Heat remains the main noticeable forecast component for the next couple of days, with thunderstorms creeping back into the picture as we head toward the latter half of the work week. A strong, but flat ridge of high pressure will keep our skies mostly sunny through Wednesday, although smoke and haze (mainly from the Ferguson Fire west of Yosemite) will still likely frequent the region for at least the next few days. As the week progresses, an offshore low will dig down out of the north, steering the flow to a more southerly direction toward the end of the week, which will allow those aforementioned thunderstorms to develop, and that should allow high temperatures to drop back a bit into the upper 90s.

Over the last week we’ve seen a lot of thunderstorm pop up in the afternoons, especially in the mountains. This type of weather pattern is always a hard to thing to predict with any real specificity. The reason for that is there isn’t a front moving in or any other defined weather feature that will be the direct cause of storms, so it’s not like you can point to anything on a satellite loop and say “Here it comes.” What causes them to form? I’ll tell you tomorrow.