 Welcome to the weather forecast for the week beginning Wednesday, March 8th, 2023 is the chief meteorologist John Innsworth for Longmont Public Media. Tuesday the 14th, my goodness, talking about the middle of March already. Spring break and things are happening. We'll have the third quarter moon, so you have to go on the early morning to see it. The sun is quite active right now. Lots of sunspot complexes on this face of the sun and on Sunday there were actually a roar of visible all the way down to Estes Park in Cheyenne and Fort Collins. Which I'd known would have run out there and gotten the picture, but pretty nice. Looking at drought conditions from last week to this week, no change in our state. But when you look nationally, take a look at California here. A big chunk of it is now drought free or very minimal drought. So we are seeing just improvement everywhere. The entire western part of the nation is pulling out of this bad drought. So if we just get some great plains water, which certainly can happen in the spring, we might take a lot of stress off of the nation. So you look at our snowpack as it has grown and it's right there. Little gap of missing data. So we're taking a look at the whole state. It's about 120% normal. So great. We're still above. We're not hugging this purple edge quite as much. We've had a fairly dry time. We've had storms, but not as much moisture has come in. Soaps have not gotten that much. There's a few spots, top to half inch, a little bit out on the plains here. Nothing in the southeastern quarter. Looking at severe weather nationally. Interesting that there's something happening right around Salt Lake. Marginal risk for large hail in Texas and eastward on Thursday. And the next system is coming into California. So they have a chance of thunderstorms and more heavy precipitation. More on that in just a moment. Taking a look at Wednesday PM surface. We do have that system that last week worked like it could be a really big one. I mean, 18 inches of snow is predicted by the GFS. And now all the energy is up here in Wyoming, Montana, and moving past around the warm side of it and just not much happening. There's our severe weather chances down here. You can see some precipitation is happening in the drought areas. For Thursday, there's heavy rain, flash flooding possible. Amazing change in the west. And then for Friday, it just keeps on going out there with snow and the northern Rockies and up like that. So we get some for the western slopes, nothing on the eastern side of the divide. Not much in the way of smoke to talk about. The normal temperatures go from 53 to 56. So very quickly climbing 24 to 27 for our normal low. And our temperatures kind of bouncing all around in there, but they're kind of pushing the top edge until we get to the end. This is a big wet storm. Lots of snow, lots of precipitation. But again, it's way out there. We're turning eight to 10 days away. And we've seen, like this last storm, the whole thing vanished. It was Sunday, a Saturday night, we still had a big midweek snow storm. And then Sunday morning, gone. Just the GFS came in alignment and started agreeing with all the other models that never put the storm there. Looking at the water vapor satellite image, we can see the troughiness in the west. Subtropical jet here, moisture coming into California. Notable events in the atmosphere this week. A little trough passing through this morning. So we do have little chances. Flurries, you might see some ice like that. Big ridge out east. And so nothing much on the northeast plains, but it's nearby, so it could happen. Next Thursday, we've got a whole week forward. We will be in our spring break. Giant trough in the west. Another system going by. Looks too far north to me already. But take a look at all that snow wrapping around. Just very heavy precipitation. So we'll see. So over the next 10 days, we have the Wednesday-Thursday storm heading by to the north. Going into the weekend, we have a good strong ridge giving us a top possible warmth. There's another one even further north going through Canada and Dakotas and Montana. And the ridge comes back for the beginning of the week. It's going to be really nice. The ridge passes on Wednesday. Deep trough digging into California. Again, giving them another hit. That one rolls more into the south of the Four Corners area. But it's pretty significant. So we'll see what happens of that one. But in the story of temperatures, again, the reds are above normal and blues and purples are below normal. So everything is normalized. You can see there's a lot of cool air in the Pacific Northwest and bits of it push down like that for a cold front. There's Sunday into Monday. There's some real cold going across the top tier of states, but it skirts us. We are above normal. Getting into Wednesday. You should see the cold area coming into the west with the next storm. And it gets a hold of some real cold Canadian air and pushes that down as a front on Thursday Friday. Very cold here at the end of that week. Let's see what the whole snow thing looks like. So here's Wednesday into Thursday. It just kind of skirts past us. Look at all the stuff hitting California. That one goes north as well. You get a little rain actually there on Sunday because it should be warm enough for that. A little bit of southern Colorado activity with snow in the mountains. Another big system crashing into the west on Wednesday. There's our low forming line and then it pulls in a good bunch of cold air and drops a lot of snow for a while. It's a good three quarters to a day worth of snow. So we'll see if that remains a thing. The next five days, not much at all along the I-25 corridor. Maybe a little bit. We'll see what happens Thursday morning. Not much in the way of snow. Maybe a coating. Maybe a little ice. The next 10 days, that's more significant water. Three quarters of an inch to an inch of precipitation from Fort Collins down to Boulder. Pretty significant snow. It's about nine inches on the west side of Fort Collins. Mountains getting some good snow. So for the next seven days, how'd that zero percent get knocked out of the way? That's weird. We start with the 40s. We get to the 50s. Almost 60s on Friday. A little dip on Saturday, Sunday. I actually do get to the 60s for the beginning of next week. You're going to start to smell the spring out there. Just closing here, I wanted to show the next 10 days worth of snow. There's the next storm coming into play here. And that's on the edge of the green. So that's about 11 to 12, 14 inches of snow around here. But look at California. This is 36, 60, 62, I think that is inches of snow in the next 10 days. And I'm dug up the actual snowpack map. You can see everything's pretty much melted along I-25. The mountains still have up to 59 to 98 inches. A little spot of 98 to 197 in here. But much of the mountains in California. And the 198 to 197 might be a few small spots there where it's the next shade. 197 to 295 inches of snow. Current snow depth. Crazy amount of moisture. For frequent weather updates. And great local news. Check out LongmontLeader and BroomfieldLeader.com. This has been Chief Leader Elvis Johninsworth saying, keep looking up.