 The weather forecast for Longmont, Wednesday through Saturday, April 15th through April, Chief Meteorologist John Insworth for Longmont Public Media. Friday, April 17th, we'll have just after third quarter moon in the morning sky, so you got to get up early to see it. It rises at 2.32 am, so most people aren't going to see it unless you're out and about. The big story is all the cold air flowing down through the center of the nation this last week, and in one more pulse for this week, Tuesday night there's still a lot of cold air in the northern plains and down into Texas. We're here on the edge of it, and contrary to what we saw in the models last week, some of that cold air has pushed over to the four corners area in northern Arizona. That's all driven down by a big trough dominating the entire nation with a north flow coming straight out of Canada. And for Thursday PM, a little spoiler alert, that's our next storm, the cold air will be pushing down again, so we have a cold front hitting the mountains and going down into the Texas Oklahoma Panhandles with some warm air up ahead of it. It's not as large of a cold air pool, but it's still pretty substantial, stretching all the way back up here, covering most of Canada and the remnants of the previous cold front out in the eastern U.S. So for Wednesday night, we have our next cold front pushing down. We see low pressure kind of collecting in the southeastern part of the state, which is a good place for us when we get that upslope flow with a little fetch of moisture from the Great Plains overrunning that cold air, and it's snow time. On Thursday morning, the cold front is now down to the southern part of the state, the low is still there, kind of our messy low configuration here, but the dominant one is this one here. And you can see the upslope flow really taking over, northern mountains, northeast plains, northern I-25 corridor getting lots of snow. This is all powered by a ripple in that overall trough that we just looked at. We even got a little cut off low off of the California coast, but the main thing for us is this big trough as it slowly passes over about a day and a half time. The GFS ensembles, which have multiple runs of the GFS with little tweaks and changes show a lot of agreement that we're going to get 24 hours to 32 hours or so of precipitation with some precipitation even Wednesday night, but when it's a little warmer, it'll have the former rain. You can see the cold air doesn't last as long, and we rapidly jump up to above normal temperatures for the weekend and into next week. So hang on, you'll be able to get out and take a run and walk the dog soon. The 10 to 1 ratio of snowfall up through Friday PM from the North America model has a pretty impressive amount of snow, about 3 to 5 inches right in here. You can see it once again, just like the last storm, a strong gradient of snow up to a foot and the nearby foothills right along I-25, around 4 columns, it's just an inch to 3 inches or so, maybe 5 inches on the western side, and then southern parts of the state get skipped. For the GFS, very similar pattern, a little stronger mark in the foothills here with more snow in the northern Rockies, higher elevations in the southern Rockies, but southeast gets missed, and we have really tight gradient. Like over in Lyons, we might have 7, 8, 9, 10 inches of snow, where over in Firestone it's 1 to 3. So we're right in that area, very tight gradient across the town. Looking at the ever-exciting gem, the Canadian model, it's gone crazy with snow again. This yellowish green thin line here puts it at a foot, and so we're right on the edge of a foot of snow. I guess it's not impossible for Boulder and Lyons to pick up a foot, but it's probably not that much. You can see up here two feet of snow in the northern mountains. This looks very much like the GFS pattern. So once again, lots of snow sitting here with this little dip of cold air coming through, going way out into the distance. We can see general storminess, but temperature is staying above this blue freezing line, so that will be rain, even if the ensembles paint a little bit of snow there. Looking out 10 days of the snowfall, the lower elevations don't get much more, but the mountains just to our west, not far away, maybe top 16 to 24 inches of snow around Estes Park and right for the lakes and like that. Look at the whole week. We've got our dip of cold air for Thursday. We have rain maybe starting with the cold front, passing 5, 6, 7 o'clock at night Wednesday. Rain starts about 9 o'clock, snow change over happens about midnight to 1, snows all day Thursday. We're getting probably 3 to 6 inches of snow. Very similar pattern to what we just saw for Easter. And then that trails off around sunrise on Friday. We get above freezing, so you'll get melting off the roads. The roads are colder than they were for Easter, so you'll probably see more slush, more snow buildup out there. The weekend, we shoot up to 55 in the mid 60s for Sunday and then even touch 70 for Monday before some showers and a little bit of cool down comes back Tuesday next week. For more local news, take a look at the Longmont Observer at LongmontObserver.org and you'll get more frequent weather updates and charts and maps and even precipitation totals after the fact at LongmontObserver.org. For Longmont Public Media, this has been Chief Meteorologist John Ensworth. Keep working up!