Tuesday, December 22, 2015

WINTER officially arrives... (pm.22.dec.15)>

Tuesday's stats:

Low temp: 39.0F (3.9C) -- at 7:30pm
High temp: 45.3F (7.4C)
Rainfall: none

It's quite hazy this evening as darkness takes over, but there are only a few scattered clouds remaining.  We saw both clouds and sun today, with the clouds definitely the majority player... especially during the early morning and again during the afternoon hours.  You can see from the stats above that the thermometer moved only a few degrees -- and that was due to the predominance of cloudiness, along with a slightly cooler air mass sinking in from the north-northwest.  The high temp at my location in the upper part of town was the coolest of the season, just by a fraction of a degree.

The Winter Solstice occurred just after 10 o'clock this morning, Indian Standard Time, which means we are in the midst of the shortest few days of the year, and have now officially crossed into 'meterological winter', which will last until around the 20th of March here in the northern hemisphere.

The minor wiggles and wobbles in the upper atmosphere that we've been talking about recently are tracking across the western Himalayan region right now -- and that will keep things slightly disturbed into early Thursday.  Models have been threatening some very light precipitation development in our area, but that doesn't seem to have manifested, except perhaps in the high elevations to our north and northeast.  There's still at least a slight risk of a brief shower tomorrow (Wed), before things start to stabilize again.  Right now both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day are looking quiet, with a good amount of sunshine returning.

A surprisingly aggressive warming trend is now showing up on the charts starting Friday night into Saturday, but much of that warming energy could translate into cloud development instead of rising temps here along the front slopes of the mountains.  Anyway, it seems we'll see somewhat of an uptick in temperatures over the weekend into early next week.

Keep track of THE 7-DAY OUTLOOK on a tab located at the top of the page.