 for the week beginning Wednesday October 7th I'm Chief Meteorologist John Ensworth for Longmont Public Media. The moon hits third quarter so it's only visible in the morning sky Saturday October 10th moon rise just before lunchtime and sitting right after midnight. Let's take a look at the drought conditions in the state going all the way back to June 23rd we had no drought in the northern counties a little bit of drought in the southern counties going to last week we had worsening drought in the western slopes and then out here on the plains at our first exceptional drought showing up right around Longmont we're kind of in the mid-range for moisture but going to this week we now have exceptional drought beginning out in the western slope so it's still very dry and looking at the precipitation we got nothing for the last week but here's where the long term drought is right here and on the four corners states and up in the Pacific Northwest and our precipitation map like I said completely empty so what we have had for all the summer and now into the fall is this giant high-pressure system this ridge extending up and down the west coast and it's responsible for the heat very little rain and the increased fire danger and the fires that are ongoing you can see the circulation around this got a little funny little low out here but other than that the high is much stronger and it just is bringing the air around and around the west so we're going to put this into motion this is the next couple days of smoke forecast from the high resolution rapid refresh map you can see our fires here the Cameron Peak and the Muller fire up and coming across from Wyoming putting out big plumes of smoke that's kind of backing up against the front range west coast smoke is not really getting here but you can see as the high kind of shifts we're going to get a little more of a westerly flow so that thickest plume is now kind of heading up into Nebraska not quite as bad around here but there still is a good amount of smoke I'm going to show you a new tool out here we haven't talked about this here where we've talked about it on the astronomy update each month this is clear dark sky dot com and for astronomers it shows cloud cover transparency how much the sky is stable or how much the stars are twinkling but what they've just added is an hour-by-hour smoke forecast column it doesn't go out this far as the rest of the forecast does goes out about a day and a half in the future the blues and the light blues are relatively clean air and then the dark browns pretty understandably are the thicker smoke amounts and I think it goes almost to a black or dark red shading for the worst smoke so it's a nice tool if you want to know what when you're gonna go out and take your run or walk the dog take a look at clear dark sky see what that hour looks like so we have that high out in the west we have the ridge up the west coast we have a little bit of upper level moisture coming in to the central plains of northern Rockies is not enough for any precipitation though there's a funny little low swirling out there down here we're gonna talk about Delta a little bit but this is the new very strong hurricane forming off the Yucatan Peninsula so the next 10 days our normal high temperature is going to drop from 69 down to 66 and our normal night-time temperatures start to get down into the 30s this is the actual forecasted temperature and for the next five days or so we're staying above normal both for highs and lows after the weekend we get down to the low end of normal but even though it's gonna feel cold this is now normal so and for the first time in a long time we have a returning chance of rain this is an ensemble forecast and so they change this model's data just a little bit and how they calculate things and see if it's consistently predicts rainfall and it's got a lot of runs where you do have precipitation falling so let's put this in a motion taking a look at the upper level map and we're gonna watch our ridge get replaced by a trough but here comes Delta coming up into the gulf and then heading for Louisiana and just as it makes landfall around Friday we have the trough coming in for the weekend on the west it digs in over Colorado and if this holds we get what's called a cut-off low here so it slows down a little bit actually can stay around long enough to give us a chance of rain bringing a lot of cooler air then we have the trough another trough skirting by far to our north going on to about 10 days from now looking at the precipitation forecast completely drying the West for the next five days here comes Delta into the gulf they've run out of the normal names as they have one other time in history as we've gone to the Greek alphabet alphabet again the Delta but there is making landfall and going up into the US here comes our system for the end of the weekend into Monday for a moment the lobe is pumping moisture up slope giving us some rain and then off it goes again these things are pretty difficult to forecast cut-off lows can do their own things and go quicker they can not quite cut off as much and just zip on by so between now and the weekend this forecast will probably change significantly so take a look at it but let's take a look at temperatures over the same period you can see the reds and purples here are much above normal we saw that on the 10-day graph this is a lot of heat in the west very abnormal high temperatures the ridge heads out here comes the trough here's the hurricane making a landfall cooling things down briefly and lots of cold air in the west you can see it hitting the front range and the plains it's our rainy period at the beginning of the week the heat starts to come back when that next wave comes through the northern states and it pumps down the cold air to give us one or two chilly days around next weekend so over the next five days our precipitation is pretty much nothing as a sprinkle out there on the mountains then over the next ten days this game will change a lot because cut-off lows are just weird that way there's a few places getting over an inch of precipitation that's the blue shading that'll change every run but it's hope it's something cool and wet change in the weather is going to be great so looking out the next seven days we remain almost up at 90 degrees we've never hit 90 degrees after October 1st but we're skirting with it was 88 and 86 86 for Saturday the front comes in on Sunday giving us our chance of rain and we dropped to the 60s 30s at night take a quick look at the latest on Tuesday afternoon with hurricane Delta it's a category four hurricane is going to hit the Yucatan move up into the Gulf start to feel the westerlies and curve around making landfall somewhere in central Louisiana late Friday early Saturday morning this model run in this forecast is a little bit further west and it was just about 12 hours before when we had a closer hit looking possible for New Orleans New Orleans is not out of the woods this is still pretty pretty close it's within this uncertain cone right there taking a look at the ensemble map again another way to use computer models to run a bunch of times and get an idea of all the things that could happen and see it lingering out in the Gulf one even has a loop but this black line is sort of the average of all those and it's coming into central Louisiana at that time and this is a forecast again different models this time taking a look at how strong this strong will be it's starting out at category four here on Tuesday a lot of them keep it category four until it makes landfall coming into the weekend a couple of them are heading up into a strong category five a few of them have it weakening especially since it's got to go over land for a little bit in the Yucatan so something to keep an eye on this week some excitement again at the end of the week so for more local news and frequent weather updates check out the Longmont leader and longmontleader.com I've been chief meteorologist John Ensworth keep looking up