With the passage of Wednesdays weak storm system, the weather pattern will revert to a mostly dry and mild to warm pattern. A ridge of high pressure will build back across the west coast, and mostly sunny skies should cover the Silver State for the next couple of days. Enough offshore moisture will overrun the ridge through the weekend to give us some cloud cover, but the odds of getting any precipitation out of them are slim. Temperatures will warm from the low 60s Thursday into the mid-70s by the weekend.

While our distance from the tropics is an issue keeping hurricanes and tropical storms from reaching Nevada, there are even bigger problems. Hurricanes “feed” on warm water, and as soon as one leaves warm water and passes into cold, the energy that drives the big storm is lost and the storm weakens. The water in the Pacific Ocean cools off rapidly the farther north you get from the tropics, and unless you pushed a lot of that warm water way up to our coastline (an El Nino of biblical proportions), it would run out of steam long before it ever hit this far north.

And then there is the small problem of getting it across the mountains. Hurricanes and tropical storms also tend to die out very quickly once they hit land, and you’ve got quite a chunk of land (called California) to plow through before you reach the Silver State, so it would be next to impossible to actually get a Hurricane intact here.