Weather Eye: Summer not over yet; we might hit 90 later this week

Here is the update on any upcoming hot weather I promised in last weekend’s column. It now appears we will get a slight offshore breeze later in the week coupled with higher pressure that will enable us to possibly log in a couple of 90-degree days. Technically it is still summer astronomically and Thursday through Saturday are the warmest days coming up this week.

Meanwhile, we enjoy highs in the mid- to upper 70s today and Wednesday. This late in the year I think the threshold for “hot” weather is lowered a bit. Upper 80s and low 90s would do it for me. The lower sun angle and longer overnight periods make it difficult to get beyond the lower 90s. But hey, the record books have many mid-to upper 90s record high temperatures in September.

So far this month we have only one day at 90 degrees, which was on Sept. 2. It was quite warm Saturday, but we remained shy of 90 at 88 degrees. It felt warmer than that, maybe the higher humidity. This week when we warm up, the humidity will be around 20 percent or perhaps briefly lower when the high temperature occurs. This raises fire danger to critical levels, as well.

I mentioned here the other day how one could feel the coolness of autumn even with full sunshine and in the early morning hours. The afternoon breezes even feel cooler. On the flip side we have many days in fall with little to no winds which make the air still, sometimes eerie in a way. I guess we are used to those nice afternoon northwest winds that accompany the summer season.

Although I expect slight light easterly breezes when it warms up, they will be barely noticeable in some locations. A year ago in this column I wrote this: “The east winds were right on schedule and some expected smoke as well from fires to our east and southeast. However, the winds were so strong on the downslopes of the Cascades they literally exploded fires and we received tons of smoke. It wasn’t all high level smoke either, much of it made it to ground level and some folks reported light ash falling in our far east county.”

At least we won’t have that scenario to contend with if we are lucky.