Tuesday, October 11, 2016

questionable afternoons... (pm.11.oct.16)>

Tuesday's stats:

Low temp: 58.6F (14.8C)
High temp: 70.8F (21.6C)
Rainfall: 0.07" (2mm)

Nearly all of the afternoon cloudiness has disappeared this evening as things stabilize with the setting sun -- but again we had to contend with some weak thundershower development along the mountain slopes today.  They barely showed up on satellite pics, but between about 3:00 and 4:00pm there was some thunder and scattered light showers around the area, with the sun shining simultaneously during most of it.  Before that, we had glorious clear and sunny skies throughout the entire morning, with cloud development not really getting going until nearly 1:00pm.  Humidity ranged from 40 to 60% at my location on Tushita Road.

Due to some pockets of much cooler air aloft in the wake of the recent batch of upper-level disturbance which tracked across north India, we're dealing with a bit more afternoon instability issues than expected.  That colder air in the higher levels causes the warmer mid-day air mass to rise and condense -- and thus, the isolated (mostly brief) thundershowers along the mountain slopes.  All of the data continues to point to gradual stabilization, as the air mass aloft warms a few degrees, but of course we all know that convective development along the Dhauladhars is something we just have to keep an eye on day-by-day and hour-by-hour.

Other than that, the weather pattern is a quiet one, and should stay that way for the next couple of weeks.  Extended range data remains absolutely uneventful for us.  As we've been talking about, perhaps the most interesting thing to watch will be our daily humidity readings, as they trend downward over the long run.

Forecast details can be found on THE 7-DAY OUTLOOK tab above.