I always say, what a difference a day can make when talking about the weather. At 5 p.m. Monday here in Vancouver, it was a cool 48 degrees. A day earlier on Easter Sunday it was 76 degrees. That is a 28-degree drop in temperature. No surprises however as we discussed the incoming cold air mass a few days ago.
Precipitation-wise we only had a few scattered showers, but I observed some light ice pellets falling from the sky in Salmon Creek indicative of the cold air aloft. A little fresh snow was evident on the higher foothills to our east, but snowfall amounts in the Cascades were minimal.
The cold upper level trough of low pressure is slowly sagging southward off the Oregon coastline today heading to California before it meanders into the Great Basin. Another low will drop down and take its place as the weekend arrives but again rainfall amounts look on the light side at this writing. If we get prolonged clearing the next four nights, almost anywhere in the county could see frost.
Unusual cloud formations
With the warm and sunny weather on Sunday we had a weak area of instability move across our skies, producing some unusual and delicate cloud formations. These clouds were my favorite, altocumulus. They were embedded in a layer of colder air with warmer air above which prevented them from building higher and turning into more cumulus-type clouds. They had enough moisture encapsulated in the cloud mass to produce virga, which is the term we call moisture, either rain or snow falling from the clouds but never reaching the ground.
