Thursday, February 12, 2015

seasonal transformations... (pm.12.feb.15)>

Thursday's stats:

Low temp: 42.8F (6.0C)
High temp: 54.6F (12.6C)
Precipitation: none

There's a lot of cloudiness, fog and haze settled here along the front slopes of the mountains this evening.  Although we had plenty of nice sunshine and blue skies until the early afternoon, the haze and clouds increased dramatically after about 3:00pm, and have continued to thicken up ever since.  Before those clouds settled in, I recorded the second warmest high temp since my return to McLeod on the 17th of January.

I'm bothered by this cloud development this afternoon, because it indicates that the warmer air mass brewing to our southwest is having trouble shifting into the higher elevations without whatever moisture it holds condensing out.  In plan language, that means that much of the energy of our long-anticipated warming trend may end up getting translated into cloud development here along the front slopes of the Dhauladhars.  I hope I am wrong... but we'll see what happens during the next three days as that much milder air mass pushes in.  If we can maintain a good amount of sunshine for the first two-thirds of the daylight hours, then it's still likely we'll see temps rising above 60F (16C) for the first time this year.

Despite the threat of clouds, there isn't much of a chance of any precipitation until maybe very late Sunday night or Monday.  That's when our next pattern shift will begin to occur, leading to unsettled conditions and off-and-on wet weather throughout much of next week.  At the moment, it looks like Tuesday and Wednesday will hold the best chances of significant rainfall, but there's still an amazing amount of inconsistency and disagreement among the various computer models.  

Check the forecast details and other info on tabs above...