This content was originally published by the Longmont Observer and is licensed under a Creative Commons license.
Forecast Discussion:
Dry and cooler continues today. Figure 1 shows the departed cold front Monday PM. Other than smoke, the skies are Colorado-clear. Speaking of smoke, the large fires in the south are pouring out copious amounts of smoke, but the haze around here Monday and today is actually coming from new fires in central Utah (Figure 2).
The upper air pattern for tonight shows the big ridge sitting to our west keeping us high and dry.
The longer range forecast:
The ridge is still in place tomorrow, but has slid across the state with its central axis just barely to our east (Figure 4). From this , we see very little weather but rapidly warming temperatures through Thursday (Figure 5). Down in the bottom of figure 4 is an interesting feature - hurricane Bud (oh what a terrifying name).
Figure 5 is the NHC's forecast of storm intensity and direction. It currently has winds at 120mph making it a category 3 storm headed north-ish (Figure 6). Figure 7 is the weather map for Friday PM and Bud is coming inland in northern Mexico. Moisture is already streaming ahead of it into Colorado. Figure 8 has a lee trough in NE Colorado and a lot of moisture from Bud nearby. This could be interesting! Going back to Figure 5, afternoon heating will combine with Bud's moisture for Friday afternoon storms. Saturday and Sunday will see more moisture around. After that, a stream of Gulf of Mexico moisture seems to get drawn into Colorado with rain showers for the beginning of next week. Relief *may* be in sight!
