Thursday, March 13, 2014

warming trend underway... (am.13.mar.14)>

*Update @ 9:56am... Most of the high clouds have scooted off to the east already.  There could be more cloud development later in the day... if not, it's going to be even warmer than expected.  My temp has already reached 57.1F (13.9C).

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There are some patches of high clouds over our area just before sunrise this morning, but otherwise, it's looking pretty nice out there.  My overnight low temp in the upper part of town has been 46.4F (8.0C), but it's up to 50.5F (10.3C) already -- a sign of the warming that is trying to kick in.  There has been no additional rainfall since yesterday afternoon.

The weather outlook for the coming few days isn't perfect, but it's definitely much better than we've seen in a while -- featuring the warmest temperatures of the early spring season and all of 2014 thus far.  A ridge of high pressure building across northwest India will be represented by generally stable conditions and very healthy warming throughout all layers of the atmosphere from now into Saturday or Sunday.  The reason I say that the outlook isn't perfect is due to the fact that there will be occasional weak ripples in the upper atmosphere moving up and over the top of this building high pressure ridge.  These will deliver a few periods of mainly high clouds, and even the risk of some scattered shower/thundershower activity over the mountains.  That shower risk will be most evident over the weekend, though the upper-level flow should keep most of the development further to our north.

As long as our springtime sunshine cooperates, temperatures will be steadily increasing between now and Sunday -- possibly pushing into the mid-60s(F)/near 18(C).  These kinds of temps would finally be close to where they should be for the season, after a solid five weeks of cooler-than-average weather.

A stronger disturbance is forecast to push into northern India on Monday and Tuesday, knocking down this high pressure ridge and bringing an increasing chance of another dose of significant rain and thunder.  In the meantime, let's enjoy this good stuff!

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