Sunday, March 23, 2014

clouds in control... (am.23.mar.14)>

There is extensive and rather thick high cloudiness across the area just before sunrise this morning.  I've recorded an overnight low of 52.0F (11.1C), and there has been no precipitation.  The humidity reading this morning is 38%.

The last couple of days we've seen a lot of variability between sunshine and clouds, with some afternoon thundershower development in the mountains just to our north and east.  Upper-level winds have steered that development away from us, allowing us to hear a couple of rumbles of thunder, but preventing any rainfall here in McLeod.  Temperatures have been really pleasant, though still a few degrees below normal for this stage of March.

An upper-level low pressure circulation is now well-formed, and spinning over Turkmenistan.  This is the feature that I mentioned a couple of days ago -- saying that it was going to remain fairly stationary all the way through most of this coming week.  As it sits and spins, though, it's going to be ejecting several waves of upper-level energy across Afghanistan, northern Pakistan and northern India.  Deeper moisture is now appearing ahead of this system, and combined with that upper-level dynamic energy, we're going to be seeing a better chance of some significant shower and thunderstorm activity in our area during the coming 48 hours or so.  I still think the best window of opportunity for significant rain/thunder will be between late tonight and very early Tuesday morning.

We'll be flirting with periods of instability off and on throughout this new week, so don't expect any extended stretches of sunny and shower-free weather through Friday.  We will get some nice breaks here and there, and that will keep our temperatures rising above 60F (15.5C) on most days -- which is actually not much of a feat at all for the end of March.

Details can be found on the CURRENT FORECAST tab at the top of the page.