Saturday, August 16, 2014

weak phase ahead... (pm.16.aug.14)>

Saturday's stats:

Low temp: 59.9F (15.5C)
High temp: 70.0F (21.1C)
Rainfall since midnight: 0.44" (1.1cm)
24 hour rainfall: 0.83" (2.1cm)

Both sunshine and some lingering patches of cloudiness are on the scene during the last hour of daylight this evening -- it's actually very beautiful.  Today has featured some radical swings between clouds and sun, along with a couple of very brief periods of rain showers which didn't add very much to the moderate amounts we received during the wee hours of the morning.  For the third day in a row, I recorded a high temp of exactly 70F.

Although there has been extremely heavy rainfall across many parts of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand during the past four days, we never really got a taste of it here in the immediate McLeod area.  It seems it was our turn this monsoon season to get skipped over.  It's kind of a blessing, though, since there were numerous reports of landslides, flooding and even some fatalities as close to us as Mandi and Shimla districts during the past few days.  I've measured less than 4" (10.2cm) of rain in the past week, which is very sub-par for mid-August.

And now it appears that we're heading into a week in which deep monsoon moisture is going to be in a major retreat phase.  The weather charts this week are looking much more like mid-September than mid-August, with a relatively dry atmosphere settling in, and genuine tropical moisture all but entirely chased away -- temporarily.  The afternoon mountain thundershower potential will be in play, however, and we all know that an hour or two of moderate to heavy rains can boil up fairly easily.