Monday, January 6, 2014

cold and unsettled... (am.06.jan.14)>

It's kind of eerie-looking out there at sunrise this morning, with mostly cloudy skies and some very light rain showers mixed with some fine, granular snow pellets at my house here in the upper part of town.  My rain gauge shows 0.07" (2mm) of precipitation from these showers which popped up around 5:00am, and the current humidity reading is 62%.  It's also one of the coldest mornings in several days -- with an overnight low of 36.0F (2.2C) which occurred around 6:00am.

The pool of very cold air aloft associated with the upper-level circulation which has been hovering just northwest of us since Saturday has not given up yet.  It remained unstable enough overnight to lift what little moisture it could gather up, producing a few stray light rain/snow showers along the mountain slopes.  We should see some sun peeking through today, but there will also be patchy clouds and still at least a slight risk of a random light shower or two.

That leaves us with little time for much sustained improvement before a more significant storm system arrives during the mid-week period.  A strong upper-level disturbance over Iraq right now will be moving steadily in our direction, then move across northern India on Wednesday into Thursday.  Based on the track record since the 21st of December, it shouldn't have trouble finding the moisture necessary to produce an outbreak of fairly widespread rain and snow across the Himalayas of northern India.  Just as it starts to move out, yet another strong disturbance will drop in from the northwest to keep rain/snow chances in the forecast for Friday into Saturday as well.  It's going to be an active period ahead... stay tuned for regular updates.

Get the CURRENT FORECAST details for the next five days on the tab above.