 Welcome to the weather forecast for the week beginning Wednesday, May 12th. I'm Chief Meteorologist John Unsworth for Longmont Public Media. We have the first quarter moon visible on Wednesday, May 19th. So the beginning of our next forecast for a new moon on this Wednesday. So yeah, we're repeating. They're falling right on the beginning and ending of these forecasting periods. So good enough. All right, let's take a look at drought. We've obviously been receiving a lot of moisture. Unfortunately, the site that this data comes from has gone down. It's been down for a few days. And it just does not even load. It just times out. So this is last week's map. This is last week's national map. And I did find a secondary source with slightly different coloration of the drought levels to show today's state of things. So it's kind of hard to see, but we have no drought around here still and it's no drought region is expanded a little closer to Wyoming. Northeastern Colorado now has a no drought area. And then across the foothills and eastern side of the Rockies, we have a lessening of the drought. So I'll go back. Let's see a little different changes. Some kind of severe drought right in there, and then that's gone. So it is definitely getting better. We've received another inch or more after this. So it'll just keep getting better from there. So take a look at the station level rainfall totals up to 7 a.m. Monday. We had just under a tenth of an inch around Longmont. We have under a quarter inch in most places set up in the mountains around Boulder. But by Tuesday morning, we had pretty significant water. We had three quarters of an inch or so and about the same around Boulder. My backyard run gauge got about 0.8 total. Taking a look at snow, because we did get a coating. It came down with sleek snow. Grapple came just about everything frozen at some point. Didn't build up much with warm ground, but there was a half inch to inch three inches on the north side of Longmont around Boulder. The mountains is two to four inches, but right around Boulder it was much less. So water total for the last week is really significant. Like I said, it was great. We've got a widespread half inch to two inches over much of the eastern mountains. Plains. Taking a look at the next 10 days. I don't know why that's pink, but the high temperature normal line is pink. We're going from 70 to 74 degrees as a normal. So things are really warming up quickly. We are in spring heading for summer. Normal low temperature 41 to 45. And I think the rule of thumb, if I have not set it before, is that you can turn on sprinklers after Mother's Day. So we should be good to go now. We've had significant snow at the end of the month in May. We've had five inches or more happening that week historically, and we've had a measurable amount of snow in the first week of June, but that doesn't mean the temperatures are exceptionally low. So it's really hard to get a heart freeze that would damage pipes at this point. Looking at precipitation, that's the departing storm. You have a little bit of chance of showers or maybe a wandering thunderstorm come Wednesday afternoon, just because there is so much moisture around, and the trough is not too far away. We have a couple days that's pretty dry, and then we start to see this pulse pattern. And when you see this, especially in the spring and summer, that means there's moisture around, and daytime heating is the missing ingredient to make the atmosphere destabilize and give us thunderstorms. So we'll take a look at that. But for the weekend, it's dry. It's warm. It's going to be beautiful. We have this big ridge just over the state. Maybe draw that blue line a little bit further west. There's a West Coast and East Coast trough, and not much beyond that. So let's take a look at how this progresses over the next 10 days. Going from Thursday into the weekend. We have this ridge moving in. Really nice weather. Here comes the trough down the West Coast. It becomes another cutoff. This is the pattern we've had for more than a month now. So you get these cutoff lows that then roll eastward. But it's getting, oh, sorry about that. It's getting warmer. And so with the track of this thing being a little further south, we're not going to see as much cold or resistant rain. It's going to be the afternoon storm variety because it's just bringing moisture in. It comes a ridge again at the end of next weekend. So let's take a look at these temperatures. This is the near-surface departure from normal. And normal is much higher than it's been a month or two ago. So it's not overly cold. And there was a flash of thunderstorms. You see all those little cells. There it is again. There's afternoon thunderstorms cooling down the air locally. There it is again for the next day. Pulse of thunderstorms move on. There's another pulse. And then we're back to the beginning. So let's just do that one more time. Play through that up to May 20th now. So give this a moment to play through. You can see the repeating thunderstorm pulses. All right, back to the 12th. As our departing cool air, the warmth for the weekend coming in. Friday at noon, there's chance of thunderstorms. There's Saturday at noon, chance of afternoon thunderstorms. And like that. It's pretty fun to see the model trying to pick up on that. So this is a map of precipitable water. This is how much water is in the atmosphere. And the greens are above normal. Amounts of moisture in the atmosphere and the browns are below normal. You can see that by Saturday we have a pretty good pool of moisture coming from the Pacific and the gulf is being drawn in around this low. With the upper level low coming in. And it just holds on until next week. You see the moisture just keeps funneling in, kind of pressing up against the east side of the Rockies. Some of this moisture being pulled in off here gets the western side. So the western slope should get some more precipitation as well. These better chances. Often to next week it just keeps on bringing moisture in. So let's put all that together for future radar. And we're looking into Thursday noon into the weekend until the thunderstorms start popping up. Saturday, Saturday afternoon. Off they go. There's Sunday. Saturday night. Sunday night thunderstorms moving on. Thunderstorms again for Monday night. That's Tuesday night's thunderstorms. So this is going to be fun. This is a pattern that we're used to seeing in spring and summer around here. And when we have a healthy moisture source like we do right now it's a great source of moisture and it doesn't ruin your entire day. By Saturday we do have a chance of convection around the area. So light green from the storm prediction center in Norman. Oklahoma shows that thunderstorms are possible and we can get convection. The atmosphere will be unstable that day. The marginal risk of severe, so public hail and damaging winds in thunderstorms is confined to the far eastern, southeast eastern plains and out into Kansas' so-called mechanical handle. It's close enough that they're usually kind of conservative two days out. But we may see this back up. It all depends on where a dry line will set up on the plains. And sometimes you have to wait for the subtle variations of the atmosphere to shake out where that will be. So if you take a look at Longmont leader I will update their daily to keep an eye on the severe risk. So the GFS, which as we've seen, has been very wet for the last month. More so than was justified by the storms that came. Does see over the next 10 days a lot of moisture. This is a big old bunch of thunderstorms right there. I think we saw that in one frame. Big yellow and red coloration in the future radar. So let's see some big thunderstorms next week out there on the plains. But it's random. We random with where thunderstorms pop. So don't put any, don't go out there and put buckets out to collect water. It'll happen someplace. But not in any particular place. But look at the foothills. They do get a lot of moisture out of this. Since we're getting so warm snow over the next 10 days is confined to the mountains. Just maybe one morning we might have something bring snow down into Boulder, but I'm not too interested. I'm excited about that. I don't think that's going to happen. All right, so take a look at the next seven days. We're looking at the 60s and 70s. Cooling down with the trough approaching, that cut-off flow approaching Sunday, Monday, but not exceptionally hot or cold at all, as there are better chances of precipitation later in the week. So check out Longmont Leader for frequent weather updates and local news. LongmontLeader.com. This has been Chief Meteorologist John Insworth. Keep looking out.