Monday, July 14, 2014

reality has set in... (pm.14.jul.14)>

Monday's stats:

Low temp: 65.1F (18.4C)
High temp: 72.5F (22.5C)
Rainfall: 1.92" (4.9cm) -- updated at 8:00pm

We have clouds, haze, and some light fog across the area this evening, as well as some scattered light rain showers.  It was nice to see some glimpses of sunshine this morning, but the clouds really thickened up quickly during the late morning, leading to the development of some light showers shortly after 12:30pm.  Those showers became heavier as the afternoon wore on, and you can see (above) that we ended up with a very hefty rainfall total for the day.  About a quarter-inch of that total occurred during the overnight hours, actually.  Needless to say, humidity has been pretty close to the saturation point -- in the 85-100% range -- throughout the day.

All of last week we were anticipating this, and it has taken shape very dramatically.  The moisture content of our air mass has finally reached normal for this stage of the monsoon season, and we've had about 7.5 inches (19.1cm) of rain in the past 36 hours!  It still looks like we may have only scratched the surface of what we might expect during the remainder of this week.  Computer models are projecting even better ingredients coming together for thick fog and periods of heavy rainfall lasting all the way through Friday.  We'll likely get some breaks between extended downpours, but I doubt that we'll see much of a drop in humidity levels.

Right now there are hints of a slight retreat of these full-on monsoon conditions over the weekend, but I'm not putting a lot of stock in that just yet.

As always, you can check the UPDATED RAINFALL TALLY and the CURRENT FORECAST details on the tabs at the top of the page.