 Welcome to the Longmont weather forecast for the beginning of the week starting April 19th Roughly Sunday through Thursday. I'm chief meteorologist John Unsworth for Longmont public media This week we hit the new moon on Thursday None of the moon will be visible because it'll be in serving line in the sky with the Sun that in front of the Sun, but above or below it Moon rising will be about the same time that the Sun rises and sets Let's look back at this big storm than we had This week. This was a pretty epic historic Storm great April dump of moisture at least for Boulder County and Larimer County. They are the big winners in Colorado The rest of the state got some precipitations. There's snow elsewhere But this was really the bullseye and Longmont was it's just about in the middle of it Biring or graphic or mountain induced Additions to the snowfall, but taking a look across here. You can see Denver Sort of in the one inch three inch four inch area and even the foothills up above Denver got four to six, but if you go up around Longmont, it's about 10 12 13 14 inches of snow going up The hills above us. There's 20. There's 30 inches right there Where my arrow is pointing so Boulder kind of Did about the same as Longmont this time, which is unusual maybe an inch more We just had a good jet induced band across this part of the state Moisture was available. The left was there. The cold air was present north of Denver Everything came together. My forecast just got totally blown out of the water It was much more snow than I called for even for around four columns. There is six eight 12 inches of snow Up in red for the lakes. I think they got about 12 to 14 16 inches of snow up there Zooming in on Longmont Itself and I didn't take a look at Boulder first down here. There's some more details with 10 12 13 inches it looks like a 16.9 in there It's kind of hard to read the numbers overlapping each other in town. We have seven eight 10 12 inches of snow, so I thought there was a 13.2 in there, but 13.4 I'm not picking it out of the numbers Very impressive storm This also set a record. This is a graphic put out by the forecasters of Boulder They note that the town of Boulder has received 145.9 inches of snow As of the second morning of the snowfall Which sets the all-time snowiest winter on record for that town Beats 1908 1909 142.9 inches And they probably picked up about two three In additional inches of snow that day and it's not over. We could still get more snow in April and May The latest snowfall Measurable snowfall goes all the way into the early Days of June, so yep, we might set a good solid record that will take a long time to break Let's take a look at the weather set up for this week It's nothing like last week. It is a much quieter week. We have a trough In the western us you can kind of see it in the water vapor satellite imagery here The dry sinking air are on the reds kind of orange colors and the rising air moist air is colored white ice and high clouds kind of look pink or blue And we have a low pressure system off of california little trough south of it in a ridge on either side You can see the same pattern in the 500 millibar map again This is the height above sea level you have to go to find 500 millibars, which is half atmospheric pressure roughly And where there's a lot of cold air you don't have to go as high whereas a lot of warm air Or right sinking air compressing warm air then you have Higher heights you have to go higher in the atmosphere to find the Half pressure level because there's more air there. So too much air So there's our low off of the coast here and what's going to happen is this general little trough in the west won't move much We're going to see an animation watch this go by but we're going to get little impulses Passing the state that'll kick off a few showers around then rain showers though Down for the lower elevation snow for the mountains. So here we go. We're going to watch this movie play out Here comes our trough for saturday night into sunday So you have some showers at the beginning over the weekend And then we have another little low coming in South of the main jet it passes on wednesday That's Tuesday into wednesday And look at this nice warm ridge moving into the state Here's another ripple passing the north side of the state for friday Into saturday with another ridge beginning to really build on the west coast pushing in that is quite a change in trough to ridge Going out we're gonna go out 10 days here You can see this giant low off in the east and we uh end up the 10 day period with that big ridge out west For sunday night beginning of this video Forecast period we have a little bit of showeriness with that trough traveling through Not a lot happening at the surface or some kind of Washing out fronts at the surface a little low up here a little low around vegas, but these aren't really Well organized storms like this one down here in texas will be kicking off some severe weather in the southeastern us Look at the big 10 day picture. Here's our freezing line the dotted line going all the way across and some of the error bars do allow for below freezing temperatures next weekend But the most confident Uh forecast has the temperature over the next 10 days remaining above freezing all the way through Does that mean we're out of the woods for snow or frost or Freezing conditions again, of course not definitely could happen again But right now the next 10 days look really good with a little chance of something happening Saturday sunday next week Here's Saturday nights passing trough and the showers that's before this video is going out and then we have a Second trough passing tuesday wednesday you can see the ensemble model here multiple different runs trying different solutions to see how confident the forecast is and it's pretty confident that a lot of the runs have showers occurring that night less so between those two periods And then the second period being friday saturday when the next trough comes down across the northern part of the state It paints some snow in there. So it's possible Looking at the gfs for the next five days The snow that does happen as these little troughs passes pretty much in the higher elevations in the mountains not really sure why it's painting a coating out here in the town, but I wouldn't uh put any money on that For precipitation total we have less than a quarter inch On the northern front range and we're we're we're fine. We have lots of water We got an inch and a half of liquid out of our snowstorm this week Some of the mountains here veil ground junction going down to color off springs and polymer divide Are pulling maybe an inch of liquid in the next five days So that's good. The southern mountains are going to parts of the state are going to need the moisture We'll see that in just a moment. We're going to check our current state of drought Looking out the next seven days There's 60 70s in the middle of the week a little cool down next week temperatures approaching freezing i'm just giving a small chance of showers Especially tuesday and then friday and saturday Little chance of a passing something monday wednesday and thursday Pretty quiet time just a good time to get heartier plants out there. I think most um Gardeners say don't put anything delicate in your garden until after mother's day All right taking a look at the drought index northern colorado and the central mountains are doing fantastic We are drought-free with all the water that we need the southern tier of counties southwestern Counties in colorado do need more moisture. This has sort of been persistent all winter long and maybe this passing uh Ripple and the atmosphere or two will give the southern counties a little more water Certainly not enough to erase this but every little bit counts Another thing i'd like to check on is the enzo or el nino El Nino southern oscillation index and just a little bit of meteorology 101 El Nino is a condition where the Uh east release at the equator around in the tropics to report They're called east release because they're blowing from east to west Relax a little bit. They're still blowing to the east because that's what east release do But they don't blow us strongly as normal and because of that high pressure system a high pressure kind of builds in the uh West low in the eastern pacific and you get a weakening or a sort of a backflow here Of warm water and the warm water Anomalously warm water builds up in the eastern pacific So again, that's just these colors are Temperature compared to normal this is not doesn't mean it's hot necessarily. It's just unusually warm That's an El Nino condition La Nina is the opposite where the east release blows stronger you get the warm water pushed out As high pressure here Blows to the low out west you get the extra warm water way out west The cold water up wells from deeper in the ocean yet colder water way out into the central pacific here So where are we right now? Are we? El Nino or La Nina? Right now these are the sea surface temperature anomalies and they're all just a Very close to neutral. Maybe a touch warmer than normal. There isn't any strong and so signal at all So whatever we could call normal weather is what you'd expect for colorado for the next many months Uh normal includes all sorts of interesting things like big storms and snow storms and Heat waves and things like that. That's all normal. Um, we just don't have a Can expect a bias one way or the other based on either El Nino or La Nina From our local news and frequent weather updates Please visit the longmontobserver.org. I'm chief meteorologist John is with for Longmont public media. Keep looking up