 Welcome to the weather forecast for the week beginning. Wednesday, February 21st, 2024. This is chief mural, just John Ensworth for Longmont Public Media. Got a full moon coming up on Friday, the 23rd. Sunspot activity is a monstrous sunspots here, but the rest of the face of the sun is kind of quiet. Looking at drought, we have seen a significant amount of relief, drought reduction in the southern mountains. And it's looking kind of okay on the plains again, and up into the northwest mountains. So, yep, just keep getting the moisture coming and we'll be fine. Nationwide, the overall trend is towards slightly less drought across different regions. Smoke, nothing really to talk about. All right, let's take a look at the snowpack as we go through January into February and too far. Too far again. So here we are, the 21st. And we're at 97% snowpack, statewide. Looking at the western slopes, it's in the 130, 140% or so. So we're low on the plains and above normal in the mountains, which is good. Looking at the last storm that we had Friday night, which was really slick for me. And I ended up getting up a new set of tires because I went right through an intersection. Didn't hit anybody, but just lay down my horn and went. So we had about an inch and a half, almost two inches in the Longmont area. Boulder pulled about three, four. There's five, almost six inches here. Much more normal type storm than those specific lows we had. You can see how much moisture came down, largely in the northern and central mountains. But that's a lot of moisture, but some out onto the plains. Looking at severe weather, we have a marginal risk south of Chicago there. And then on Thursday, still in the Ohio Tennessee Valley and then down in the southeast on Friday. All right, looking at the surface, we have snow ongoing Wednesday, Wednesday night. Some rain showers, maybe mixed with snow Thursday morning down on the plains, but it's not going to be very much. It's mainly a mountain system. And then Friday, we're high and dry and warming up again. The normal is 48 to 51. Nighttime normal is going for 20 to 23. The climb is coming on fast. Here's our chance of showers once a night into Thursday morning. And then a pretty good chance of something big. Tuesday, Wednesday, next week. Lots of variability. You can see it's different runs of the ensemble have different timing on this. It's a week away, so yeah, we'll have to see. Plenty of atmospheric moisture going on. It's a subtropical jet here and very dry down here. The notable is that Tuesday, Wednesday storm. You can see it in some runs, it's been a cutoff low that goes slowly. And here it's an open wave that goes by kind of quickly. But let's just step through this. So Tuesday PM, rain showers start changing quickly to snow overnight and then just pretty heavy snow, Wednesday, Wednesday noon, continuing into Wednesday evening. So we'll see. Let's take a look at this is a later run of the GFS. So you can see the trough here. We have a little ripple going by. For the weekend, then kind of ridging in the West with really warm temperatures. You can see the trough starting to come down for Tuesday, Wednesday, digging in, swooping right through. There's a little cutoff there, but that's after it passes us. And then a ridge comes back right afterwards. So we'll warm up very quickly after that system. And we're out to March 2nd and nothing really big. There's another ripple right there. So let's take a look at temperatures. This is two meter temperature anomaly at departure from normal for each spot for that time of day and time of year. And you can see it's very warm way above normal, except for the snow here in the mountains. Most of the nation. And then here comes the cold pouring down into all of the West with our extra cold little shot of Arctic stuff coming right down the plains, swooping over. This is now Friday next week. And we warm up again by the end of the week and the cold air is making it down into the Gulf and Atlantic. Atmospheric moisture is precipitable water in the model. We are very dry at the start of this. Let's just see what happens with our Tuesday, Wednesday storm dry right through here on Monday. And then here comes this big surge out of the Southwest. And we moisten up very nicely before that cold front sweeps it all away. Bone dry air comes in after that. Looking at dew points, it remains very dry at the beginning. You'll see the atmosphere moisten up as the storm pulls together. It's brief, but it's enough to give us precipitation. Extremely dry air here for Monday. And here comes the moisture out of the Southwest and some of it being pulled in from the Southeast. Right, there's a ribbon of high dew points and then through comes the dry air. Here's our Wednesday into Thursday morning system at the beginning of the forecast window here, not very small. And then dry through Sunday. Very nice. It's going to be a beautiful weekend to go outside and do anything. Monday, you start to see the system come together. And there's the low. You can see placement at low. If it goes for the south, we get more snow. If we go north, it'll be a dry slot and rain and then snow. So yeah, we'll have to be watching where that low sets up and travels. So the next five days, not much. This is Thursday morning rain chances, snow chances, nope. And for the next 10 days, it's pretty good water, half inch to three quarters of an inch of liquid right along I-25 Longmont area, Boulder, a little closer to the .75 measurements. So it's the four inch or so, four to five inch snow amounts with Boulder up more like the six to eight inch snow amounts. So yeah, it's looking like this next strong could be pretty significant. So fifties and then cooling to forties on Thursday with that little system coming through rain, not snow. Fifties and sixties, sixties, upper sixties, maybe is even possible, but at least mid sixties Sunday. And then cool down as we head for the Tuesday night system. Check out Longmont Leader for frequent weather updates and lots of great local news. This has been Chief Miro of this time and it's worth urging you to keep looking up.