Mazatlan weather report

It Was The First Day Of Spring!....Or Maybe Not

 

Mar 21, 2014

 

This was the first day of spring, so how did we fare? Not so good in Calgary and Edmonton, where snow was falling today and it looked a lot like winter. Ontario gets next, as both Toronto and Ottawa look to have white stuff tomorrow or Saturday...or both. Further east Quebec will be blessed with a double dose of "spring." They had snow today, and get a second helping for the weekend.

The other side of the border also saw a lot of what we'll call season confusion. Temperatures ran below normal for the entire Northwest, and along the coast through Seattle and Portland it was about 5 degrees below norms. The eastern parts of Oregon and Washington were more like 8 degrees below their usual temperature.

In the meantime the snow that hit Alberta and Saskatchewan visited areas of Idaho through North Dakota. Maine got hit with sleet again, and they'll join Quebec for weekend snow. The Midwest won't be spared as the Twin Cities get a dose of ice and sleet tomorrow, then catch snow on Monday or so. This is Spring??

I'd like to tell you this was a fluke, and warm sunny days are right around the corner for our beleaguered friends NOB. No can do unfortunately. Remember our last report where we talked about back to back to back to back storms over the North Pacific? Only one of them has made landfall, so we've got at least three more potential named storms to ride out.

Mazatlan also has an oncoming front to contend with, but fortunately this is a warm system. I'll link a couple different types of satellite feeds below this paragraph, so you can see what we're talking about. You may recall this system as the one I mentioned would be coming from south of Hawaii, and expected to end our phenomenal run of beautiful clear skies every day.

weather.unisys.com/satellite/sat_ir_west.gif

http://www.weatherimages.org/data/imag6.html

Notice how deep this front is from front to back...wider than Mexico itself, and a full two days worth to pass by. The saving grace is its' current direction, which may end up largely passing Maz by. I had expected things to develop more or less straight in. However just like our mini-front over last weekend, this system also turned Northeast.

 This morning Cabo San Lucas had a significant overcast working, which looked to be heading straight for Maz. However the clouds moved up toward central Baja throughout the day, and by late afternoon the sky over Cabo was clear. The major thrust of this front is now moving toward central Baja and through Chihuahua into Texas. The key will be if the tail end catches Mazatlan over the weekend, and my guess is it will.

So what appeared to be a noticeable weather change, may now only affect Maz in a relatively insignificant way. Our primarily remaining change will be somewhat higher humidity, with clouds creating what I call "the blanket effect." This will warm up our days a degree or two, and make the nights particularly mild. Look for it to push into the very low 80's (28 C.), with nights at 68 (20 C.) and feeling warmer than that.

Hopefully the southwest to northeast push of this front will also bring warm currents to elevate the ocean temperature back up. It fell a little bit from the mini-whoosh winds the other night. The other primary weather change will consist of periods when clouds dominate the sky, but even that will be a fly by where bands of rather high clouds move through with little fanfare.

In short I'll bet you hardly even notice this one, and Mazatlan will just have to settle for a continuation on some of the best weather in North American!