Saturday, April 26, 2014

tastes of summer... (pm.26.apr.14)>

Saturday's stats:

Low temp: 61.2F (16.2C)
High temp: 74.5F (23.6C)
Rainfall: none

Our sky looks very interesting at sunset this evening, with scattered towering cumulus clouds all around, and some significant thunderheads visible to the north and east.  We haven't had any showers or thunder at all in McLeod today, but clusters of thundershowers have developed not very far away from us late this afternoon.  The sunshine didn't have a lot of competition today, which put temperatures right where they were expected to be -- allowing us to reach yet another new high for the season and the year.

The weak upper-level disturbance we've been keeping an eye on is now centered right over the middle of Kashmir, with its associated rotation and pool of colder air aloft.  The real instability associated with this system has remained north of us up to this point, but I think we still need to be on alert for a random thundershower until about midnight, when the atmosphere stabilizes and this system moves far enough off to the east of us.

We'll then embark upon a period of about four days in which a summer-like high pressure ridge will build across most of northwest India.  There are going to be day-by-day issues of potential instability over the mountains which we'll have to watch, but sunshine and further warming of temperatures will be the main headlines all the way into Thursday.  We've been talking about 80F+ (26.7C) temps here in McLeod for this coming new week -- and that indeed looks like what we can expect.

CURRENT FORECAST details can be found on the tab above.