Media. Friday, February 16th, just a couple days from now. We have a first quarter moon. It's gonna be cloudy and snowy so you probably won't see it but you will on Saturday. Sun is looking pretty accurate. There's a lot of sun spot activity going on right now. Looking at drought conditions things got noticeably better on the Northeast Plains and some of the western slope here. I still have some southern mountains that need some moisture. Looking nationwide, pretty large decrease of drought in many locations. It's kind of shrinking all over. Smoke, nothing to talk about. I've tried to align this animation a little better as they were hopping around a lot but we're moving in on the 7th and here's the 14th. So you see we just about got to a hundred percent or ninety-four percent statewide of snowpack. It's better than less so that's good. We're close to a hundred percent. We have to get up into this territory but we'll see. Looking at that last storm it really wasn't much of a mountain system at all. Look at that boulder got less than an inch in all locations. I don't think I see anything over an inch. Longmont did a little bit better with one's twos and three inch totals. If you pull into the state Firestone got seven inches and then up into this area over a foot around Greeley and in Well County. So there was a convergence line that set up right out there. Kind of trapped all the moisture and really dumped. So lots of snow. You can see that amount of precipitation here. Half inch to inch amounts. Pretty impressive for severe weather or even convection. Got chance of thunder in Northern California and out in the plains a little bit. Nothing on Thursday. A little bit here on largely Arkansas Friday but that's it. For Wednesday we have mountain snows up here. Thursday still western slopes. Maybe a little bit making it down into the plains fog in the morning. Things like that. Then Friday a little bit of snow will spread across the rest of the state. There's our snow chances for Friday. Our normals are going for 46 to 49 so we're starting to accelerate the climb expecting warmer temperatures. 19 up to 21 so we've left the teams as a normal low. There's our dip with that system. There's something more disorganized way out here around the 23rd 22nd of February. We'll see what happens. Moisture wise there's more moisture streaming into the west. The active southern jet bringing plenty of moisture in. Only real system we have is this Friday Saturday morning one. You can see this trough sweeping down from the north and a kind of a brief period of snow across the state. Over the next 14 days I can see going into the weekend had that little ripple come through and then this is the stronger trough right behind its ridgings so we'll warm up pretty quickly. There's a ripple coming by but that stays pretty much north of the state. A ridge right over us. On the 22nd 23rd there's that hint of something coming for us but the ensembles are not in agreement and then the ridge kind of digs back in with a cutoff bringing more rain to California. Okay temperatures this time the cold air source is Canada. It's not extremely cold but it's not Pacific cold either and see it coming down being caught by the mountains not able to get into the western side of the Rockies. It goes down into the deep south and then without ridging coming back we go back to above normal except where we have snow so although blues right in there are snowpack cooling. Moisture we have throughout the entire atmosphere. Petatable water pretty good a little bit above average is that low comes by then with the Canadian dry air comes right on down. Looking at dew points just look right in here you can see this little fetch of moisture at the surface pull into the system briefly and then super dry air from Canada comes down again. So here it's our system as it comes across the Rockies who is the front low creating some upslope and more upslope along the front and then it's gone. I'll let this go for a little bit but there really isn't anything big that next plume goes north of us so nothing there here comes that next cutoff low in California they are doing great with their water budget that comes in and gets the western slopes a little bit of rain on the plains on the 23rd so that could be just too warm for snow. So previous run of the model had one to three inches right along I-25 the latest run this morning cuts it back to a coating to an inch or two the three inch snow mounts kind of hug the foothills more closely so Friday night system is just not going to be that big as it looks right now the next 10 days a little bit more might come in on the next system on the 23rd so we have unusually warm fifties going into Friday we do have temperatures cold enough for snow and then we bounce right back into the fifties and sixties for the beginning of next week that's a holiday Monday is president's day so for frequent weather updates as needed longmontleader.com on great local news this has been chief meteorologist Chad Ninsworth urging you to keep looking up