Tuesday, August 25, 2015

late monsoon dynamics... (pm.25.aug.15)>

Tuesday's stats:

Low temp: 62.8F (17.1C)
High temp: 72.1F (22.3C)
Rainfall: trace

Thick fog is reducing visibilities to less than 100 meters here in the main market of McLeod Ganj at sunset this evening.  It's been yet another day of extreme variety, with a few hours of beautiful, bright sunshine early this morning, followed by a thickening of clouds and fog during the late morning hours... and then pretty much totally cloudy and foggy conditions throughout the afternoon and now into the evening.  However, there's been nothing more than a few brief sprinkles of rain/drizzle this afternoon -- and that may allow us to end up with a day without measurable rainfall as long as something more significant doesn't pop up in the coming several hours.

The humidity reading at my location dipped to 70% during the mid-morning, but has obviously rebounded to the 95-100% range since around 3:00pm, as evidenced by the fog. It's much too early to get anything resembling a clean sweep of the remaining tropical moisture lingering here along the mountain slopes of north India -- so we'll continue to see periods of sunshine in between extended periods of clouds and occasional foggy episodes. The computer model data is showing very little rain development in our area the next couple of days, and only slightly more significant development as the weekend arrives.  BUT -- there could be isolated to widely scattered thundershowers dotting our area on any given day, especially during the afternoon into the evening hours.

The extended range data continues to show a fairly benign situation as we enter and progress through the first week of September; which means a mixture of sunshine, clouds and occasional fog, along with the risk of downpours from time to time.  We may see the lush ferns and mosses begin to yellow a bit and start to wilt during the next couple of weeks... the first signs of the approaching end of the monsoon.

THE 7-DAY OUTLOOK and the MONSOON 2015: RAINFALL TALLY can be found on tabs above.