The heat will continue in triple digit realms for another couple of days, accompanied by generally light winds, the lack of which will be helpful for the firefighting efforts, but will be unlikely to do much to clear up our poor air quality. A slow cooling trend into the weekend will drop the highs back into the mid-90s by the first of next week, and may allow just enough afternoon breeze to help clear up the air somewhat by the weekend. At this time there doesn’t appear to be much of a chance of getting any showers for the next week, although occasional cloudiness could pop up.

Yesterday we talked about heat lightning. Steve followed up with this: “What is the difference in the “ingredients” that go into the thunderstorm “brew” that ends up producing a storm full of cloud-to-ground bolts vs. a storm producing cloud-to-cloud bolts?”

The ingredients are really the same. In fact, most storms that have cloud to ground strikes will also have a lot of cloud to cloud strikes as well. Tomorrow, I’ll talk about just what those ingredients are.