Sunday, March 27, 2016

spring nicely entrenched... (pm.27.mar.16)>

Sunday's stats:

Low temp: 58.3F (14.6C)
High temp: 71.6F (22.0C)
Rainfall: none

A glance to the east-northeast reveals (and satellite pics confirm) a batch of thundershowers which developed across the higher elevations this afternoon, otherwise we're dealing with partly cloudy and hazy skies as sunset approaches.  It has been a spectacular Easter Sunday here in McLeod, actually, with the sunshine never being hindered by cloudiness for long, and temperatures which peaked out at their warmest of the season and the year.

The dying upper-level disturbance drifting across Himalayan north India today barely affected us at all, but there has been an extensive outbreak of shower and thunderstorm action further north and east of us along the main mountain chains.  The weather pattern during this coming week is going to consist mainly of a flat west-to-east flow in the upper atmosphere, embedded with a few weak ripples and wiggles.  Those little disturbances will keep us from being totally and completely apathetic about some mainly PM shower/thunder development, but significant macro-scale storm systems will be totally lacking.  Like last week, we will probably have to contend with some rather extensive patches of high cloudiness drifting in from the west-southwest from time to time.

Temperatures today were warmer than expected, and it seems that's an indication that this latest disturbance failed to drag any lingering late-winter central Asian air into our neighborhood.  Models are showing quite a warming trend over the course of the next several days -- through Friday, in fact -- so I'll be bumping up our temps on THE 7-DAY OUTLOOK (see tab above).

For those of you who are celebrating Easter across the time zones of the world, I hope yours is special and blessed.