Thursday, September 24, 2015

both sun and showers... (pm.24.sep.15)>

Thursday's stats:

Low temp: 57.9F (14.4C)
High temp: 65.3F (18.5C)
Rainfall: 0.47" (1.2cm)

There are a couple of patches of clear sky visible at sunset this evening, otherwise fog is dominating our weather conditions.  It's been one of those days of extreme variability -- with full sunshine in control until just before 10:00am, when we started to see some fairly rapid cloud development here along the front slopes of the Dhauladhars.  It was then partly to mostly cloudy until just before 1:00pm when the first sprinkles and light rain showers showed up.  We then had clouds, fog, and occasional light to moderate showers until just after 4:00pm.  The sun reappeared thereafter, but was never able to completely take over again.

Today has been another step of improvement over what we were dealing with earlier in the week, but we're still stuck with enough latent moisture in the air here along the mountain slopes to see a lot of cloudiness and these scattered rain showers develop by the afternoon hours.  There will not be a sudden and magical turn to reliably bright and sunny weather anytime soon -- as a moderate amount of moisture is expected to linger through the weekend.  It will only take a few hours of morning sunshine to destabilize our atmosphere and force us to dodge more mainly PM shower (or thundershower) action.  I keep refering you to THE TRANSITION TO AUTUMN tab (above) -- but what's written there is the best thing I can come up with to articulate this dying phase of monsoon conditions.

For what it's worth, the computer models are showing a more aggressive push of dry air and a developing high pressure ridge over northwest India by Monday or Tuesday.  Let's see what that might do for us.

Check tabs above for more info, including THE 7-DAY OUTLOOK.