Sunday, August 17, 2014

intermission... (pm.17.aug.14)>

Sunday's stats:

Low temp: 61.7F (16.5C)
High temp: 72.9F (22.7C)
Rainfall: none

If you scroll through the UPDATED RAINFALL TALLY tab above, and then compare it to the amount of rainfall we had today (zero), you'll see that the fact that it didn't rain at all today (at least not as of the time of this writing) is a pretty big deal.  Although we've had fairly regular periods of sunshine this monsoon season and not very long stretches of persistent clouds and fog, the rainfall totals here in McLeod have actually been running a little bit above normal up until recently.

It's foggy as we approach sunset this evening, but our Sunday has featured a good amount of sunshine alternating with fog and periods of clouds.  There were even a couple of brief rumbles of thunder around 3:00pm, but as I've said, I didn't witness any rain drops.

The weather charts/data are looking pretty remarkable for most of this new week.  A west-northwesterly flow in the mid- and upper-levels of the atmosphere has channeled in some unusually dry air for this time of year, and has successfully pushed the vast majority of the juicy tropical moisture well to our southeast.  It doesn't look like atmospheric patterns will be favorable for that moisture to surge back in our direction until perhaps Friday or Saturday, so we may be in line for an extended intermission here in the middle of Monsoon 2014.

On the other hand, the Dhauladhar thunder machine is notoriously naughty in relatively dry/fair weather patterns like this, so we're going to have to remain on guard for potential thundershower development during the PM hours...