 Welcome to the weather forecast for the week beginning Wednesday, January 10th, 2024. Happy New Year. This is Chief Merovis Johninsworth for Longmont Public Media. And yes, I missed Christmas, so I took a little break off then, and then we were heading back from California the next week, and we had to dodge a snowstorm, ironically, so we could get through Donner Pass between Reno and Sacramento. So yeah, we ended up Wednesday and Thursday being in the car and driving, and I just couldn't get a forecast in last week, but but here we go. We're back. It was kind of boring anyways, but it's not gonna be boring now. Thursday the 11th, tomorrow will be a new moon. We have a scattering of sunspots on the sun right now. Nothing huge except maybe this little complex here, and that could certainly spark some geomagnetic stuff for us. Looking at drought from mid-December to early January, definitely getting worse in the front range and northeast part of the state. We're just, we're dry as things are very dry right now. We have had very little precipitation. We're gonna get some precipitation, but it's not going to be a lot. But then at the same time you're not losing a lot because the temperatures are so cool. You don't have as much vapour transpiration. Looking nationwide from mid-December to now, very a little bit worsening of the drought down here. That probably will get knocked back this week with a system coming through, but again cooler temperatures drought just doesn't get much worse. Smoke-wise a little bit down here. I don't even know where that came from, but not really affecting us in Northern Colorado at all. My little jerky animation here of the snowpack so far. Here's early December, mid-December, late December, and then January 10th. And we are definitely staying down here below normal. We're at 72% of median. Yeah, it's not good right now. We need some more water, some more snow. With the El Nino, the hope is that there will be some time during the winter season where the moisture machine turns on, but hasn't happened yet. Look at the last seven days, the mountains did get some precipitation. The light greens, which are kind of dominant here, about half inch to an inch. That's good. We need that. Going back two weeks to kind of cover the time I was gone, there's some eastern plains precipitation, but nothing really changed in the mountains. We've just been staying dry. Looking forward now, we're looking at severe weather chances. Just some convection out in the West, but normal thunderstorms, nothing severe. When you go two days out to Thursday, we have a pretty good blob here of marginal and slight with tornadoes hail all possible. Strong straight-line damaging winds, and then that moves down to the southeast and becomes even an enhanced region of severe weather. So you'll probably hear about tornadoes Thursday and Friday, affecting communities in the south and southeast. Looking at Wednesday, the mountains and western slopes are getting light snow, kind of ongoing. Looking at Thursday, the entire state might get some snow. It isn't a lot, except from up in the mountains, but again, like I always say, the National Weather Service forecast of the surface map seems to way overdue snow. Going to Friday, we get a little break before the next stuff with chances of snow on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. So let's take a look at that. Normal high temperatures are level at 44, normal lower are level at 18, and we're staying below it for the next 10 days. Have a pretty good chance of precipitation on Thursday, then over the weekend, same thing. Some snow off and on. I'm keeping the percentages low. The amount of snow along I-25 should be light. Places like Estes Park, Netherland, maybe get one to three inches almost every day. So the mountains get it, but we don't. So here's the water vapor satellite image. It's a fair amount of moisture in the West, mid to high level at least, as the next system moves in. And Thursday morning, we do see pretty good snow in the mountains, and some snow sneaking down onto the plains. That's also seed with this trough, and we'll see in the animation, but basically a deep trough kind of remains in the West for much of the next week. Saturday a.m. is our next shot of snow coming in. Sunday morning, same thing. Better chance of snow, especially in the mountains. It's our coldest temperatures. It'll be Sunday noon, where we're 30 degrees below normal. We could have a high around zero to five degrees. It is possible. Temperatures around negative 11 or negative 13 or so at night. Notice this cold air is so dense and so low to the ground and so thin that it can't push up into the mountains. So Estes Park and Leadville and all the places that are normally really cold, the ski resorts are like that would be a lot warmer than Fort Collins Boulder and Denver, Colorado Springs. The cold air just isn't deep enough to make it over the mountains, and it's not getting pushed up this time. So let's take a look at the animation. You can see on Thursday the first trough comes down. Friday we get a little break. Things dry out for a moment. On Saturday and Sunday we get another little ripple coming in, but this general trough is just going to allow us to continue to get periods of upslope snow. So Monday and Tuesday, and then Tuesday we just have Northwest flow, and the ridge is starting to try to sneak back into the West. You can see it's on the West Coast, and then Friday it starts to push our way. It looks like next weekend it crosses the state again. For temperature this is amazing cold air coming down. Temperature is far below normal for each location under that color. You can see it has a tough time getting over the higher elevations of the mountains here. It definitely comes right down the plains, shoots down across Texas and out into the Gulf, down into the southeast, and that's what's going to kick off some severe weather. That first blob is kind of away from Colorado by Wednesday. And then another blob of cold air starts coming down the end of next week, and whether it comes all the way back to the mountains, it looks like it briefly does. That sure could change a lot. That's a whole week away. Looking for atmospheric moisture, this is precipitable water forecast in the model. A storm zips out first and dumps a lot of snow in the northeast, and by the weekend this blob starts coming in from the Pacific and briefly gives us elevated moisture amounts, and then it's dry. Dew points are not too helpful right now because when it's cold enough it will snow, but you can see just amazing low dew point values. I'm just kind of showing how amazingly dry that air is, and that's why even if we do get snow, the snow totals are going to be very light. There just isn't a lot of water to squeeze out of the atmosphere. You'll get a fluffy dry snow, and that's it. So let's take a look at these snow events. Here's Thursday, you get a chance of snow sweeping across the state much of the day. Friday we get a little bit of, I don't know what that is, a bit of a break. Then going to Saturday, there's our next chance of snow. It's kind of like every morning, Thursday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and there's the Sunday chance is the best chance, but then going into Monday we still get a chance. It's a holiday for most people, so I'm not talking school days or snow days for school, because we're already off. After that gets really dry for a while. Here's Thursday next week, there's a little bit in the mountains, and going into next weekend, snow in the northeast plains with nothing big. So the next couple of days, 48 hours, we see the very light snow, four columns down to Longmont. Longmont might pick up an inch on Thursday, and maybe Boulder gets two inches or so. The mountains get some better four, five, six inch totals. Not much. The North American model has a different tape with almost nothing along I-25. Boulder getting maybe half inch to an inch. Better stuff in the mountains. The GFS over the next five days. Maybe an inch all over these regions, but less than that. East of Fort Collins, east of Longmont, east of Broomfield. And nearby though, you get up in the mountains, you got 18 to 24 inches of snow. So if you're trying to get up into the central or northern mountains, it's a very different story than what you're getting right along I-25. Over the next 10 days, the pattern and the low elevations doesn't change much. Definitely get more snow north of us, Cheyenne to Sterling, and more snow stacked up in the mountains. So the real notable stuff here is how cold it's going to be. So we go from below normal on Wednesday in the upper 30s, plunge to 20s, briefly get almost normal on Friday, and then the cold front comes in Friday afternoon and we drop to zero. Saturday's high 11, Sunday's high might only be zero. I'm gonna be conservative and keep it Southern or five or so. But negative 10 degrees at night, possibly lower than that. Monday we start a slight recovery, but still very cold. And then Tuesday we're climbing up close to normal. Low chances of snow, off and on snow. Thursday, Friday, especially Friday later night when the front comes through. And I'm keeping a 50% chance it won't be all the time snow, but we'll see some. It's gonna be very light, dry, powdery stuff. Missed this because I didn't have a video last week. The January Outlook from the Weather Service has the Intermountain West and part of the Great Plains below normal in temperatures. And from West Coast to East Coast along the Southern States and up the East Coast is above normal precipitation. And that is possibly a sign that the El Niño rain train is coming. So check out Longmont Leader for frequent weather updates. I'm gonna go up and do a full update right now. This has been Chief Meteorologist John Insworth asking you to keep looking up.