 This is the weather forecast for the weeks beginning Wednesday, July 20th and Wednesday, July 27th, 2022. I am Chief Meteorologist John Insworth for Longmont Public Media. Yeah, I'm going to take one more vacation right before everything cranks up for the fall. I am currently in the Woodland Park Library. You might hear some background sounds here. So our next two lunar phases will be Thursday, July 28th with our new moon and Thursday, August 4th for the first quarter moon. Solar activity is pretty good right now. We have a number of sunspots facing our general direction in the solar system. And it was a possibility of a geomagnetic storm in the last 48 hours. I think I don't think it actually did much. I think it missed us for some reason. I've lost the July 7th graphic. So the drought conditions have gone just a little worse up in the Northeast corner. We are nearly drought free along the Front Range and Central Mountains. And most of the state has seen some relief. Looking nationally, not much has changed here either. A little less drought in the East, a little worse to our South. But things in the Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico corridor are doing pretty well compared to what they were. And that's because of this. Over the last seven days, much of the state has received half an inch to an inch of mounts. Four corners is dry and like that. But it comes and goes. Some spots have done really well with over two inches even. Just this little corridor along I-25 from Fort Collins to Denver, not so much. Smoke, not much to talk about. This is going to be probably our last graphic as we go into May and June. See, we peak in June and then things back off in July and then really fade out quickly as we get into August. Oops, not too quickly. The actual severe weather chances for the next three days. We have a marginal risk of hail and winds down south of Denver, Colorado Springs, Pueblo and like that. General storms around for Thursday. General storms for much of the state and for Friday. General storms again. Looking at the surface map, we have a little cold front up here that has stabilized northern counties of Colorado and still plenty of moisture in afternoon storms kicking off for Thursday. It shifts down to the southeast half of the state. For Friday, it's a little more in the mountains. We do dry out and get some heat just for a couple of days. Yeah, we could see over a hundred again. So for the next 10 days, we are normal high and low temperatures of plateaued. We're at 90 and 60 and that's as high as the normals go. Here's our peak for the end of the week in the weekend. Going off the chart, I don't know why they didn't rescale it and show that. And here's the decrease in storm activity just for those few days. Next week, it's every afternoon pulsing thunderstorms. And that's all because of this moisture. We have rich tropical moisture down to the south. A few systems have gone by to the distant southwest in the ocean, all contributing to a nice flow around a high pressure system south or southeast of us. And it's just made the moisture increase. That's a gray and white shading on the water vapor satellite image. So some of the highlights for the next two weeks. The high currently is over northern Arizona pumping things nicely around. And here's a moisture coming in and the precipitable water map jumping to the end of the weekend. The high is now situated out here in the Arkansas area, but still plenty of flow around. So rich moisture is still coming up. And then next Friday, we see sort of a shift in the pattern. We have a ridge building up on the west coast. But that circulation really doesn't inhibit this high pumping of moisture up into the southwest again. So this is storms normal, dry abnormal. So let's take a look at the animation. Some of these animations won't be as helpful in this pattern. But we're taking a look at this ridge, sitting at the four corners area. And then it kind of breaks down shifts to the southeast some. There it is out there, but it just keeps everything moving up from the south southwest and southeast into Colorado. There's the highway over here by July 26. It's next Wednesday. Normally the end of our forecast window. Take a look at the west coast. You can see the ridge start to form Thursday and Friday that following week. But the Bermuda Hive circulation just keeps on going out here. It's not until the beginning of August after cold air north flow comes in that we do get a ridge over and probably another chance at hundreds. So let's take a look at this surface temperature anomaly. So this is reds two meters above the ground or above normal temperature. Blues and purples are below normal. So we do have this kind of repeated cool front trying to come down on the 24th, 25th. It kind of backs into Colorado a little bit. Then the heat comes back. You can see the afternoon bubbles of cooling created by rain and thunderstorms that moderates overnight and warms up the next morning. There's another cold front for Thursday the 28th. And then it really settles in for the end of July. We might see well below normal temperatures in that time. And then going into the beginning of August that heat builds in the west and starts to expand towards us making the temperature swing around. There's some thunder outside. That's nice. So the big story is the precipitable water. This is again from the GFS. All these products are GFS things in the green is abnormal amounts of atmospheric moisture. And it's just dry there on the Friday, Saturday window. And then moisture comes right back for the beginning of next week. Just kind of watching everything flowing in from the south. You get little dry intrusions now and then, but they are very short lived. Now we're in the second forecast period Thursday the 28th. Plenty of moisture just keeps coming on the end. There's the 30th Saturday. Finally get some dry air in with that cool front coming in on August 1st. And the moisture is pumped way out west and then starts to come in where we have dry air at the beginning. So August 3rd, 2nd, 1st could be pretty hot and dry. So the afternoon storms just kind of come and go this. It's a random process where they fire the mountains, kick it off first. And then they move with a prevailing air flow. And this model isn't going to be too informative after just a few days. So over the next five days we're expecting pretty good water around the Palmer Divide in Plains. A few spots in the mountains over the next 10 days. Pretty significant water amount coming in. Got southern part of the state. Much of this area really needs water. So that's really good. Little lower amounts, less than three quarters of an inch or half inch or so right around Longmont. And over the next 14 days I have to switch websites for this. You can see pretty significant water. Two inch to three inches of pink colors. And we're at the edge of that. So sort of the inch and a half to two inch area for Longmont. Boulder is breaking two to three inches total over two weeks period. So looking out ahead as best as we can. We have 90s and 100s drying out for the weekend. We'll drop down to the 80s with that cold front on Sunday. And then return to the 90s and sort of continue almost 50-50 chances of storms every day. We get an increase on Wednesday. Then we're back in the 80s and 90s going all the way out to August 1st. And after that the heat might really crank. It definitely dries out. We'll see what happens to the temperatures. It may take a day or two for that to really go. Looking into the future. July through September averages. Again the weather service seems to have a heat bias. Yes we've had a lot of heat just this last week. But overall we're still below normal. In precipitation we're looking, they're seeing below normal for that three month average. It's just not really coming out that way. The winds are moistening up. We do have Tropical Storm Mistel. Down here is the Baja California Peninsula. And it's heading out generally towards Hawaii and fading out. So for frequent weather updates and I will keep those going. And local news, check out LongmontLeader.com and BroomfieldLeader.com. This has been Chief Meteorologist John Misworth. I'll see you again in a couple of weeks. Keep looking up.