Saturday, May 2, 2015

just gorgeous... (pm.02.may.15)>

Saturday's stats:

Low temp: 59.4F (15.2C)
High temp: 77.9F (25.5C)
Rainfall: none

One of the most pleasant and beautiful evenings of our summer season is in progress right now, with mostly clear skies as the sun sinks below the western horizon.  Full sunshine early this morning gave way to a rapid increase in mountain cloudiness for a while between about 11:00am and 3:00pm, but then the clouds dissipated just as quickly, leaving us with mostly sunny skies for the remainder of the day.  Once again it looked like there may have been some isolated showers up-mountain from us, but we were spared here in McLeod.  My high temp in the upper part of town was almost exactly normal/average for early May.

The last couple of days we've had some pools of colder air in the upper atmosphere lingering across the western Himalayas, and that has created a bit of conflict with warmer and warmer air pushing in at the surface from the southwest.  The afternoon instability has been something worth watching -- but as a high pressure ridge begins a more aggressive move into northern India during the next 24-36 hours, much of that potential instability will be erased.  All this to say -- we're setting up for some genuine summertime weather this coming week which will give us the warmest temps of the season and the year thus far, along with plenty of sunshine.

I feel like a broken record when I continue to point out the slight risk of some kind of isolated thunder development over the mountains during the PM hours... but we've been burned by that more times than I care to remember over the years that I've been closely following the weather here.  That means it pays to keep that in mind, even while relishing the sunshine and comfortably warm weather of the early summer season...

THE 7-DAY OUTLOOK can be found on the tab above.