We are going to ring in June on an appropriately summery note. After the trough of low pressure dropped valley temperatures into the lower 70s Wednesday, highs will bounce back into the low 80s Thursday, and climb into the upper 80s by the weekend. Skies will be mostly sunny through Friday, with a few afternoon heat induced clouds popping up Saturday Afternoon. Conditions remain dry and a bit on the warm side of average through the middle of next week at least.

Yesterday, Richard wondered why clouds “stick” together…Did it have anything to do with ion charges or molecular attractions?  He poses an interesting question. But it’s not one that is especially easy to answer. Let me start by saying that clouds do have negative and positive ions, although those charges are usually grouped such that negative ions tend to group with negative and vice versa, so that wouldn’t provide any attraction there. And on an atomic level, there are inter-molecular attractions that hold individual water droplets together, but don’t really account for a significant attraction between separate water droplets. Water droplets will coalesce (stick together and form bigger droplets), but that doesn’t hold an entire cloud together. Tomorrow, I’ll approach it from another angle.