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The Next Storm/Next Snow Forecast Discussion from the Cherrywood Observatory
Issued: Friday July 7, 2017
by John Ensworth
This feature will run as close to daily as possible in this location on the Longmont Observer.
I will provide a brief note about the ‘why’ behind the weather with a focus on severe weather, unusual weather, and snow (especially focused on snow depth in Longmont).
Discussion:
There is a big ridge (a ridge is a hill shaped bend in the jet stream and is associated with high pressure and hotter and drier air this time of year) over the Western U.S. Colorado is on the right side of the center of this ridge. This is allowing a fairly faint, slow moving, cool front to back in from the northeast now and through Saturday. This ridge will ooze eastward passing over us and drying us out and heating us up to near 100F on Monday.
In the meantime, a bit more moisture will flow in from the east with this front. Temperatures will cool to upper 80’s and 90F (not much of a cooling) but severe weather will be possible for Longmont on Friday. The Storm Prediction Center (SPC) out of Norman, Oklahoma has Longmont under a marginal risk of severe weather Friday (merely a 1 on a scale of 1-5). Isolated thunderstorms will form in the foothills and may produce strong damaging winds and hail (damaging in size in a few spots) in the afternoon. These storms will move to the southeast and merge into a line or two of thunderstorms that will affect the eastern plains. The severe risk will be far away on Saturday; south of Colorado Springs.
Bio:
John Ensworth works from Longmont as the Principle Investigator for the NASA
Science Mission Directorate Earth and space science education product review. He is in his 14th year running this review. He is an astronomer (from the 2nd grade onward) and became a meteorologist (in the 5th grade) when a thunderstorm in Arizona rained on his telescope when the weather service had only forecasted a 10% chance of rain. He has college degrees in physics and astronomy and climatology and a graduate degree in meteorology and earth science. He lectures at the Little Thompson Observatory in
Berthoud, the Estes Park Memorial Observatory in Estes Park, and for a number of online universities.
He built and runs a backyard observatory near Pace and 17th in northeast Longmont where he has lived for 8 years with his wife, daughter, son, and two cats. Forecasting severe weather and snow amounts via text lead to this column. He began texting friends about the weather right after the September 2013 flood. The readers of this column will keep him honest in what he ‘thought’ he had forecasted for ‘the most recent’ storm.
