Trending Warmer

Thursday, June 16, 2011
4:55 P.M.

Greetings everybody, now that I am graduated from high school I can continue writing on this blog more regularly. It may seem like we have been really cool and cloudy lately, but this is actually pretty typical June weather. The last few days have only been slightly cooler than average, and we are slightly below average for precipitation this month. It is typical to see fairly heavy "marine layers" of clouds formed by onshore flow in the morning in June, and that is what we have seen this month. Instead of having a blocking ridge of high pressure like we do later in the summer, the jet stream is generally pointed somewhere in our direction in June, and even though it is much weaker than it is in the winter, it still is strong enough to direct cool maritime air into our area. The image below shows the winds at the 300 millibar level of the atmosphere, which is where the jet stream is located. You can see how the jet stream comes into our area from the NNW, giving us cool air and clouds.

(UW model: 12z GFS)

However, much of this will change soon, and we will warm up. We saw our morning clouds today part at around noon, and this is something we will continue to see for the next few days. Unfortunately, a disturbance will come in over the weekend and we will see some rain, but we will warm up into the mid 70s next week, which will be nice. In addition, the newest model runs indicate that this system will be weaker than previously thought.

I like cool and wet (or snowy) weather in the winter, and hot and dry weather in the summer. We had a good winter, and hopefully we can have a good summer too!

Thanks for reading!
Charlie