Hey folks! Hope you had a good holiday weekend. We enter a new week strong stretch of summer heat. A big ridge of high pressure is expected to set up shop across the desert southwest, as seen below:

This ridging extends into southern Canada, with a few areas of unsettled weather of note across parts of the central US and northwest coast of California.

This looks about as classic of a summer weather pattern as you can get with the main storm track way up in central British Columbia.

While this type of pattern can lock in for several days at a time, there does seem to be a chance to break this pattern up over the next 7-10 days.

Below we have the potential high temp charts – we're going to roll with a nice wave of summer heat through at least Thursday or Friday. The jury is out on how much weather we can squeeze out of Saturday's system.

We look to kick the atmosphere around beyond that with some up and down temp swings into the middle of next week. Below is a look at the pattern going into Friday and Saturday.

IF that set up pans out, it probably kicks a cold front south by Friday evening, yielding a nice break from the heat throughout Saturday. We may even need to worry about thunderstorm chances between Friday and Saturday too.

For now though, we'll need a day or two to parse those details. Unfortunately, with a predominantly ridge-heavy weather pattern for at least the next 10 days, we likely fall behind a bit on moisture for much of the state. This will have to be watched closely as we have seen extreme drought develop across the Western Slope.

Any potential for dry lightning could be the spark for timber wildfire activity to pick up... this is about the time of year for that threat to pick up... another thing we'll have to monitor closely.

Hope you folks have a good week– we'll shoot another update out before the end of the week if we need it for Friday and Saturday.

Luke