 Welcome to the weather forecast for the week beginning Wednesday, September 23rd. I am Chief Meteorologist John Insworth for Longmont Public Media. The very first night of our forecast window here, we have the first quarter moon with it rising just after lunch and setting just before midnight. It would be beautiful to go out and take a peek at. We've been looking at the worsening drought conditions over the last few months. And this is last week's and then this week's drought monitor. You can see a little bit less drought on the northeast and eastern plains. We had that inch, two inches of rain about a week and a half, two weeks ago, and that did lessen drought conditions. It's still pretty bad. Statewide in the western slopes, no improvement out there. Looking across the nation, we have from Wyoming down to Nevada and Arizona, Colorado and West Texas all getting pretty dry. Over the last week, from Fort Collins to Colorado Springs, really wasn't any rain at all. This is the driest seven-day rain total that we've had in these briefings. A little bit way out here near the Utah border, but up on the Wyoming border, but just not much to speak of. Of course, we have the smoke around. And what's helped with the smoke conditions is that we are now in a more progressive pattern. The troughs and the ridges are beginning to move across the nation. Wind speeds west to east are increasing. So the smoke is blowing on out, heading out into the North Atlantic and not pooling in the West like it's been doing. So you can actually see these little fire sources in California, I think up here in Oregon, and here's the Cameron Peak fire source right there. It has been flaring up as well. We have a circulation around tropical system beta. I think it's now just about to lose tropical storm characteristics as we record, but it's bringing some of the smoke all the way down into Mexico. Well, this is Tuesday and then Wednesday you can see the local smoke merging with some of the California smoke heading up into the northern plains. And then for a Thursday morning, a new batch of smoke coming out of the West, local smoke kind of coming to the southeast and make their front range kind of nasty again on Thursday. But we do see normal temperatures are dropping 76 down to 71 degrees for a normal high over this 10 day period 46 down to 42 for our lows. But throughout this entire period temperatures are above normal for the highs and above normal for the lows. We just have this bias upward because of that big ridge in the West and it's going to be so dry. It's really interesting just a few days ago. The GFS showed a big cutoff low very much like the one that brought snow to us a couple weeks ago forming again in the four corners area. And that was going to bring an inch or two of rain on Sunday. It's completely gone from the model now. It was just one of those old fantasy storms that sometimes the models create. So looking back at Tuesday, you can see our big ridge. There's the highest center down here, big ridge going all the way up into Canada. There's that little bit of a trough coming into the West. You probably saw some clouds building up over the foothills on Tuesday afternoon because of that. Then Saturday, that trough that was going to cut off and make a big storm here is just zipping on by to the north. That's the creature right there, but it's not going to be in the vicinity of Colorado for more than about a day and a half. And the ridge is sitting off the California coast waiting to come back. Looking Monday noon, you can see another trough coming in. The ridge is strengthening up to the West. And that's putting us under Northwest flow. Northwest flow, when there's more moisture around, we can get more interesting afternoon storm flare ups, chances of rain, but the lower atmosphere is so dry that that's just not in the books for us right now. But we'll get cooler temperatures because the air is coming from the north. So let's take a look at a movie of the same progression over the next 15 days. Watch the ridge out here in the West going into the end of the week. And we are coming up Friday into Saturday. You can see the trough skirting past us to the north. The ridge getting strong out in the west again. Here comes our beginning of the week trough cutting down, really tilting the air flow. So even if we're dry, we will be cooler. But that ridge just stays out there all the way through next week. We'll see the heat come back. It's just a very persistent pattern. We've seen that now for almost two, two and a half months anchored to the west. A giant ridge out there. And looking at temperatures over this time period, the reds and the pinks here are above normal. And you can see coming into Sunday, there's the cool air starting to come down with that trough in the northwest. The trough passes and we get a little cool down right east of the mountains. It passes on down to the south. We warm up for a day. Monday, Tuesday, next week, we see another shot of cool air coming in, backing up against the mountains. West of the mountains really hot, out on the plains really cool. That cold air really is going to be a newsmaker out in the eastern half of the nation. But waiting in the wings is that heat right behind it. And here comes the record heat again for the long range forecast with pinks and like that. So we just can't quite shake the heat of the summer. Show you moisture over the next five days, a little bit in the west, a little bit in the south, nothing on the eastern plains. Over the next 10 days, the southern mountains pick up a little bit more rain. But again, not much. An interesting graphic here is the next 10 days, a nationwide precipitation toll. You can see the eastern U.S. not only gets cool, it gets a lot of moisture. This is tropical moisture down here in the Gulf and coming up into the southern states. But the outline of this giant ridge is just easy to see in a big area of really no rain at all. So looking out into this very next week, we get back to the 90s. We add at least a couple, maybe three more days of 90-plus temperature to our record this year. Then for the weekend, we cool down to the 80s. We see 70s next Tuesday. But beyond that, we warm up again. Just finish here quickly with the tropics. We have Hurricane Teddy swooping past the east coast, but not impacting the U.S. It's going to scrape Canada up here at the beginning of the forecast window. Here's Beta. We've run out of the normal list of names for tropical systems. So now we've gone to the Greek alphabet for the second time only, and we're going to be working way through Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and like that is the storm's rack up. This one's moving slowly across the Gulf Coast, dumping a lot of rain in places that have already had a couple tropical systems come in. So for more local news and frequent weather updates, take a look at the Longmont Leader at LongmontLeader.com. I've been Chief Meteorologist John Innsworth for Longmont Public Media. Keep looking up.