Cloudiness caused by a weak inside slider type of disturbance will be with us through Thursday, with only a slight chance of mainly mountain rain and high elevation snow. The best odds for that to occur are in the areas south of Lake Tahoe. For the Reno area, partly cloudy skies will bring us a high temperature in the low 60s Thursday, before a blocking pattern sets up for the weekend, which will clear out our skies and boost our high temperatures back to around the 70 degree mark. Clearing skies will also allow our low temperatures to drop into the 30s, with even colder temperatures into the 20s for the outlying areas through the weekend.
And on a much different note, our thoughts and prayers are going out to those affected by Hurricane Michael, which made landfall near Panama City, Florida midday Wednesday. Though there are different metrics of measuring the strength of storms, Michael is likely to go down as the third strongest hurricane to make landfall in the US. Michael had strengthened to a very strong category 4 (just falling short of a category 5) hurricane, packing winds of over 150 mph. It will be a while before damage estimates are known, but in many places it most assuredly be catastrophic.
A Word of Weather 
With all of these hurricanes making the news, we were wondering….with the fierce winds, why is it that the eye of the hurricane is calm. Explanation?
LikeLike
Hi Fran. Wind is caused by a pressure gradient… the stronger the gradient, the faster the wind. But in the middle of the eye, there isn’t a gradient in any one direction, therefor there’s no wind. Another way of looking at it is anything that is spinning, like a basketball on your finger, has velocity when you go out from the axis of spin. But in the center, while there is some rotation, there isn’t any real lateral movement against your finger.
I’ve over simplified it a bit, as the internal structure of a hurricane is somewhat complicated and actually creates a very small area of high pressure in the middle (that’s why the eye is clear), but even if it didn’t, the exact center of any spinning object would still be relatively “calm.”
LikeLike