Are you ready to book a plane flight to head south?  Some folks would say it is a little difficult to lift your spirits when Rochester has this amount of cloud cover day after day.

Maybe you thought the overcast skies was just a figment of your imagination. You would be wrong. Looking back over the last two weeks, history is showing that we have had overcast or nearly overcast skies each and every day. But why does the bleak weather happen for such a long of a period of time? There is a good reason and it has to do with the very low sun angle this we find this time of the year. At the sun’s highest point of the day, incoming solar radiation is only measured at 29 degrees above the horizon. That low angle creates a problem, because the sun’s direct rays have a difficult time penetrating the extensive cloud cover. At that lower angle the sun direct rays most likely reflect off the cloud tops or do not penetrate the cloud deck. That means we have less mixing of the lower atmosphere and it is much less likely that the clouds will break-up and diminish.

In the short term we are somewhat optimistic. Computer models show that a portion of this cloud cover will begin to break later this Tuesday night and this could lead to a bit of sun for Wednesday morning.  However, it is likely the clouds will redevelop later in the day and unfortunately the remainder of the work week should again be overcast. On the positive and less gloomy side, we do have some strong indications that north of Lake Ontario there will be a lot of dry that will be heading to the south with an advancing change in air mass.  This weather system could be dry enough, and we are very optimistic, that sunshine will return for the weekend.

In fact, I so optimistic about this forecast that I am getting my sunglasses ready for the weekend!