Sunday, May 14, 2017

daily threats... (pm.14.may.17)>

Sunday's stats:

Low temp: 61.0F (16.1C)
High temp: 85.4F (29.7C)
Rainfall: 0.10" (3mm)

It's mostly cloudy this evening, with still some faint rumbles of thunder now and then, along with a random drop or two of rain.  We started off our Sunday with full sunshine once again, but just like a finely-tuned machine, cloudiness began to develop along the Dhauladhars during the late morning, leading to a bit of thunder by around 12:45pm, and then some rather brief periods of showers between about 3:45 and 5:15pm or so.  The amount of rain in my gauge in the upper part of town was quite small... but it was the first measurable amount since very early Thursday morning.  It was very warm again before those thundershowers got going, but then the low temp for the day occurred during a shower shortly after 4:00pm.

Unstable, unstable, unstable.  How else can we describe this current weather situation?  And it looks like we are in for much more of this during the week ahead.  Some of the warmest air of the season remains entrenched across central and northern India, at least in the surface layers, while minor disturbances containing little pools of colder air ripple across in the upper-levels of the atmosphere.  Even with just a marginal amount of moisture in this air mass, this simple equation leads to random shower/thunder development during the PM and even into the overnight hours -- especially in the vicinity of the steep elevation gradient along the mountains.  There are no major changes in this pattern expected during the coming several days, so we'll just have to accept the fluctuations and back-and-forth between sun, clouds and the threat of thundershowers.

Even with the lurking showers, temperatures have been well above normal the last three days or so... but may drop back to normal or even slightly below during the latter half of this week.  The normal high for the middle of May is 82ºF/28ºC, just for the record.