 Welcome to the weekly weather forecast for the week beginning, Wednesday, October 28th, 2020. I'm Chief Meteorologist John Innsworth for Longmont Public Media. On Halloween night, we have a full spooky moon rising with the sunset and setting with the sunrise. 100% illumination and it will be really noticeable under very clear skies. Take a look at drought. Of course it's getting worse. Now we just had a bunch of precipitation but that did not show up in this analysis, this data. It's almost a week old when we get to see it. But we'll see what it looks like next week. Hopefully there is some relief that will show up. But a week ago, we had a fair amount of dryness on the plains, extreme dryness in the western mountains and a week later that extreme dryness is now spreading into the plains as well. So now we need that moisture that we got and we're going to cover that in a second but we need more, more moisture. Looking at the entire nation, the southwest and southern Rockies is just crispy dry right now. All right, the actual amount of melted liquid, most of it did fall as snow, is depicted in this map and the light greens are half inch, darker greens are an inch and the yellows are two inches to three inches up around red feather lakes and like that. So fantastic, here's the I-25 corridor with four columns down to Colorado Springs. The eastern plains didn't do as well, it's about a quarter inch of moisture out there. Snowfall totals, thanks to CBS Denver that made the graphics. We have up to a foot and a half around red feather lakes, over a foot in Estus Park, ten inches at Grand Lake, eleven, eleven, down around Denver is more the half foot area Palmer Divide got up a little more towards nine inches so really good, we needed that and it piled up. Taking a look at Wednesday noon we have our storm cut off into this nice low down here over Texas, New Mexico. Because of that we're on the dry side, the moisture is kind of staying out on this side of it. This is Hurricane Zeta, the fifth system to hit Louisiana this year because it is 2020 and this low will be influencing it as we'll see. It's going to come in to very close to New Orleans so big news there if you're not following it go go try on the TV then heading over here towards DC and out. Looking at the water vapor satellite image we have lots of dry air southwest of the US, we have the northern jet stream coming down and this little curl of moisture here, tremendous amounts of moisture so say to a Zeta. It's not the last letter of the Greek alphabet, if I can do this off the top of my head it's alpha beta gamma delta eta zeta theta, I think epsilon is in there, probably missed epsilon. So yeah it's still early or middle alphabet but we have certainly had a lot of named systems. Taking a look at the smoke forecast for Wednesday night I just want to show a mostly smoke-free map. Stuff is still going on in extreme fire, activity in a few spots in California. Locally here the blanket of snow helped kind of tamp everything down for now. Okay the normals we were dropping from a normal of high of 60 down to 56 over the next 10 days going from right at freezing as a normal low temperature 32 down to 28 so winter is coming. High and low temperatures are staying below normal for the next two or three days. The weekend we get a little cool down here as a dry front comes through and we go to slightly above normal but that still puts us only in the 60s for high temperatures. Yeah it's getting cooler. There's this tiny little spot that shows up in the ensemble out here about November 6th. I wouldn't get excited about that but some of the models think a little bit of rain or snow falls. Our next system is Saturday and it's this trough coming in. You can see at the high that we had all summer and fall is not far. It's still lurking out there over California with a ridge up above. If we put this into motion you can watch the low cutoff low rolling through. You can see Zeta get caught up into that flow and thrown off the east coast then that trough heads out. In the northern branch we still have a pretty good ridge. Here comes the weekend trough pushing in but then it's replaced right away by another ridge with a little swirl down here but yeah this ridge just keeps wanting to form in the west. Now if you watch if we get out close to the seventh near the end of the 10 days there is here's the ridge becomes more zonal as you go to the fifth and then a trough starts to dig off the west coast. It could mean before mid-November we have another big system come through. Over the next 10 days precipitation heavy stuff with the tropical system down here in the southeast. Rain ahead of that with the cutoff low but the west and central plains dry. We get a bunch of rain up here in the Pacific Northwest. For snowfall the current system is going to dump kind of an unusual amount of snow in New Mexico and the Panhandle of Texas and a little bit of Western Oklahoma but we're pretty much snow-free up here. Maybe a few ripples will create some mountain snows but not a lot. So looking for the next seven days we have fifties and sixties into the end of the week. We cool down with that trough to a Sunday forties. Night time temperatures back to the twenties and then we get above freezing at night in the next week with temperatures almost getting to 70 that's possible but dry conditions. For your Halloween forecast if you are going to brave the extra scary Halloween conditions this year 6 p.m. it'll be 46 degrees with fairly stiff winds making it feel colder out of the west around 10 miles per hour. By 9 p.m. the temperatures will drop at 10 degrees to about 36. Winds will have gone to calm or just slightly out of the east but very clear and dry. Sunset will occur at 5.58. Twilight ends at 6.23. So my hope at Cherrywood Observatory is to get a camera working on my telescope out to a big screen TV and feed candy down through a pipe or something like that to trick or treaters on the long next to the observatory. So see if I can pull that off. It's been a little too chilly to try the technology beforehand. So for more frequent news updates and local news and weather updates take a look at the Longmont Leader at LongmontLeader.com This has been Chief Meteorologist John Nensworth. Keep looking up.