Sunday, May 18, 2014

noncommittal pattern... (am.18.may.14)>

Mostly cloudy skies blanket the area at sunrise this morning, though the sun is dimly visible at the moment.  I'm recording an overnight low temperature of 61.3F (16.3C), and there has been no rainfall since last report.  Humidity is currently 43%.

We remain in a pattern that is not really committing itself one way or another, and it looks like that's going to remain the case throughout most of this new week as well.  A weak upper-level circulation is sitting over western Afghanistan, while a tentative ridge of high pressure remains across much of northern India.  Neither of these systems is strong enough to totally dominate the pattern, so that's keeping us in a rather 'in between' phase.  This morning's batch of cloudiness should give way to a good amount of sunshine again today, but we still have to be on guard for a random shower or thundershower which could pop up at some point.  But as we've been discussing for days, the risk of anything more than brief, light rainfall is not very high.

A marginally unstable atmosphere will hang with us for the next several days, with just a small chance of some isolated to widely scattered shower/thunder activity now and again.  We'll see both sunshine and occasional clouds this week -- and with a fairly warm air mass in place, any sunshine we get will keep our temps in the pleasantly warm range.  It's still not looking like we're going to be rising above normal for this time of the year, though.

CURRENT FORECAST info can be found on the tab above.