Monday, April 17, 2017

warm streak to continue... (pm.17.apr.17)>

Monday's stats:

Low temp: 68.7F (20.4C)
High temp: 83.9F (28.8C)
Rainfall: none

Today has been the tenth day in a row without even one drop of rain, and it has also been the fourth day in a row of temps rising above 80ºF/27ºC.  For some reason, today's high temp was just a small fraction of a degree less than yesterday's, but we are still running about 9ºF/5ºC warmer than normal for this stage of April.  The air quality today wasn't as good as it's been the last couple of days... with an increasing amount of haze in the air... otherwise there was plentiful sunshine again.

This run of unseasonably warm temperatures will continue as we progress into the middle of the week, with both overnight lows and daytime highs expected to rise another degree or two, at least.  Our huge ridge of high pressure will start to flatten a bit starting late Wednesday, with a very slow and gradual evolution toward a more unstable atmosphere as the weekend arrives.  We're not talking about any kind of major storm system moving in -- just more of an active and disturbed westerly upper-level flow containing some pockets of colder air aloft, AND, a bit of an increase in moisture availability.  All of that mumbo-jumbo means that we should see a slighter better chance of some scattered shower/thunder development starting as early as Wednesday, and continuing into at least the early part of next week.

There probably won't be a dramatic drop in temperatures with the increasing risk of showers coming in... but it seems fairly likely that we will settle back into a range that is a bit closer to normal for the latter half of April by the weekend.