 Welcome to the weather forecast for the week beginning Wednesday, June 21st, 2023. This is Chief Meteorologist John Innsworth for Longmont Public Media. Trying another outside cast here, there aren't going to be trash trucks today. Behind me is the Cherrywood Observatory. On the lunar front, we have a first quarter moon coming around on Monday, the 26th. So something beautiful to look at in the evening sky again. The sun is very active now and the side facing the earth. A lot of sunspot activity going on right now. The first day of summer was today at 8.58am mountain time. So welcome to the official summer. Now meteorological summer starts June 1st. This is astronomical summer. Did you look at drought? From last week to this week, we've had even more drought relief. We are somewhere around 83% or 87% drought free. Looking nationally, things are a little bit better over much of the nation, except maybe the Pacific Northwest. Things got a little drier, but this is a lot better than a year ago. Taking a look at smoke. I have noticed there are some haze out there, I can see it right now. And some of that is the Canadian smoke kind of filtering back down. But some of it is also one that's in Northern Arizona and some smoke is coming up from the Southwest because most of the flow just recently has become very strongly Southwest. Let's see why in just a minute. Let's take a look at our snowpack animation. It's kind of funny and maybe I'll do it one more week like I said last week would be this week the last one, but the thing about it is we aren't normally often at zero snow now, or at least nothing measurable or appreciable. So just having an above average amount here gives us 1,062% snowpack. That's funny. Ridiculous number we can get next week and then end that. Now that's because it still has remained cool and there's been a tremendous amount of water. That's how we got all this drought relief and it's hitting the western slopes and higher elevations and everything. So you see lots of two to three inch amounts even in this belt through the Palmer Divide and out on the plains, there's five inches in many spots. So just so much rain. And yes, we had a couple of days where it was 90 or near 90 and very warm, didn't matter. It barely changed the hydrology at all. Taking a look at our severe weather climatology map and we're in the fourth week of June. This is the peak month climatologically. It begins to move up and out on the plains. The probabilities do and they start to drop right around the long month at that peak dot right there. To make that point, we're Wednesday and severe weather is definitely the topic of the day. We have an enhanced area with a slight sliver, almost too small to care about, becoming a marginal up in the higher mountains by an enhanced region which is a three on a scale of one to five in chances of severe weather events. And it's everything. We have a chance of tornadoes, so we're along Denver to almost four columns as a two percent chance of tornado within 25 miles of you this day, five percent in this brownish area here. Looking at hail, we have a 30 percent chance of large damaging hail. Right down I-25, all the communities and just almost into Ustis Park, if you can zoom in. I have another tool where I can zoom in on that. So the weather service even made what's called a special mesoscale discussion, a couple of them, concerning the best chance of tornadoes. So it goes right down to Ustis Park, down below Greeley, here's Boulder, so it's just about into Longmont. And Longmont's just a little bit further down here. And the whole region still could get something, but just north of Longmont's where the tornado threat goes up. They made another mesoscale discussion that includes Ustis Boulder, down to Kesselot, Colorado Springs, four two-inch plus diameter hail. So let's take a look for a moment, if we go to Thursday, let's take a look at what the current radar has. And the current radar has the first storms initiating up here near Frasier, so it's still pretty far west of Boulder. This track is towards Loveland. If I click on this, you'll see this is going to evolve quickly and become more, I just want to do it. But here's Longmont here. We should see things really get going here. Oh, that's why. It's got the drawing tool on. I don't want the drawing tool. Okay, so we can go there and see the lightning is starting to fire. Yeah, and this cell, if it doesn't change into something different, is going to get to Loveland around 4.30 to 5 o'clock. You can see another surge here from thunderstorms that fired earlier. There's a lot of activity going here. This stuff is kind of back-building. We have things up here on Grover. So it's just the beginning. I won't be on the air for that. Take a look at your weather apps to stay safe there. For Thursday, we might have a similar situation, almost all the same ingredients are going to be in effect. So we have a slight risk now, but again, they didn't change that to an enhanced risk until after 11 o'clock this morning. So we'll see what happens tomorrow morning. They have painted a 2% chance of a tornado along I-25 and up to Estes and Red Further Lakes and like that. And 15% chance right now of a large damaging hail for Thursday. For Friday, the severe risk doesn't go too far away, but right now we should be in the convective chance, just normal garden variety every day thunderstorms. We get the surface forecast map for Wednesday. Heavy rains are possible, inch to 2 inch amounts with thunderstorms and the severe threat for tornadoes hail and damaging winds exist. For Thursday, it moves up to the north of us with a heavy rain. Going up into the northern Rockies. For the next 10 days, I still think the ensemble of the GFS has been nuts for months. The temperatures are totally wrong. Our normal high temperatures go from 84 to 87. Normal nighttime temperatures over the next 10 days, 54 to 56. You can see the Wednesday, Thursday storm signals pretty strong. We get very dry for a couple of days. And then afternoon thunderstorm chances return. So this is a water vaporized satellite image from earlier this morning on Wednesday. And then just before I went on air here, here's the thunderstorms beginning to fire. You can see they have a lot of moisture in them, so they get coated very green. So the features they're doing this is this big trough off the west coast. We have strong flow coming up from the southwest aloft. We have ridges to our east. And these little ripples that barely show up in the models are what are kicking off the storms. So we had the storms to our east already, and then this one's kicking the stuff off the west. It hasn't quite arrived. Maximum daytime heating, we're just about four o'clock right now, is happening. So as that comes over the warm, very humid air, we should get the storms. And there are the storms in the models going crazy about 7 o'clock tonight. Looking at Thursday, same thing, low gets a little bit closer. We still have little ripples coming over. These change from model one to model one, so it's kind of, you know, put a lot of money on any one run. But the fact that these little ripples are coming up and through, they will kick off the storms. There are the Thursday storms. After that things dry out. There's our Sunday ridge, and that's why the rain chances vanish. So let's put this in motion and take a look at this big trough, low wobbling towards us. You can see the little ripples traveling overhead. There goes the last of it on Friday into Saturday, and then the ridge dries us out and makes the air sink and suppresses convection. Nothing really changes until we get to Tuesday, Wednesday next week. We have another ripple going by, but there is a lot of moisture. We'll see that in just a second. So there are the surface temperatures. Do you have a little front that is pushing backwards? And then the thunderstorms each afternoon, there are some down there. Leave pools of cold air. As the trough goes by we see it get another little cool front pushed down on the beginning of the week. We have a ridge aloft with cool air below and we're not going to get storms. Then we begin to warm up a little bit above normal next week. Not much. We're very close to normal for the most part into Wednesday next week and beyond. Let's take a look at the upper air moisture. The total perceptible water is very high, way above normal for Wednesday and Thursday. You can see the dry air, the browns flood in over the weekend. So say goodbye to storms there. A little bit of moisture comes back by Monday. Eastern plains, it stays kind of further out on the eastern plains of dry air again Tuesday into Wednesday until a little bit more comes in with another low. And then later next week we are dry. Let's look at the surface moisture. This is what fuels the storms from the ground. Really helping in the 50s here are really high. Very unusually high. There's even some 60s in the actual data. And then over the weekend, really dry air dropping into the 40 dew point area and eventually 20s start pushing in and there they go. So really suppressing storms until later next week where there's some 30s kind of trying to come back with some 40s. It's just nothing for a while as rich of an environment for storms as what we have right now. So there's our storms for Wednesday and the rain overnight. Storms for Thursday and rain later and then we dry out quickly as the low passes at the surface and things just stay really quiet into Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, stuff passing us over to the north. There's a nice low going through but no moisture for it to work with. So over the next two days we should see some really healthy rain out of the storms. This is random where they fire for the most part and so it's about an inch to two inches can be expected in some places. Everything's wet, everything's saturated so that will lead to local flooding. The next five days inch and a half inch and a quarter amounts around the front range here up down at 9.25 or the next 10 days some serious water out here, a little more water in the eastern plains and the western slopes get a break. So I'm calling for 80s and then a cool down on Thursday with really good chances of storms in the afternoon and evening and we go back to really seasonably normal 85-87 dropping to 81 on Sunday with that cool front as the trough passes and then 80s completely typical standard late June weather, small chance of an afternoon thunderstorm. So check out Lionel Montliter and Broomfield leader for local news and weather updates. For these severe weather events though you need to be using apps like StormShield or another weather bug is a good one, those are all cross-platform so just keep the alert sign, keep your notifications turned on your devices and be alert to what's happening to your west and southwest. This has been Chief Neerald just John Ensworth, this time very importantly keep looking up.