Tuesday, September 30, 2014

a wet finish... (pm.30.sep.14)>

Tuesday's stats:

Low temp: 58.6F (14.8C)
High temp: 68.2F (20.1C)
Rainfall: 1.20" (3.0cm)

The mountains are visible to the northeast at sunset this evening, but there are still a lot of clouds in all other directions.  In line with the recent formula, our early to mid-morning sunshine was rapidly replaced by increasing clouds and patchy fog again today -- with some random sprinkles of rain appearing even just before noon.  By about 1:00pm, there were some heavier showers developing, with a bit of small hail mixed in as well.  Occasional rain showers and thunder kept up throughout most of the afternoon, and I recorded the greatest one-day rainfall total since the 5th of September at my location in the upper part of town.  The low temperature for the day (see above) occurred during the late afternoon.

We're now just hours away from saying 'goodbye' to the month of September -- a month which has been full of contradictions.  On one hand, it looks like we're going to finish off with barely HALF the normal amount of rainfall.  On the other hand, we still haven't had an official monsoon withdrawal declaration, which is a rarity by the final day of September.  What is normally the third wettest month of the year has been significantly drier than average (at least at my recording spot), but lingering tropical moisture has kept us battling clouds and fog almost every single day.

October last year was nearly spoiled by stubborn leftover tropical moisture... and we didn't really break free of it until the latter week or ten days of the month.  Is that going to happen again?  From where we sit right now, it looks like that is a distinct possibility.  Although some slightly drier air should filter in during the latter part of this week, we could easily see yet another resurgence of moisture, leading to a good chance of scattered showers and thundershowers next week.