Cloudiness caused by a weak inside slider type of disturbance will be with us through Thursday, with only a slight chance of mainly mountain rain and high elevation snow. The best odds for that to occur are in the areas south of Lake Tahoe. For the Reno area, partly cloudy skies will bring us a high temperature in the low 60s Thursday, before a blocking pattern sets up for the weekend, which will clear out our skies and boost our high temperatures back to around the 70 degree mark. Clearing skies will also allow our low temperatures to drop into the 30s, with even colder temperatures into the 20s for the outlying areas through the weekend.

And on a much different note, our thoughts and prayers are going out to those affected by Hurricane Michael, which made landfall near Panama City, Florida midday Wednesday. Though there are different metrics of measuring the strength of storms, Michael is likely to go down as the third strongest hurricane to make landfall in the US. Michael had strengthened to a very strong category 4 (just falling short of a category 5) hurricane, packing winds of over 150 mph. It will be a while before damage estimates are known, but in many places it most assuredly be catastrophic.

All in all, this should be a fairly typical fall week weather-wise. To begin with, Tuesday will be sunny with slightly above average temperatures. Wednesday and Thursday should be cooler (60s) with a couple of weak “Inside Slider” systems dropping down from the north that will give us only a slight chance of any showers (mainly Wednesday), and will give us some moderate breezes. The weather clears out and warms back up to the low 70s by the weekend.

Fall has definitely arrived. The first wave will be moving out of the region Thursday with a few residual showers and high temperatures falling to the mid-60s. Temperatures rebound on Friday to about 70 degrees with dry conditions and partly cloudy skies. The next storm system digs through the Pacific Northwest over the weekend, dropping temperatures again into the 60s, and giving us a slight chance of some showers Saturday. As skies clear out late Sunday, we can expect some very cold temperatures Monday morning, and the colder microclimates will likely see some significant frosts.

Fall weather will be with us through the rest of the week, with cool temperatures, occasional rain, and even the possibility of the first hard freeze is some locations later this weekend. An offshore low pressure center will move through Wednesday, bringing numerous rain showers, while opening up the door for a trough to settle in across the west coast. Showers will decrease as we head into the weekend, with high temperatures in the mid-60s to low 70s, but a cold northerly flow by the end of the weekend will cool us even further, and clear skies could give us that chance of a hard freeze.

Now that we have started the month of October, it looks like some fall-like weather will finally settle in for a while. A relatively weak offshore low pressure center will move into the region from the southwest, bringing some cooler temperatures and scattered rain showers and very high elevation mountain snow. Temperatures will warm briefly Tuesday (about 80 degrees) ahead of the front, but will plunge to the 60s for the rest of the week. A slight chance of showers Tuesday increases to more likely on Wednesday, with a chance that some of those could be thunderstorms. Things dry out toward the end of the week leaving us with a cool but stable weekend.

The dry weather should continue through the rest of the week (and therefor the rest of the month).  We will see a warming trend from the low 80s on Tuesday to the low 90s on Friday. As we head into the weekend, the ridge of high pressure will finally break down and allow an opening for low pressure systems to move into the region, although at this time there is a lot of uncertainty as to when any will finally break through. Temperatures will cool over the weekend, dropping to the upper 70s with a few clouds, but we will likely have to wait a while longer before we will see any rainfall

We will continue with the dry and sunny weather over the next week, with the temperatures starting at about 80 degrees on Monday, and then rising steadily with near record high temperatures in the low 90s expected by the middle to latter part of the week. Once we get past next week there is some indication that the strong ridge of high pressure will start to breakdown and we could see some cooler, and possible even wetter weather coming our way.

Even though the air temperature hasn’t hit the freezing mark down here in the valley, that doesn’t mean the ground has escaped the frost line. I received a report from a viewer down in the Gardnerville area last week saying that she had a frost (at the expense of her veggie garden) early last week. How can that happen with temps in the 40s?

It happens more than you might think. During the day, the sun heats up the ground directly (by radiation) to a level much warmer than the air above it. Walk barefoot on asphalt on a sunny day if you don’t believe me. The reverse happens at night. The ground emits radiation energy straight to outer space, leaving the atmosphere mostly untouched. So the ground cools much faster than the air.