Wednesday, February 26, 2014

increasingly unstable... (pm.26.feb.14)>

Wednesday's stats:

Low temp: 44.4F (6.9C)
High temp: 55.0F (12.8C)
Precipitation: trace

It is partly cloudy just after sunset this evening, with most of the remaining clouds up along the mountains.  Today has consisted of a nearly 50/50 split between clouds and sun, along with a brief period of thunder and very light rain showers between about 4:00 and 4:30pm.  Temperatures have averaged out a bit cooler than we've enjoyed the last couple of days.

A broad and rather disorganized area of low pressure in the upper atmosphere is loitering just to our west at the moment, and will very slowly and gradually creep eastward over the next three or four days.  In the lower levels, moisture is flowing northward toward the Himalayas of north India, while an unseasonably cold batch of air in the mid- and upper levels sags southward from central Asia.  Although this whole system is rather ill defined so far, and the computer models still haven't settled on a consistent solution, the overall theme is that we're in for a prolonged stretch of unstable weather which could last all the way into early next week.

Already this afternoon we had a brief precursor of some action, in the form of that brief thundershower -- and we'll look for the potential of rain and some occasional thunder to increase incrementally as we head through tomorrow into Friday and Saturday.  We probably won't have long-lasting persistent rainfall, but sudden showers could occur anytime -- some of which could be moderate to heavy -- especially tomorrow (Thu) night into Saturday.  The models are literally flopping back and forth with different scenarios with each data run... so stay tuned for updated info.

Temperatures aloft will be cold enough for some major nose-dives during periods of precipitation, so we'll have to keep an eye out for accumulating snowfall above McLeod -- mainly above 2100m (6900ft).

Check the CURRENT FORECAST details on the tab above.