Thursday, May 1, 2014

becoming less stable... (pm.01.may.14)>

Thursday's stats:

Low temp: 67.5F (19.7C)
High temp: 81.0F (27.2C)
Rainfall: trace

There are some light showers hovering along the mountains this evening, with partly to mostly cloudy skies at the moment.  Morning sunshine gave way to a very rapid increase in clouds over the mountains around noon, which led to a brief period of light showers just before 1:00pm.  The afternoon was generally partly cloudy, but then some fresh shower development uphill from us around 4:30pm has led to a few more sprinkles and very light showers early this evening.  It was very warm again today -- but for the first time in the past eight days I did not record a new high temp for the year.

For several days we've been anticipating the return of some mountain instability, and that's exactly what we've seen happening today.  The lower layers of the atmosphere remain peaked at the warmest of this unfolding summer season, while some ever-so-subtle cooling occurs in the upper-levels.  With an increasing amount of latent moisture in the air, the situation is primed for some scattered mainly PM shower and thundershower activity in our vicinity -- and it looks like this basic pattern will continue for at least the next five or six days.

Intermittent sunshine will keep temperatures near or even slightly above normal for early May, but we'll likely get some temporary refreshing cool-downs in the event of thundershower episodes through the weekend into early next week.

Check out CURRENT FORECAST specifics on the tab above.