Weather Eye: Say farewell to sunny skies for next couple of days

After the clouds burned off on Monday skies were clear and sunny with afternoon highs reaching the 70-degree mark west of the Cascades and 80 degrees east of the mountains. So for today say goodbye to that for a while.

The advertised abrupt change is upon us with a cold trough of low pressure that will park itself over us the next two days. This will result in showers, hail, thunder and of course snow in the mountains.

We’ll struggle to just get into the 50s with some new record minimum high temperatures possible. It depends on how much cold air and cloud cover we receive. Bottom line is that it will be quite chilly.

The silver lining is that things dry out and we inch up to near normal highs by the end of the week. The holiday weekend still looks like unsettled weather but not a total washout. It is difficult to pinpoint how many showers we may get. The sun breaks will be the bonus feature here. And with the high sun angle, temperatures will feel much better with those sunbeams!

The rainfall over the weekend was perhaps a little more than what I thought we would receive but a welcome freshener to gardens, I am sure. We are running now a little over an inch of rain below average as of 5 p.m. Monday. As expected we have dropped two degrees for our average mean temperature for the month at 60.9 degrees, but still four degrees above average. We will knock another chunk off this week.

Weather in other parts of the nation have been in the headlines lately and the devastation is very tragic indeed, especially the monster storm in Oklahoma. I, like most weather enthusiasts, really like extreme weather but my thoughts and prayers go out to the people involved. You may have friends or relatives affected as well. If I could do a moment of silence in my column now would be the time.

Patrick Timm is a local weather specialist. His column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. Reach him at Weather Systems.