 Welcome to the weather forecast for the week beginning Wednesday, August 26th. I'm Chief Meteorologist John Insworth for Longmont Public Media. This week we start off with a full moon on Wednesday, September 2nd. It'll be a hazy, smoky moon, but it will be up and bright all night. We've been watching for the last couple months the growth of our drought conditions in the state. About a year, year and a half ago we were completely drought-free. The remnants of that drought-free area were up in the northern counties back in June. But as we moved through July and August, other than some relief created by some thunderstorms, we just kept seeing it grow. So now in Boulder County, Larimer weld, it's a severe drought, D2 on this scale. And we have worsening drought conditions out where the fires are in the west. So are we going to get some relief? I think so, at least temperature-wise. And we will see some water come in, so let's get into that. Out on the national level, long-term drought has been relieved in the southwest with some of the monsoon rain and additional moisture that's come in off the Pacific over the last few weeks. So that's good news, but we still have a long-term drought, right around, centered on Colorado. Over the last week, you can see the front range from Fort Collins down to Colorado Springs here. You see very minimal amounts of precipitation, almost nothing around Denver, literally a little bit more in the foothills. Somewhat significant rain has occurred out on the plains and down around Colorado Springs, but the west bone dry. Let's take a look at a visible satellite image. This is from Sunday. You can see at that time we had two tropical storms, Marco and Laura down here. You can actually see in the visible satellite this wispy gray coloration of the smoke building up in the west. The big theme is this high pressure system right around the Four Corners area just kept cycling the smoke around and around. So by Monday, you can see it's even thicker, pouring now up and towards the Great Lakes. Marco made landfall and Laura's moving past Cuba. And then by Tuesday in the morning, you can see this pretty thick smoke sunrise and stretching up into the northeast and Laura is now gaining strength and we'll cover Laura in just a moment. If I pull back to show a large chunk of the northern hemisphere here, this is the smoke model I've put in, arrows showing the direction that the smoke is migrating around. And what's really interesting is the remains of Genevieve out here have helped pump some smoke all the way out to Hawaii. That's the Hawaiian Highlands out there getting mainland smoke. Got smoke down to Mexico City practically up into northern Canada and then off the Canadian Atlantic coast. So this is a crazy amount of smoke. Zooming in on Sunday, there's the location of the high on Sunday and the big clockwise swirl of smoke going around it. There's circulation from Genevieve. Tuesday, we're seeing a little relief coming in. See the high has moved down to by the Grand Cayenne area and there's a little bit of cleaner air getting pulled in to the west. And for Wednesday, that little tendril of cleaner air is kind of punching its way almost up to Colorado, at least western slopes. You can see some of our own local fires contributing smoke right in there. So we've got smoke for a little while, but relief is probably coming for that as well. So we have afternoon thunderstorms are back. We have moisture that's making it in with that same flow around the high. Our high temperatures are starting out at about 86, dropping down to about 85, 84 at the end of this 10 day period. Normal nighttime temperature is going from 57 down to about 55. I put a dotted line here showing you the 90 degree temperatures. We have at least a couple more days of 90s and then the temperatures drop below normal. Finally, in fact, later in the period, we have a significant cool down coming. So let's take a look at our records. We looked at last week Tuesday marks 65 days at 90 degrees Fahrenheit or higher. So we broke it. We now are in second place for the number of very hot days. We passed 61 that was on Friday. So Saturday was the record breaking day. Thursday will be 67 days and then we might be over with it. It's possible that we could see another 90 degree or so in September. But remember the record is 73 days back in 2012. So 14 days ago, we had just a little bit of moisture in the West. We had Lydia down there. We had dry air coming in a week ago. We had a good shot of moisture coming in and we had a little more storm activity in the state. On Tuesday, the high is right around the four corners area with moisture being pulled around. A bit of moisture coming in on that edge of the cleaner air that's scouring out some of the smoke. By Wednesday, this is the precipitable water. So this is how much moisture, another measure of how much moisture is in the air. You can see Laura down here, a hurricane has a lot of moisture in it. So that's the darkest green shading on the map. Then we have circulation coming on around the high bringing it into the western slopes in northern parts of Colorado. But that high is a big one. It's still extending up into Canada, way off the southwest coast. And by Wednesday, Laura's coming in for landfall and the high hasn't moved very much at all. So a little bit longer. We're baking in smoking conditions with that high. Thankfully, we don't have any severe weather. There's a little bit of chance of severe weather down in Arizona, up across the northern states. We do have a chance of thunderstorms in general. These are just garden variety thunderstorms. Maybe for a moment they put down pea-sized hail or something. By Thursday, same thing. A little bit of hail and strong wind chances right down to the northern Colorado borders. So it's possible to see something nearby, but it just means we are getting moisture or seeing a little relief come back. That moisture looks to be around a quarter inch or less in the next five days. The southern mountains get some good hits of water, maybe an inch and a half wherever thunderstorms happen to form. Add another five days, looking out ten days, and everything just gets out of touch. Moisture, but most of the rainfall should occur in the next five to seven days. Not much further out than that. We dry out after the weekend. So by Sunday, this is when the change is coming. The high has now moved down into northern Mexico. We have this trough coming in, and this looks like the beginning of a sequence of troughs. It will be kicking down cold air and bringing in cleaner air, making breathing nicer. Taking a look at the moisture, you can see the dry air with that front pushing down. But ahead of that is a good stream of tropical moisture coming up into the southwest and into Colorado. There's a temperature anomaly map. This is how unusually cool or hot the temperatures are. In our state on Sunday, we see low thunderstorms all over the place, dropping little pools of cold air with the rain. But the real cold front is down through Montana and north into South Dakota. For Wednesday, this is one forecast made Sunday showing cold air down and the cold front stretching down into Texas and Oklahoma. But this was the model run on Sundays. This shows the earliest that the cold air was expected to make it here this week. But if you look at the Monday model run for Tuesday next week, it's got the cold air here a whole day earlier. Then if you look at the Tuesday model run, the cold air is yet a day earlier arriving next Monday, just here hitting Kansas and making it down the plains of Colorado. So, and this is some really cold air. This could be temperatures in the daytime, low 70s, maybe even 60s up in the mountains here and northern plains and we might see night temperatures in the 40s. So, this is a change. This is finally going to break the stretch of heat and smoke. So, the trend has been this cold air is getting here sooner and sooner. The latest model run shows us of being a very strong trough cutting down into the plains and strong northwest winds right behind it. So, looking out for the next week, we have a few more 90s Wednesday and Thursday. Then as moisture increases, we drop down to the 80s, maybe skirt back up to about 90 or so of the weekend and then the bottom drops out. We see 40s at night, 70s in the daytime and this could be too warm still. We'll have to keep an eye on that. Before we go, let's take a look at Laura. Laura as of Tuesday morning is out into the gulf. It's passing over cooler water from Marco. So, it's not going to intensify right away, but as soon as it gets past that, it's got a good stretch of very warm gulf water there. Right now, it should probably make it to category three. It could even exceed that before it makes landfall very close to the Texas-Louisiana border and then gets caught into the westerlies as that trough, that same trough cooling us down, will whip it off to the east and send it away. So, a big news story there like we need something else, but there's a hurricane to watch for the gulf. For more local news and frequent weather updates, check out the Longmont Leader at LongmontLeader.com. I've been Chief Meteorologist John Ensworth. Keep looking up.