Wednesday, May 4, 2016

quite a cleansing... (pm.04.may.16)>

Wednesday's stats:

Low temp: 54.0F (12.2C)
High temp: 78.6F (25.9C)
Rainfall: 0.88" (2.2cm) -- updated total thru midnight

Well... I think this is definitely settling the dust.  We have mainly light rain showers in progress at the moment, with cloudy skies, occasionally gusty winds, and a rumble or two of thunder from time to time.  With all that sunshine this morning into the early afternoon, it looked questionable as to whether we would get any more rain today, but a sprawling area of thundershowers broke out right overhead starting around 2:30pm, and we've seen several periods of rain, thunder, gusty winds and even a bit of small hail since then.  Temperatures have been on a roller-coaster ride -- the high occurred around 1:30pm, but then we plummeted about 24ºF/13ºC as the first round of thundershowers got going (see high/low stats above).

An upper-level circulation center is just pushing into west-central Pakistan from Afghanistan this evening, as a stream of tropical moisture gets drawn northeastward ahead of it.  The increasing instability of our atmosphere here along the Dhauladhars first triggered some showers a couple of hours before dawn this morning, but the outbreak of thundershowers this afternoon/evening has been much more impressive.  It looks like things will slowly calm down overnight, but we could see another flare-up of showers and thunderstorms tomorrow (Thu), even though the upper-level circulation itself is projected to weaken.  There will be some gradual stabilization occurring as we head into the weekend, but with lingering moisture hanging around, along with the heat of the early May sunshine, it's going to be hard to remove the risk of mainly PM thundershower development.

Temperatures will be highly variable during the coming several days -- we should pop above normal for this stage of the summer season with the help of several hours of sunshine, but then plunge into the chilly zone during a period of thundershowers.  In other words... it seems we need to be prepared for everything.

Get a look at MAY DAILY STATS, THE 7-DAY OUTLOOK and other info on tabs above.