Thursday, January 9, 2014

the colossal flop... (am.09.jan.14)>

It's a cold morning -- my low temp here in the upper part of town was 37.6F (3.1C) about an hour ago.  Skies are partly cloudy at the moment, with a humidity reading of 58%.  We had a couple of periods of very gusty winds between about 1:00am and 5:30am, along with a few more sprinkles and very brief, light showers, but not enough to measure in the rain gauge.  So that leaves us with a whopping trace of precipitation in the past 24 hours.

The center of circulation of our upper-level system is very close to the Pak/Kashmir border, just northwest of Jammu.  Most of the moisture in the higher levels of the atmosphere has already been pushed off to the northeast, leaving us with only scattered/broken cloudiness across southern and western Himachal early this morning.  It appears that the only significant snowfall occurred on the Dhauladhars (and other high mountain ranges) during the past 24 hours, as the anticipated supply of low-level moisture never showed up for the party.  That's what has caused us to almost totally miss out on any precipitation from this system which had looked fairly promising.  In fact, let's go ahead and call it a colossal flop.  If you weren't looking forward to some nasty weather, you're probably pleased -- but if you're a fan of Himalayan winter storms, you might be disappointed.

If you remember, we've been talking about a secondary upper-level disturbance following closely behind this last one.  It is dropping southeastward, and will wind up directly over Himachal Pradesh by late Friday night and early Saturday morning.  Although it will be very dynamically energetic and bring with it a pool of frigid air aloft, we're going to run into the same issue -- a lack of decent low-level moisture to work with.  That means there will probably be some scattered rain and snow showers around the area, but it's going to be hard to get much measurement/accumulation here at our elevation.  But of course, the atmosphere is always full of surprises (both good and bad), so we shall see...

Check the CURRENT FORECAST details for the coming five days, on the tab above.