While some cool weather will settle into the region for a while, we should stay dry through Friday, after which a weekend storm system could bring rain and snow showers all the way to the valley floor. In the short term, Tuesday should bring sunny skies with a high in the low 50s after a chilly start to the day in the 20s. As the week progresses, some cloudiness will come and go with similar temperatures, but on Saturday a cool storm system will pass through the region, with temperatures falling to the mid-40s by Sunday, which could turn Saturday rain into Sunday snow showers.

Air is pretty cool stuff. And while the term “lighter than air” gets bandied about a lot, it underscores the fact that air in fact does have mass. So how much does air weigh?

The easiest way to answer that is to look at air pressure. At sea level, the atmosphere has a pressure of about 14.7 pounds per square per inch. So what does that tell us about air’s weight? Applying fluid dynamics, that 14.7 psi means if you took a column of air one square inch in cross section from sea level to the top of the atmosphere, it would weigh in at 14.7 pounds. Another way of looking at it is to take the weight of a cubic foot of air. At standard temperature and pressure (zero degrees C and one atmosphere) a cubic foot of air would weigh about 1.3 ounces.