 Welcome to the weather forecast for the week beginning Wednesday, July 29th. I'm Chief Meteorologist John Insworth for Longmont Public Media. Let's take a look at the moon. This week we have a full moon on Monday. 99% illuminate up for 10 and a half hours. So this weekend there'll be lots of moonlight out, great for a nighttime walk. Let's take a look at our last month of drought with this sequence of images. We've been building this up over the last four weeks. We can see the development and some relief that has occurred in the drought. So going back a whole month, much of northern Colorado is drought free with some bad areas in the southern part of the state. Week later began to creep up in both the east and the west. Then creep up further last week and we started getting some mild drought across most of northern Colorado except Boulder County. And then this week we're there with an interesting little notch right out here. Let me back up one and then forward and we see some relief occurred with some really persistent rains down there. So it is possible, even though it's hot and dry, to get enough water to relieve some of the short-term drought conditions. Just to give you an idea of the nation as a whole, we do have some of the worst drought in the nation. We've got southern part of our state right in northern New Mexico, a little bit of west Texas, and then out on the west coast there's a little extra drought enus there. That's not a word. Rain over the last week, we got the light greens and up are one inch, rainfall, half inch, one inch rainfall. You can see the southern and southwestern counties really won out well this time. Some spots out in the northeast plains really got hit hard as well. We didn't as much, but it kind of looks like the counties that needed the water got the water. So our next week's briefing might show better conditions. All right, let's go back in time before this week and look at Monday and Tuesday. And the reason I'm doing this is because the weather that occurred Monday and Tuesday is repeating Wednesday and Thursday. That often happens. You get a pattern and it repeats, at least in the short term, doing the same thing on a two-day, four-day, or seven-day cycle. And this is just a two-day cycle. We had on Monday a big ridge in the west. We had this little trough out in the west coast. We had northwest winds, a loft blowing across northeastern Colorado. And that started to push down on the moisture coming into the states. We have this nice flow of moisture. We've seen that for a couple of weeks now, lots of humidity. The North American monsoon is the term usually used for this. There are some meteorologists that don't like the idea of saying that there's a monsoon here. They want to reserve that for the Indian subcontinent. Taking a look at the water vapor satellite, again from Monday, you can see this dry air here. And these reds and browns are dry all the way down from the top of the troposphere down to the surface. You can see that we definitely had dry air come in. We had almost no shower activity on Monday. And we had smoke and dust coming in from fires and the dryer locations out west Tuesday. So here we are Tuesday afternoon. We've got rain and showers going on out there. Is that trough that was in the west is now crossing us. And you see the moisture got pulled in with that trough to really back up against the Rocky Mountains. So the foothills are getting thunderstorms or showers on the plains. This should extend through the night Tuesday. And when you look at the water vapor satellite image, you can see the moisture is pushed all the way up to Montana. So very quickly, one day, the moisture made it all the way up. Some of this is from former Hurricane Hannah. It's remnants are way down here in Baja in central Mexico. But some of that did get fed into our moisture flow as well. So taking a look at the next 10 days. Here's our equivalent batch of showers for Thursday. You can see a cool down here too. As always, my red bar at top here is the normal high temperature. The blue is a normal low. And all the way out here, 10 days out, we drop one degree in normals and highs and lows. So I wouldn't say falls in the area, but we're starting on the correct downward trend. Temperatures in this time period. I'm not too ridiculously out of bounds. Maybe way out here next week, we see some serious heat pushing far above. But it's brief. All right, so now let's look at the repeat starting on Wednesday. So here's our ridge way out here in the west. We got the high pressure center right around Las Vegas. We have a little weakness, a little trough pushing past the state. We have Northwest flow again. So we're getting smoke and dust in from the west one more time. It's pulling a little bit further down the eastern plains on Wednesday. And by Thursday, we have a pretty nice trough digging in from the northeast into Colorado. So we'll have a better chance of showers as a lot more moisture gets pulled up through the plains and pumped up into the mountains again. So repeat gives us rain on Thursday. How much? Well, maybe a quarter to half inch if we're really lucky. Tuesday is looking like it was less than a tenth of an inch for most places outside of the mountains. And then the pattern changes and we go back into a definite summer regime. The ridge that was in Vegas doesn't go far down around Phoenix. It's going to be really hot in Phoenix. And you got this giant ridge all the way up into Canada right over Colorado. We have Northwest flow, but it's going to be bone dry. So we go back to whatever moisture can make it in from the eastern plains, giving us a little chance of a wandering thunderstorm coming off the foothills in the afternoon. And if we're lucky, we get some relief for an hour or two before sunset and then we do it again the next day. So we're getting fun right now. We'll be back to summer. So for Wednesday and Thursday into Friday, a little better chance of showers, cooler temperatures with that trough pushing into the state. Then we go back to very low chances of a storm each afternoon, Saturday through Tuesday with temperatures climbing into the low and then eventually mid-90s again. Do want to, before we go, take a look at the east coast because we have a big loose easterly wave out here. It's kind of oblong in shape and not really getting this hacked together. The time that we're filming this, we have a, let me go ahead and go forward. There we go. We have the system right here. It's just called potential tropical cyclone 9. It doesn't have a name yet. If it does get a name and it's likely to, it'll be Isaias. It is one not below tropical storm force conditions. And so probably in the next 12 hours, 24 hours, going into Wednesday, this will become named and start its trip up towards Florida in general. There's a lot of things out there against it. It's got a lot of winds going at different speeds, different parts of the atmosphere vertically and there's a lot of wind and dry air and African dust north of the system. It's going to be pulling in that dry air. So right now the National Hurricane Center keeps it below hurricane strength all the way up. That can certainly change. If it slows down, it can get a little more favorable environment. We might get a hurricane out there. But looking back again at the probable paths, you can see it's curving way out. Some model runs take it into that side of Florida. Many model runs keep it out to sea and tell almost Nova Scotia. So yeah, it's just something to keep an eye on if you have friends or relatives on the East Coast about six to eight days from now. But this will be a news story. For more frequent weather updates and local news, take a look at the Longmont Leader at LongmontLeader.com. This has been Chief Meteorologist John Ensworth for the Longmont Public Media. Keep looking out.