 This is your weather forecast for the week beginning Wednesday, January 6th, 2021. We made it to a new year. I'm Chief Meteorologist John Ennsworth for Longmont Public Media. We have now a situation where the notable phases occur right on Wednesday, the beginning of our forecast period, Wednesday, January 6th, the start of this time. We have the last quarter moon rising at noon, sitting just about the next morning noon. Our drought conditions are not changing from Christmas week into New Year's week, pretty much the exact same map. And that's due to cooler air temperatures, which don't promote as much evaporation from the soil. We are getting many shots of snow to the higher mountains and the western slopes, and so hopefully that'll start to show up in the data in the weeks and months to come. Over the west, we have pretty extensive long-term drought. Out to the west coast, most of the Rockies into Texas and up into the northern plains. We should see some relief in the plains and on the west coast, as we'll see at the end of today's discussion. Precipitation over the last seven days, very minimal, a little bit out on the eastern plains. We have missing data here, and over a large part of the west. Something must have gone wrong with the data assimilation system at the weather service. So we have just the data right here, and that shows we didn't get anything. It was a little bit in the foothills, but nothing right along I-25. By Thursday AM, a ridge that's been in the west giving us warm, comfy weather has a little shortwave trough breaking through, kind of cutting in half momentarily. Do you have a storm down in the south and southeastern part of the US that's rolling along? This is creating some snow up in the northern mountains. I feel a cold front trailing along here, and we've got some rain down in the south, and we're still high and dry between those two. Okay, the next 10 days, our high temperature remains at 44. This is the typical or normal high temperature. The lows rise a degree from 17 to 18, and our expected temperatures bounce around in the low end of this normal range. We briefly on Sunday drop a little bit below normal, but this is really normal January weather, believe it or not. We do see a chance of precipitation on Friday, and some of the ensemble runs. More of the model runs are in agreement that we'll see some snow from Saturday afternoon or evening into Sunday morning won't amount to much. Then later next week we see some unsettled weather, and let's put the next 10 days in motion and see what's causing all this. So here comes that northern rocky trough, it just kind of washes out there. Here comes our trough digging in on Saturday, a little cut off low, pumping some moisture up, giving us that Saturday-Sunday storm, then into Monday, ridges back in the west. Here comes another trough, looking at the precipitation. We have a little bit of snow dying out up here as that shortwave trough vanishes. The next system comes in, cranks up briefly, creating upslope snow for us before it takes off down into Texas, and then as we go into the beginning of next week, we're getting very high in drive, even on surface high pressure systems sitting out here, there's a storm system kind of getting its act together up in the northern Rockies. It comes down and does something around Thursday, Friday, next week. That remains to be seen, it's a long ways away. Over the next 10 days, our snow expected is really minimal, right along I-25, the GFS on this run gives us really nothing, maybe a coating of snow to an inch near boulder, and then the mountains get four or five, six inches in places. The precipitation is equally very meager, five hundredths of an inch to maybe a tenth of an inch around Denver and the lower foothills, maybe up to a quarter inch and a touch more and spots up in the mountains, just not much there. Over the next seven days, as I said, we stayed in the low end of normal throughout this time. We have forties going into the weekend and forties coming out of the weekend and low to mid-thirties for the weekend itself, night time temperatures don't change much, bouncing around in the upper teens and low to mid-twenties. We have our chances of snow, mainly Saturday afternoon and evening, still fading off on Sunday morning. We saw in the December forecast prediction from NOAA that we would have above normal temperatures and below normal precipitation for Colorado and much of the West, and that certainly came true. Now, looking at January, we see above normal temperatures over most of Colorado, I guess the four corners area is close to normal, and for precipitation we're now in the normal area for this month, and so we'll get something down in New Mexico, Arizona, West Texas is where you have your below normal look at the Midwest and Great Plains with above normal precipitation amounts expected in the West Coast, or even better with Central and Northern California actually probably getting some good rains, so very beneficial, very needed out there. That's what I'm hoping to see better drop data in the weeks to come. For more frequent weather updates and local news, check out the Longmont Leader, LongmontLeader.com. I've been Chief Meteorologist John Insworth, keep looking out.