 Welcome to the weather forecast for the week beginning of Wednesday, January 31st. This is Chief Mineral Justice John Ninsworth, for Longmont Public Media. Welcome to February with the third quarter moon starting up the month on Groundhog Day. That's going to be interesting. The sun is kind of quiet right now. It's surprising it's been very active. Everything's on the back side now. Looking at drought from last week to this. A little lessening of the drought to our southwest, but not much has changed. That's pretty typical for winter. Nationally, a little lessening of the drought in Texas. That's about it. Not much really changed. Looking at smoke. There's not much here except from the southeast. Looking at our snowpack. It almost got to 100% as an average. And now it's back off at about 87%. Statewide, but the western slopes are above 100%. So that's going to change for the next 10 to 15 days as storm after storm brings some snow to the low elevations and lots of snow to the mountains. Over the last seven days, it's been really the central, southern, middle part of the state that got anything. Denver and southward, Longmont got a sprinkle. It's just not much. Looking at severe weather or convection at all. There's a little bit coming into California and marginal risk in south central Texas on Friday. Looking at the systems, heavy rain. Just storm after storm has been hitting California. Like, meat is going up as rain, rainy system after rainy system has come through that state in Utah and Nevada. And this is happening again, so lots of precipitation. The thing is, temperatures are really warm. You're going to see that very above normal. And so, low elevations are getting rain rather than snow. We have heavy snow possible for the mountains on Friday and Saturday. A little mix of stuff on the plains. We'll see more detail on that in a moment. So this is a major storm coming up for the weekend. Exactly the wrong time for a snow day at school, but also too warm probably for a snow day. Water vapor shows tremendous amounts of water coming into the west coast. System passing by to the south on Wednesday. Sorry about that. So for Saturday morning, we have a low digging in, bringing a lot of instability into the region. Temperatures are really close to normal and just a little below normal here. There's no Arctic air coming down. This is stuff coming in from the Pacific. I got to get through this before I cough too much. For Saturday morning, you can see precipitation, rain, snow, line very close to Longmont. That's the GFS. And I don't have time to record, sorry. GFS here. This is the Canadian and it has a different look. It has a whole surge of moisture come back on Sunday. It isn't on the GFS. So the North American model or the Europeans seem to be hinting at this push. The GFS is not picking it up. So Sunday could be kind of stormy. Well, not stormy, but rainy and snowy and slushy as well. So Wednesday PM is our next trough coming in. Lots of Southwest winds loft and another system coming in on a Wednesday that kind of lingers into Saturday, but I'm not going to worry about that. So here's our ridge right now, causing way above normal. Temperatures way up into Canada. Here comes the trough Friday into Saturday. Almost cuts off down a little bit there. Really an unusual pattern. It just becomes this cutoff down to the southeast as a ridge jumps back into place on Tuesday. Another deep trough coming in. This is a very progressive pattern here. And that trough is approaching on Thursday. There's a little shortwave right in there. And there's a hint that this thing digs down in for the weekends. That's why we have a lingering stuff on into the weekend. So look at how high the temperatures are above normal. 12 to 30 degrees above normal for most of the nation. Going into Friday, you can see the cool air kind of coming in from the southwest. Look at the temperatures up here in Canada. They've run out of colors for how far above normal things are up there as we cool down a little bit for our system. And then that slips through cooling down the southeast again. It's been quite chilly in Florida for the past few days. And it's happening again. It's stream warmth up here. Cool in the west by the time we get to the Thursday or Friday system and into next weekend. For water vapor, you can see lots of water coming in. This is tropical jet here. It's really bringing lots of water into the west. That's why California is having all the heavy rain. You can see the large amounts of atmospheric water being brought around over the weekend. Here's the next system coming into the west. Another river of very high water values for precipitable water. And you can see for Wednesday, Thursday, it's looking really good there. I'm just going to cover this first storm in the dew points. This is surface moisture. You can see in the Friday, this is our source of the surface coming out of the gulf. You can see it really pulls around into the state thirties and dew points. So, yeah. Right where you get rain and slush. It's going to be a weird... We're going to see who gets snow and who gets rain and who gets a little of both. All right, so let's take a look at these systems. Heavy flooding rains coming into California. Much of the west getting more rain. It survives into Arizona and Mexico. Then it hits us. There's a low-forming lee of the Rockies with wraparound precipitation and snow. A lot of it looking like rain for the weekend, especially on the plains. Then the next system comes in. There's Tuesday into Wednesday. Arizona gets it again with some heavy rain. Low-forms pumping snow uphill for a Thursday, Friday. It looks pretty impressive, actually. We'll see if we maybe get a Thursday or a Friday snow day. There's that second bit rotating around for the weekend. So, for the next five days, you can see feet of snow veil up into the North Central Mountains and just above Grand Junction, down around Durango and like that. For precipitation on the plains, it's looking kind of dry right now. A quarter-inch to maybe less, 10-3-inch to a quarter-inch along I-25. Boulder getting maybe closer to a half-inch. The next 10 days, this is not, this is a 10-to-1 ratio. This is not 15-to-1. 40 inches, 38 inches down here. 18 throughout much of the mountains here. Even on the plains, this is probably our Thursday storm, giving us 2-to-3 inches, which isn't enough to close school, but we can see if that changes. So we have 60s, crazy. Going into the weekend, we cool to 46 for a high. That's not a good temperature for lots of snow, but night temperature is 31 to 22, so maybe some overnight accumulation. That's it for now. We'll keep, you posted a long-mount leader with a snowfall ground up as we get closer to the weekend. This has been Chief Meteorologist John Inthruth, urging you to keep looking up.