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Forecast Discussion:
Things are quiet still, but with the ridge to the west of us and northwest flow in place, we have plenty of smoke in the air. Figure 1 shows the regions where the largest number of fires (named as well) are currently burning. Figure 2 shows the 500mb pattern and air flow responsible for sending this smoke our way. Incredible (all time) record heat was observed in San Francisco today due to that giant powerful ridge.
A look into the future:
That ridge moves eastward over the holiday weekend (Figure 3) baking us some heat (not as much as San Francisco) but we still may break the Sunday record of 95F at DIA or the all time high record for September of 96F. Stay tuned for that. Relief (for a few days) is in sight for Tuesday/Wednesday when the ridge pushes westward again and a big blob of cool air sends us, maybe, all the way down to 70F for a high on Tuesday (Figure 4). Still, the ridge pushes east AGAIN later in the week sending us back to nearly 90F. Up and down weather indeed, but eventually it will get cold. September sees 1.3" of snow on average. So it can happen! (Thank you to tropicaltidbits.com for supplying the upper air GFS maps this time as NCAR's site was completely down this evening!).
