 Welcome, Longmont to the weather forecast for the week beginning Wednesday, December 9th. I'm John Ensworth, chief meteorologist at Longmont Public Media. Taking a look at the moon this week, Monday will be the next quarter phase, and this is the new moon rising and setting close to sunrise and sunset. We haven't looked at drought in a little while, so here is the conditions from a week ago. And you see, we are still kind of holding on to moderately moist soils around here. It's not too bad. Western slopes are really crispy, and if you go to current week, it takes a small jump, but not much changes. A little of this area, West Denver and Boulder, got a little bit of moisture over this last week or two. Looking nationally, I haven't done this before, but I'm showing you your last weeks and then this weeks. What's kind of bad is you really see the southwest fill in with the most severe drought, and the long-term drought regions have all kind of connected from the northern plains out to the west coast and down to the desert southwest. So we need a pattern change. We need to get rid of that persistent ridge that's out here in the west and start getting cold front moisture and everything back. Speaking of the moisture, we had a little bit up in the mountains. We had some areas here, just over half an inch in the northern mountains, southern mountains there, south of Colorado Springs near Pueblo, but right along I-25, bone dry, little sprinkles in Denver, nothing really big. So we see on noon Monday, just going back in time to watch. This is our next system down here. Southern California is swirling around down here. We have our ridge still trying to hold on in the northern mountains there. We've got northwest flow out on the plains. We're kind of in a calm area here. It's warm. Nothing really happening and very dry. If you look at the water vapor satellite image from that same time, you can clearly see that swirl down here in the moisture, and this is what will at least give us some chance of precipitation later in the week. This kind of scooping moisture up off the ocean and being ready to transport it up our way. The color front that is going to be coming down as a slow and strough approaches hits Wednesday late afternoon, and the temperatures you can see start dropping pretty quickly, but it's not until about a day later that more moisture arrives and the winds turn upslope enough to really give us some precipitation. Our normals are starting to flatten out 43 down to 42 over a 10-day period, and the normal low temperature at night remains 17 for this 10-day period, so we have dropped down into the winter regime. After this cold front, we do stay within that normal envelope even though it's going to feel pretty chilly since we've had so much unusual heat. After a couple of days or a day and a half of precipitation, we do see some chances of precipitation happening out into the following week with the cool temperatures, so if some of that gets organized now if we might see another snow hit. As this low pulls out of the southwest by Thursday, it'll be sitting over southern Colorado, and this is when the moisture starts to cycle around and get ready for its Friday approach. Precipitation starts Thursday night, continues most of Friday, and starts to taper off Saturday morning. Let's put this in motion and watch this low roll around here. This cutoff low underneath the big ridge in the west, it starts to reconnect and get drawn up into the flow again, passing Thursday and Friday. Another trough reinforces that, kind of making a broad chili pattern over the mountains and us, and then northwest flow on next week. A little ridge passes a little bit later, and a shallow version of that ridge settles in after that. It's still cool, but it's dry. Looking at the precipitation itself over the same time period, here's our low sitting off of the California coast, a little bit of rain with it. Comes up across Arizona and New Mexico, surface low starts trapping out into the plains. We have our upslope and mountain snows. It's not big, it's not a huge storm, but it's something that will take anything right now to get some moisture. How much moisture over the next 10 days? The snowfall around Longmont looks to be in about the 1 to 3 inch area. Up in the mountains we're getting about 6 inches to a foot, a few lucky windward facing slopes, maybe a foot and a half. This at least puts some trace of snow out across much of the plains as well. For our actual amount of water, we see about 10th to a quarter of an inch of liquid here and up to an inch and a few lucky locations up in the mountains. So again, mountains benefiting from this more than us, but we'll take the moisture and the cold down any time. Over the next 7 days, we end our run of 60s on Wednesday, the cold front Wednesday afternoon drops us into the 40s. The cold air keeps pouring in Friday as the moisture finally arrives, giving us a few inches of snow, tapering off Saturday morning. That second little ripple coming down the flow might give us a touch of snow at the beginning of next week. Before we go, let's take a look at the next month and see what Noah is calling for in temperatures and precipitation. The oranges here are temperatures above normal, so a pretty good chance of temperatures above normal for most of the nation and we're sort of in the core of that. And for precipitation, everything other than New England is drier than normal, that's expected by Noah at least. That seems a good bet. That's what we've had for months now. So for frequent weather updates and local news, take a look at longmontleader, longmontleader.com. Having chief meteorologist John Ennsworth, keep looking up.