Monday, April 22, 2013

very fickle... (pm.22.apr.13)>

Monday's stats:

Low temp: 52.7F (11.5C) -- around 6:00am
High temp: 65.4F (18.6C) -- 4:45pm
Rainfall: trace

Challenging weather to keep on top of today, as clouds thickened up here along the mountain slopes this morning, and didn't really break up and yield to sunshine again until after 3:00pm.  There were a few sprinkles and very light showers during the early afternoon, but not enough to measure in the rain gauge.  Humidity has remained high all day -- in the 60-75% range.  Now, as sunset approaches, we have partly cloudy skies with temperatures near their warmest of the day (which hasn't been all that warm).

Satellite pics this evening show a scattering of showers and thundershowers from eastern Afghanistan all the way into northwestern India, courtesy of an unusually moist air mass for this time of year, along with an upper-level flow that contains numerous weak disturbances.  This general pattern is not expected to change until perhaps the end of the week, and that's going to keep us on guard for the sudden appearance of a period of thundershowers on any given day or night.  There is no major storm system responsible for this... just a marginally unstable atmosphere that is in flux and determined to be fickle.

Temperatures since yesterday (Sun) morning have been quite a bit cooler than normal for late April, and considerably cooler than expected.  I've been frustrated waiting for the warmer air to flow back in after being chased out by yesterday morning's major round of thunderstorms -- but it will definitely be returning as we get more help from the sun during the rest of the week.  It's hard for intrusions of cooler air to stay around for long this time of year...

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