Thursday, March 16, 2017

temporary setback... (pm.16.mar.17)>

Thursday's stats:

Low temp: 44.4F (6.9C) -- at 4:10pm
High temp: 53.8F (12.1C) -- at 11:00am
Precipitation: 0.32" (8mm) -- total

A sliver of clearing in the western sky has allowed a quick view of the setting sun during the past few minutes, here at the end of a day that has not been very good at all.  This morning there were a few glimpses of sunshine in the midst of the clouds, but those clouds thickened even further during the afternoon, with numerous periods of light rain showers, starting just before 12:30pm.  Rainfall was not heavy, but it was certainly more widespread and persistent than expected.  Temperatures started out mild this morning, but plunged during the PM showers.

The weak upper-level disturbance that began to affect us yesterday (Wed) afternoon became more robust than the models were indicating, but we're now starting to get on the backside of that circulation.  Things should stabilize overnight, but with warming in the surface layers, coupled with significantly colder air aloft, we could see some isolated/random shower development tomorrow (Fri) as well.  Even on Saturday and Sunday there's going to be a mentionable chance of mainly PM instability kicking off more in the way of random showers somewhere around our area.  So... it's not totally smooth sailing for us as we head into the weekend.

The big weather feature to watch in the extended period will be a building ridge of high pressure across much of India, which should allow some much warmer air to surge northward into our neighborhood... by Tuesday into Wednesday.  If all goes at least marginally according to plan, we should be seeing the warmest temps of the season in about 5-6 days from now.