Saturday, August 20, 2016

signs of resurgence... (pm.20.aug.16)>

Saturday's stats:

Low temp: 64.6F (18.1C)
High temp: 71.7F (22.1C)
Rainfall: 0.68" (1.7cm)

The best weather of the entire day is happening this evening, with some high clouds above, some cumulus and patchy fog visible in the valleys below, and some nice sunshine filtering through it all.  But until just recently, it has been a mostly cloudy, gloomy, occasional foggy, and rather damp day.  Today's rainfall total (up til now) isn't very big, really, but we did have about a half hour of moderate to heavy showers between about 4:30 and 5:00am, then several periods of drizzle and light rain showers around sunrise, and again between 11:15am and about 2:00pm.  In my rain gauge in the upper part of town it's been the biggest rainfall amount since Monday -- but there were much heavier rains just south of us during the past 12 hours.

Real monsoon elements had been in retreat for four days or so, until very early this morning.  But the overall "big picture" trend since last night has been for the deeper tropical moisture to be oozing back northwestward, and we had our first tastes of that today.  Although we're still not talking about an extremely intense period of continuous rains, our daily rainfall rates during the coming week or so will likely be quite a bit higher than we've seen this past week.  Expect a few bright periods here and there, but the risk of some blasts of moderate to heavy rainfall will be good -- as we would normally expect during the final one-third of August anyway.

Extended range models are projecting the next major slowdown coinciding with the arrival of September.  The average official date of monsoon withdrawal here in the Dharamsala area is right around the 15th of September, so it's possible that we are only about 4 weeks away from the end of this year's rendition...

Check tabs above for detailed rainfall stats and other local info.