It looks like we will say goodbye to our first drier than average month this year as sunny skies will last well into the first week of July. A strengthening ridge of high pressure will start our temperatures climbing up again, reaching the mid-90s by the end of the work week, and giving 100 degrees another run by Sunday. With temperatures that high, a few afternoon clouds are almost inevitable, especially over the mountains, but overall it is a pretty stable pattern, so isolated thunderstorms should be few and far between. Temperatures ease back to the mid-90s for the fourth of July.

Yesterday, I mentioned that the new GOES-R satellite has 6 different visible bands of imagery, but it also sends down 10 different Infrared (IR) bands, compared to only 4 with the present weather satellites. What good does that do? The different bands are sensitive to different things, and each will allow us to look at different levels of things like water vapor, ozone, carbon dioxide, fog, and even will highlight wildfires.

But (at the risk of sounding like an infomercial)…that’s not all. For the first time, our satellites will be able to see and count something that until now required ground based sensors: lightning. More on that tomorrow.