 Hi, Longmont. Welcome to your weather forecast for Tuesday, September 8th. We're coming to you a day early this week because such momentous weather changes coming on. But before we do that, let's take a look at the moon. Wednesday, September 10th will be our last quarter. It'll be a neat morning sky. You won't see a moon through the smoke in the evening. And our drought index just from last week to this week, very little change. There's a little bit of relief down here around Colorado Springs with some rain and thunderstorms there. But in the western slopes, in the eastern plains, everything is pretty much the same. That's going to change dramatically this week. And we'll see. Probably if it doesn't show up in the next week's map, the map after that will be really a lot moister. Nationally, we still have a lot of drought kind of increasing out here in the west. Surprisingly, California, even with all its fires, isn't as dry hydrologically as we are. Rain fall over the last seven days shows just very light showers along the I-25 corridor, a little bit up on the northeast plains. The western slopes got a little more significant rain, half-inch amounts in the heavier regions there. And that did help a little bit with the fires out west. What didn't get touched was the Cameron Peak Fire up here. We're going to cover that a lot right now. So here are four major fires. Williams Fork and Cameron Peak Fire, the closest ones to the front range here. Williams Fork is not as active. It is contributing a little bit to the smoke. Only 10% contained at about 10,000 acres. But the big monster here is the Cameron Peak Fire. It increased 10,000 acres just over this last weekend and put up smoke and ash all across the northeast part of the state. Lawnmine got hit about as hard as anything. So here's a picture I took yesterday. That is Sunday from Hays Hardware. You can see the sun is obscured to the point that you can actually look at it. Really eerie orangey color to the sky. And we all had a lot of ash on our cars and every place around. So that will probably continue some on Monday. The plume is already going up. But change is happening. So here's our smoke model. And you can see the Cameron Peak Fire right there. These purples are the highest ash and smoke content that the model handles. That is right over our head. We're going to put this into motion now and look out about the next two and a half days. You can see how cold front is coming down and bringing a lot of fresh air. It really pushes down into Nevada and Utah more than here. We're on the interaction part of the front. Let's do that again. Get that going again. We're on this side of the front where the moisture is available for rain and snow. And so the smoke doesn't get quite as cleared out. At the end here, you can see the Cameron Peak flaring up again with winds coming from a different direction, more from the south direction. So still a lot of smoke around. The big picture for the next 10 days is this dramatic cold front. An absolutely epic cold front. We go from temperatures up here in the 90s and plummet down to below freezing down to the 20s in just a day and a half or so. The ensemble has heavy continuous precipitation for more than a day and has snow in here as well, blue dots. And the temperatures really don't get up into the normal area again between these two colored bars until the very end of the week. This is a change in the forecast. Just a few days ago, we thought it was going to warm up a lot more rapidly than this and we'll take a look at why. So here's the 500-bill bar map in motion. Here comes that big strong trough. And what happens is it cuts off from the jet stream. It becomes closed circles here and stalls right over the four corners. Originally, we thought it was just going to be a wave that would move on out. Because of that, it's going to linger, keep things cold, unsettled, and a chance of showers throughout the rest of the week. Taking a look at the temperature movie here. Here's above normal temperatures. Here comes the cold, really cold, extremely cold below normal temperatures coming right down into Colorado and lingering for days here. See the West really gets a shot. It's a complete flip in the temperature regime. And here we are out into Friday and into Saturday. We're still below normal. Going into Sunday below normal. And finally, about Monday, we see normal temperatures, some above normal temperatures on the western slopes, coming back into the state. So this week is going to be chilly. Get your jacket and coat out. So let's take a look at the storm itself. It's sweeping down. The low cuts off in the upper atmosphere. We get upslope flow here. Just shoveling moisture from the gulf uphill into Colorado. I'm going to back it up here again and do that again. Here comes the front. It's going to blast through Monday afternoon, rain at first, changing over to snow before sunrise. And then as the week goes on, we continue to see light showers, some snow chances around in Colorado. So how much precipitation are we looking at? Well, this is rainfall. Well, rainfall and melted snow. So this is the liquid content of the storm. We're located here at the pink dot. And we are in the two inch to one and a half inch zone for just raw amount of water. And down here we have two, two and a half inch, almost three inch amounts in the southern part of the state. And where the camera peak fire is right there, it's about an inch and a half of liquid. This is fantastic news for them. The storm also, since it's backed up a little bit and it's cutting off around the four corners, we did not expect a lot of precipitation over in the western counties. And that is now going to get some rain and snow out there as well. So everybody's going to get some relief. How much snow? That's the big question. This is very early in the season. We just had 101 degree temperatures. The ground is extremely warm. When the snow is falling, we're going to get a lot of melting. Roads will be fine throughout Tuesday. Maybe Tuesday night, if the snow fall rates stay high enough and the cold air really comes in and trenches, maybe by Wednesday morning you'll see slick spots, especially on bridges and overpasses and like that. Most of the snowfall you'll see build up on grassy surfaces. But we're going to do what I call the snowfall roundup. We're going to take a look at a bunch of different opinions, how much snow is going to come in. And the GFS, this is a model that we look at a lot in these discussions, is extremely bullish. 8 to 10 inches of snow right here in Longmont. Even heavier, up to 15 to 18 inches of snow around Boulder and along the foothills. That's a lot of snow for this time of year. Another model, the North American model, has much smaller regions of the heaviest amounts of snow, but it puts Longmont in the 10 to 12 inch area. Looking at the Canadian model, they also give a little less overall snow in those regions that get skipped east and west of us, and they have us in the 2 to 4 inch region, which might be a little underdone. And then, weather underground says 4 to 5 inches and asks for weather services calling for 3 to 7. Channel 7 News gives it 3 to 6, Channel 9, 2 to 6. I'm happy with the 2 to 6 area. I think so much melting is going to occur. We'll get water, we'll get snow. If you had a cold board, if you put a board out, let air circulate around it, you'll get these higher snowfall amounts or greater buildup on it. But anything that's got some of the summer warmth still in it is just going to ruin the snow depth. We also have a lot of watches and warnings. We are recording midday on Monday, Labor Day, and so these will change as the storm moves in and takes shape, so please look at the National Weather Service site, look at your weather apps, watch the news, keep up with what's coming, but we have a winter storm warning for the high country. We have a freeze warning over much of the state. Before that, we have a red flag warning for high winds as the front comes in. We could see 50 mile an hour winds where the fires are occurring. So very bad for a brief period of time before the rain moves in. We have a winter weather advisory on the lower elevations along I-25 and out on the plains, the high wind watch with the front coming in, freeze watch after that. You will see temperatures down in the 20s, even possibly the low 20s, so plants, garden vegetables and things will die. So you've got to do what you can to protect them if you can, and we have an air quality alert for all the smoke and ash that's occurring. So quite a wild, crazy time. So over the next seven days, we dropped to highs in the 30s on Tuesday from just having 100 degree plus temperatures. Wednesday, we struggled to get to the 40s, finally climbed to the 50s on Thursday, and then returned to roughly normal, a little bit below normal temperatures in the 70s and 80s through the weekend. Had very good chance of snow Tuesday and Wednesday, then changing back to rain on Thursday. Before we go, let's take a look at the records that have happened just in the last few days and the records that could be broken. This is thanks to some data digging that Channel 9 News did. So we have now set the latest 100 degree plus temperature for the year that happened on Saturday. We are probably going to see the shortest gap of time between going from 90 degree plus temperatures to snow. We are certainly going to hit or break the 90 degree plus temperature record in one season. On the cold side, we will probably break the record low high temperature of 42 on Tuesday, the record low temperature of 34 on Tuesday, the record low high temperature of 53 on Wednesday, the record low temperature of 31 on Wednesday, the record two day temperature drop, which is 76 degrees, we could go as high 79 degree drop. We'll see. The record one day temperature drop, and that record is 53 degrees. We will almost certainly set the record for the second earliest snow and the most snow in the first storm of the season. And finally, the greatest amount of precipitation in one day on September 8th of 0.71 inches that was set in 2001. What crazy times. Be safe out there. Stay warm and stay cool before that happens. Thank you.