Clouds: Be Gone With You

I don't know about you (I'm guessing I might on this matter, though), but I am not a fan of clouds and I am willing to bet you are not either. Clouds do put sunny days in perspective, though, which definitely helps us appreciate the nice & sunny days a bit more. So, while Cody and Jesse have discussed some big warm-ups and cool-downs in the past few blog posts, I will talk a little more about some nice clearing we are looking for.

A big part of forecasting has to do with figuring out where clouds will or will not be. When they are overhead during the day we have lower high temperatures, and overnight we have higher low temperatures (think of it like a thin blanket). A big part of forecasting for clouds comes from looking at model-predicted (or actually) relative humidity at different levels of the atmosphere. This is how we know things are looking up for Tuesday and Wednesday:
What you can see from that image is little bands of green. Those are areas of higher relative humidity at 700mb (above about 30% of the mass of the atmosphere). They will likely be some thin mid-level clouds - and they are out of here!

Looking to the west on that picture you can see that there aren't any more green blobs. That doesn't mean we'll be cloud-free, but we'll see a lot fewer of them. Definitely fewer of these pesky ones that hug close to the ground.

Enjoy!

~KDLT Meteorologist Aaron Shaffer