Wednesday, May 6, 2015

still climbing... (pm.06.may.15)>

Wednesday's stats:

Low temp: 65.5F (18.6C)
High temp: 85.6F (29.8C)
Rainfall: none

Other than a few patches of high clouds around the area, we have mostly clear skies as sunset approaches this evening.  There was a significant amount of cloud development over the mountains this afternoon, which led to an isolated thundershower or two just to our northeast -- but we never had any rain here in town.  It's been another unseasonably warm early May day, with the high temperature at my location again surpassing the previous high for the season and the year.  The haze and pollution issues didn't really turn out to be that big of a deal today.

We remain under the strong influence of a huge ridge of high pressure sprawled across the northwest half of India, and that's continuing to deliver scorching hot weather to the plains south of us, and temps running closer to late May norms here along the front slopes of the mountains in Himachal.  It's also keeping the atmosphere very calm and stable, apart from two or three hours of instability along the mountains during the middle of the afternoon.  That high pressure ridge should strengthen even further on Thursday, giving us another day of temperatures climbing near or just above highs for the entire year.

There are signs of some changes as we head into the weekend, however.  Advancing moisture from the Arabian Sea will combine with a few ripples of energy also moving in from the southwest to give us an increasing risk of scattered shower and thunderstorm action -- with the best chance of some sigificant rainfall between Sunday and Tuesday, the way it looks now.  With that rain potential, temperatures should trend back closer to normal for this time of year, but will probably remain pleasantly warm.

Details can be found on THE 7-DAY OUTLOOK tab above.