Thursday, June 9, 2016

a slice of stability... (pm.09.jun.16)>

Thursday's stats:

Low temp: 64.8F (18.2C)
High temp: 80.2F (26.8C) -- updated
Rainfall: none

Well lo and behold, our atmosphere has indeed stabilized this afternoon.  For the first time since last Saturday we did NOT have thunderstorm development in our immediate area.  There was a cluster of thundershowers which slipped by just to our south early this morning, leaving a lot of patchy cloudiness in its wake, but then the sun broke free by the noon hour, providing us with some calm and quiet PM weather conditions for a welcome change.  Humidity averaged in the 40 to 50% range throughout the day, with temps a few degrees cooler than normal for the first half of June.

More micro-climate mysteries.  The overall pattern has not really changed at all over the course of the past few days, but today, there was only the most isolated shower development all up and down the outer Himalayan chains.  So obviously, the interactions between differing temperature and moisture profiles across the various layers of the atmosphere here along the mountains was in more of a state of equilibrium and stability today.  Computer model data has been bordering on useless lately... a coin toss might be a better forecasting strategy.

Those models continue to show isolated to scattered thundershower development mainly during the afternoon and evening hours, but perhaps some activity during the overnight and morning hours as well -- for the duration.  This means that we have now reached the time of year when it's very difficult to totally remove rain chances from the forecast.  On the other hand, as we saw today, periods of steamy summer sunshine are also likely, as our temps fluctuate based on that dance between sun, clouds and showers.

We finally have an official declaration of monsoon onset in extreme southern India -- check out SUMMER INTO MONSOON (above) for details on that.  Get a look at other info on tabs above as well.