Mostly sunny skies will couple with near-record high temperatures over the next several days as we will say goodbye to August, but won’t say goodbye to mid-summer conditions. The ridge of high pressure across the Great Basin will stay put and even strengthen a bit over the weekend, driving Saturday high temperatures to about 97 degrees, and we will get very close to if all the way to 100 by Sunday and Monday. Temperatures ease slightly as we get into the middle of next week, but should only fall to the mid-90s by Wednesday.

Continuing yesterday’s thread…what’s the record for the lowest relative humidity? That’s actually a lot tougher question to answer than it may seem. The reason for this is relative humidity is not on a linear scale, but rather a parabolic one. If you start with saturated air, as soon as you take a little water vapor out of it, the relative humidity drops off very quickly. But as the air gets drier, the curve flattens out, so that once you get into single digit relative humidity readings, the accuracy of the measurements become suspect. As a result, record relative humidity readings aren’t kept. There’s really no way to trust any reading to the accuracy needed to establish a record.