Mild and dry conditions will continue across western Nevada, with only a tiny chance of a mountain thunderstorm, mainly south of Lake Tahoe. Light flow over the region will allow some afternoon cloudiness to pop up, but probably not enough to give the valley any showers or thunderstorms. Temperatures will slowly rebound to the low 90s by Thursday before dropping back down again to the mid-80s over the weekend.

So with all the computing power available to us, why does the forecast still bust now and then? In a nutshell, it comes down to Chaos Theory, as well as the old “Garbage in… Garbage out” conundrum. The atmosphere is such a complicated system, in order to always get it right, you’d have to know what every single molecule of the atmosphere is doing at any one time… an impossibility given our limited means of measuring. As a result, we have to do it in bits and pieces.

There’s an old saying that we meteorologists like to use: “If a butterfly flaps its wings in Tokyo, it can cause rain in New York (or Reno) a week later.” Tomorrow, I’ll tell you how the little critter can really mess things up.