As we bid a fond farewell to the month of May, we have a little dip in the road temperature-wise as a weak trough of low pressure moves through the region Wednesday. Mostly cloudy skies and scattered to isolated showers will dot the area Wednesday and the valley temperatures will drop to the low to mid-70s. The trough passes through the area fairly quickly, and skies should clear out by Thursday, with high temperatures back into the low 80, continuing to climb to the mid-80s on Friday and the upper 80s by Saturday.

We are now pretty firmly in the time of year where we spend a lot of our afternoons dodging thunderstorms. And even if we don’t get enough buildup for showers and/or lightning, it’s a rare hot summer day around here where we don’t at least see some afternoon clouds build up. Perhaps with that in mind, Richard had the following question for me: “Why do the big white puffy clouds tend to stay together? What keeps them from spreading out and disappearing? The shape will change, but for the most part the cloud seems to stay as a cloud. Does it have to do with negative and positive ions? Or water molecules attracting to each other? Or something else?”  I’ll tackle this tomorrow.