Wednesday, April 19, 2017

no longer stable... (pm.19.apr.17)>

Wednesday's stats:

Low temp: 69.3F (20.7C)
High temp: 84.9F (29.4C)
Rainfall: none

It's rare to experience so much thunder and lightning, and not come up with any rain at all -- but that's what happened this afternoon here in the immediate McLeod Ganj area.  I first heard some thunder around 1:45pm, and it continued on and off (sometimes very intensely) until nearly 4:30pm.  BUT -- I never saw even one drop of rain, though I'm sure there were at least some light showers up-mountain from us.  Prior to all that, we had a lot of hazy sunshine, which was only briefly eclipsed by the cumulonimbus development along the mountains during the afternoon.  The high temp at my location in the upper part of town was yet again the new warmest of the season and the year.

Well, it is obvious that our atmospheric stability of the last several days is taking leave of us.  If you've been following along here, you know that we've been anticipating a gradual influx of cooler air aloft to begin destabilizing our atmosphere... and today we got the first little taste of that.  With some gradually cooler air in the upper-levels overrunning much warmer air in the surface layers, we're going to be seeing an increasing chance of some isolated to scattered shower/thunder action over the course of the coming several days.  Although afternoon into early evening is the peak time for seeing that development, we could also see some overnight thunderstorms over the weekend into early next week.  But keep in mind that we'll also have some nice periods of warm sunshine in the midst of that risk of passing thundershowers.

These way-above-normal temps are going to be departing in a few days as well.  As a slow-moving upper-level low pressure circulation eases into northern India by Sunday into Monday, we should cool off quite a bit -- but I have a feeling that wouldn't be such an unpopular thing.