Temperatures will slowly climb back to seasonable levels and beyond as we go through the work week. A building ridge of high pressure will give us mostly sunny skies on Wednesday with our high temperatures reaching the mid-60s, and then moving into the 70s for the rest of the week. Winds will be light through most of the week. A slight chance of showers moves back into the region early next week.

With all the rain that we had last weekend, I was asked by one viewer, who received several inches of rain in Carson City, “What happened to the rain shadow? Why wasn’t this storm affected by it?”

Actually, the rain shadow was alive and well with this storm. The suppressing effects of a rain shadow doesn’t mean that we won’t get any rain here on the lee side of the mountains, but we should get less than what they get up in the higher elevations. And while we saw anywhere between one and five inches of rain on this side of the crest (the higher amounts fell closer to the mountains), the mountains picked up as much as 12 inches of rain (just west of Alpine Meadows.) It was just that wet of a storm.