 Welcome to the weather forecast for the week beginning Wednesday December 30th. I'm chief meteorologist John Ensworth. I'm a new Microphone you can see it down the bottom of my screen here. So hopefully the audio is better than it's been for the last couple weeks Using the same graphic as last week Wednesday December 30th is our full moon at the very end of the month very end of the year And looking at drought This is a new graphic going from the 17th to the 24th, but nothing changes. So at least the drought conditions are not worsening they have been arrested by cool temperatures and some moisture coming back to the state West though some of the boundaries of the long-term drought have expanded a little bit in other states Looking at that precipitation the snow we got on Monday Amounts to just about an inch and a half across town and down in Boulder about an inch or so The precipitation over the last week Mainly in the mountains and that's been the theme for a lot of the winter and will be the theme for the next week to 10 days You can see half inch to one inch A monster is a inch and a half out there west of Colorado Springs and down in the southern mountains So what we have is a big trough down in the west The energy of this is really focused on in the Baja in northern Mexico, which is kind of unusual But we are on the dry side with north winds coming into the state Keeping us very seasonably cool another vigorous trough off the west coast is Powering a cold front pushing in to the western states You can see by Thursday morning lots of moisture falling down in Texas and Down up into the southeast and east coast and up in New England Just a large front big bigger system there and the Pacific Northwest in a lot of snow, too We are just high and dry in between and kind of remain that way Look at the normal high temperatures rising a degree over the next 10 days from 43 to 44 And now the minimum temperature, which was flat in the expected norms last week rise one degree to 18 so we've passed the Shortest day longest night of the year on the 21st when winter began and We're already seeing the recovery of the temperatures in average The actual forecast of temperatures over the next 10 days are deep inside this normal Range they do warm up nicer for the weekend But nothing abnormally cold or warm going on. We'll take a look at the New Year's Eve midnight Forecast at the end. You do see a few Places where there's a chance of snow One being Thursday into Friday One in the New Year couple next week. They aren't very organized. These are all passing shortwave troughs There's just not a lot of moisture. We'll see that in just a second So looking at the next 10 days. Here's our deep trough heading down into Mexico cutting off down there and then moving up another trough That's drenching the West digs way down into Arizona An old ridge comes back for the weekend and we warm up the little passing trough there gives us our one shot of a chance of Precipitation then it's kind of zonal flow there with the Air going from West to East straight across the nation. There's our next little ripple for next week Just nothing big going on And what we're missing is that atmospheric moisture We need a load to sit around long enough to really pull some moisture in you can see it kind of gets to the Rockies and then it's dry on the eastern side and as soon as the moisture moves in it's out and Replace by dry air the green is abnormally high levels of precipitable water and the Browns are Low amounts of precipitable water. We just don't get anything sticking around very long So looking at future Radar you could say or precipitation patterns were dry through Thursday There's a little system coming in and it fades out There's a big storm moving up into the Midwest and up into the Northeast We are still high and dry another storm moving into the Pacific Northwest And it fades out by the time it gets to the Rockies yet another one crashes the shore Some snow into our Western Mountains and then it fades out And this is sort of the pattern that we get there's a lot of snow in the Western Mountains But nothing east of the Rockies So over the next 10 days, that's the pattern we expect Get below the foothills and a long I-25 and it's pretty dry Mountains picking up a foot or more, which is fantastic. We need as much snowpack as we can get Over the next seven days, we hover around in the 40s Touch the 50s a little bit stay in the teens and 20s at night partly cloudy skies very low chances of a flurry now and then For New Year's Eve midnight Minute before midnight. It should be about 23 degrees Fahrenheit mostly cloudy skies Light west winds a chance of a snow flurry, but not much For frequent weather updates and local news check out long amount leader calm. That's where I have my weather column over there I've been chief meteorologist John N. It's worth for long about public media keep looking up