Weather It Is (Unusual, yes)

Good Evening:

"How can it be," she asked, "that the neighbor has their air conditioner turned on, but we do not?"

To be honest, I really don't know what the problem was or is.  My roof weather station said 28 C (not 38 C)  Still, one must be sensitive about these things, so I did try to express my consternation at the apparently unfair and unwarranted situation.  To make matters worse, the neighbor's air conditioner was dripping with a loud ping, so changing the subject to cooler matters didn't make the situation any better.

To put it in Weather-ese, here's what happening.

From the tropical storm group forum:

"The westPAC monsoon has ramped-up to epic levels.  A river of west wind goes across all of Micronesia (south of 10N) bringing white-out squalls with gale-force wind gusts.  Every island
from Palau in the west (135 E) to Kwajalein (168 E) has been drenchedwith episodes of extreme rainfall in squalls of high wind...  The timing of the current westerly wind episode with twin TCs so far east is probably a sign that strong El Nino is now unstoppable."(From Marc Lander).


"Barry--The mean state over the whole season probably favors looking something like the link below, although there is a very small sample size of similar strong-side El Niño events this time of year:
http://tinyurl.com/nujkojq ,
MJO-based composites in combination with El Niño states suggest that the intraseasonal pattern, including the westerly wind burst and the northward-moving northwest Pacific monsoon trough, favors other patterns, including the Gulf of Alaska block and the warm ridge in Europe. Such present patterns are probably not part of the mean state." (From Paul Roundy).

What they're saying is that the weather is weird, which is associated with an incredibly strong El Nino and the West Pacific Monsoon.  It's really hot in some places (like Europe) and really wet in other places.  There's a huge drought in California.   Fortunately, here it's just nice.  I mean, we're talking about 28 C for a high in July, instead of 33 (or even hotter if things get a bit toasty).

Looking ahead for the next few days, we see a small rise in temperatures, and then some slightly cooler temperatures, depending on the exact position of the ridge over Europe and its associated trough over the eastern Mediterranean.  Complicating matters is the strength of the desert low to our east, but it doesn't seem to match up against the European ridge-trough system (and the strong El-Nino and MJO).

Barry Lynn