Monday's stats:
Low temp: 60.4F (15.8C)
High temp: 74.4F (23.6C)
Rainfall: trace
Ominous-looking clouds stretch from the northern into the eastern sky before sunset this evening, but it's quite a bit brighter to the southwest. I'm surprised that we've received no measurable rainfall in McLeod during the past 24 hours, in spite of the period of thunder, lightning and gusty winds very early this morning, and then another build-up of scattered thundershowers across Himachal Pradesh this afternoon. There were a few raindrops during the pre-dawn, and another short period of light sprinkles around 4:00pm, but that's been it. Temps today were just slightly cooler than they were over the weekend.
Our weather pattern is a moderately unstable one, and will remain so for most of the coming week. A west to southwest flow aloft is embedded with weak disturbances, as some gradual cooling in the upper atmosphere occurs. This, in conjunction with a few pulses of mainly mid-level moisture is going to keep the mention of some isolated to widely scattered showers in the forecast on most days -- all the way into Monday of next week. There could even be a period of fairly decent thunderstorms at some point along the way. Interspersed with all that will also be some good periods of April sunshine, so all is not lost. As most of you know, April is the second-driest month of the year, on average, so even with the risk of thundershowers in the neighborhood, we don't usually get a whole lot in the rain gauge to show for it.
Models have been showing somewhat of a cool down in temperatures, but we haven't really seen evidence of that yet. Still, both high and low temps this week should average a few degrees lower than we've seen recently -- but still fairly close to normal for the season.
Check tabs above for lots of other local info, including APRIL DAILY STATS and THE 7-DAY OUTLOOK...
