 Welcome to the weather forecast for the week beginning Wednesday, May 18th, 2022. I'm Chief Meteorologist John Insworth for Longmont Public Media. Sunday, May 22nd, a week after a beautiful eclipse and a few completely clear nights we had recently. That's what was great. We have our third quarter moon. We're going to drought. Going from last week to this week, things have gotten a little worse in the plains on the southwestern part of the state. We have a fire down here. We have numerous fires down in New Mexico. Looking nationally, the west and southwest and areas around the inner mountain region are all getting a little drier and a little drier. Not good news there either, or we do have good news coming. So hang on. Here is the snowpack. I'm going to keep this going until maybe beginning of June or something. Because this is interesting. Here goes the plunge right now. We're down to 52% of the median for a snowpack statewide. But we have a gigantic system coming in and that sure could give us an uptick more towards normal right here at the end. Over the last seven days, oh my goodness, how dry. Just almost nothing. A few wandering storms, but nothing else there. I hear the fires down in New Mexico. I don't know why that isn't showing up the one in Colorado. There's evacuations and everything, so I'm not sure about that. But the smoke is being kept down there by the overall jet stream flow. There's a little Oregon fire here. The smoke comes in this direction, but nothing in Colorado proper. Looking at severe weather, going into the third week of May, first, second, third week. Definitely have this little nose of severe weather chances coming back. We had a marginal risk on Tuesday, not yesterday as I record this. But as far as I know, nothing big happened. There's a marginal and slight risk in the southeast part of the state on Wednesday. And a chance of afternoon storms that pulls out Thursday and further away on Friday. I'm not sure that just doesn't look right to me. I think we should have a chance of thunder with our next system. So I'm not sure what's going on there. Let's take a look at the surface map. So we had a cool front come through. Briefly knocked the temperatures down like that. But then right before the front comes in, we do see temperatures go way up. And then we have the next storm system coming down to Wyoming in heavy snow. And even some thunderstorm watches are now going for rounds and snow and rain over much of the state for Saturday. So looking at the normal temperatures, it's going from 73 to 76. Getting positively warm now, 44 to 47 for a low. And here we peak really warm. We could even break 90. And then we plunge with this Thursday evening cold front. Go way below normal and we don't start to come back up until the 25th of May. We have our old chance of thunderstorms on Wednesday. A little dry period here and then a really strong signal in the ensemble for heavy rain. And another on Monday, a pretty good signal too. And then beyond that, there's even chances. So there's a lot of water coming back. I'm going to highlight this weekend storm. But before we do that, here's our ridge on Wednesday. And I'll keep it really warm on Friday as Thursday. And then Friday, the big trough pushes down and with a very strong jet stream overhead and a low to the southern part of the state pumping moisture up out of the plains. It's just going to be perfect for all this precipitation. So here's a strong start. So this is actually, we'll probably start Thursday night late, really Friday morning, but it really gets going late morning. Friday, Friday night. Let's show the snow. I think the lower elevations, it's going to be more rain, but we should get some snow along that 25. Friday, Saturday, midnight, just going to town. Saturday morning, still rain or snow. Saturday noon, switching over to rain with snow mixed in maybe. So Monday, another trough comes in. We get another shot of rain with mountain snow. So yeah, we're going to turn things around hydrologically. There's the ridge going into Thursday, then compressing air, warm things up and then down comes the big trough. And it hangs around for a while. There's Saturday, just a broad kind of slow moving trough. Gets a little reinforcement in the back. And then that comes swinging through on Monday, Tuesday for the next shot of precipitation. Pretty amazing. There's even a hint of more coming down on Thursday. That's a later sprinkling of precipitation. And then a strong ridge comes back right after school ends here. That's going to be great. Let's take a look at this cold front. Those are thunderstorms and cool air from thunderstorms. Here comes the front. Look how sharp that is. It comes down the plains first. It kind of gets hung up on the mountains a little bit, but eventually shoots down with a reinforcement of super cold air all the way down to Mexico. And then just cold air sitting around. We have a source of cold air kind of reinforcing that. And we stayed chilly on this 25th, 26th. And we don't see a warm up in the west until the end of next week. Let's take a look at this storm in motion. There's a batch of thunderstorms that left on Wednesday. Here's Thursday and Friday. The storm really gets going. And you can see the load just kind of sits down here cranking away. Away it goes. Here comes the Monday storm. There you go. That's a pretty good shot of Monday, Tuesday precipitation. The shower's lingering around into Wednesday. At least you're getting rained on in Mexico. That's really good news for them. And there's the end of next week with it clearing out. So this is where, I don't know how much I believe all this. Over the next five days, total precipitation for Collins is about an inch, inch and a quarter. Down around Longmont, it's two inches. Boulder, you're up at two and a half to three inches. Maybe three inches by Lyman. That's a lot of water. But this is slow moving and it's got a good jet pull. It's spring heading for summer, so there is moisture available out on the plains. Well, I don't believe is how much snow the GFS is putting down. Look at that. It's eight inches to a foot. Eight inches around four Collins a foot in Longmont. 18 to 20 inches in Boulder. My goodness. Pretty crazy. Something more realistic, but this doesn't go out quite as far. It only goes to the 21st, but this I think is better. Far Collins is about two to three inches of snow. It gets less realistic again right around Longmont to Boulder. Boulder getting 17 inches. So I don't know. Just kind of keep watching the models. The GFS has doubled down on snow. I mean, it looked kind of crazy yesterday and today. It's like twice that. And of course, if you've got 10 days, it's even more nutty with places around Longmont. That's two to two and a half inches of liquid and we've got three to three and a half, maybe four to five inches of water. Over the next 10 days above Colorado Springs and ridiculous snow amounts for that too. There's a couple feet, two and a half feet up here. I don't know. I think it's fiction, but watch Longmont leader for updates and Broomfield leader for that. So we have 87.91 right before the front comes in because you get that compression of the heat down of the air or heating the air down slow upon the mountains as the front comes in. You can see the nighttime lowers dropping. Probably a chance of the thunderstorm or two, but it's going to take a while for things to moisten up. Sometime overnight through the season, the Friday rain showers begin. Friday is pretty much rain and maybe snow, maybe snow mixed in, changing the snow in the evening, something like that. And then Friday overnight to Saturday, snow is probably likely, you definitely get a lot of melting with a very, very warm ground and maybe you'll see two to three slushy inches of stucco rye lie 25. It certainly is, that's pretty likely. So Sunday Monday, we get the additional showers coming in and we kind of dry out little on Tuesday with more coming in later. So like I said before, Longmont leader and Broomfield leader have my more frequent updates and also great local news. This has been Chief Meteorologist John Ensworth. Keep looking up.