Wednesday, September 10, 2014

sputtering phase... (pm.10.sep.14)>

Wednesday's stats:

Low temp: 63.0F (17.2C)
High temp: 71.4F (21.9C)
Rainfall: 0.01" (less than 1mm)

A very pleasant evening is in progress, with partly cloudy skies and comfortable temperatures.  It's been another day of wildly swinging extremes between sunshine, clouds, fog, light rain showers and even some thunder.  The rain barely registered a measurement in my gauge in the upper part of town, but it did look threatening for a while during the early afternoon.

Yet again today, we saw how quickly early morning sunshine can get eclipsed by cloudiness and fog.  That's what happens when there remains a good amount of latent moisture in the air -- condensed out by rapid warming from the sun for just an hour or two.  It doesn't look like our air mass is going to dry out enough to put an end to this phenomenon during the next few days... so we'll continue to have to be braced for the development of clouds, patchy fog and some random rain shower/thunder action by the mid-day and afternoon hours.

The good news is that there is no indication whatsoever of another strong surge of monsoon moisture -- even on the extended range data which gives us a glimpse all the way into the final week of September.  Of course there could be twists in the plot, but it seems that this year's monsoon season will continue to sputter out and dissipate as we move into the latter half of the month.