Do rainy Mondays set the tone for a week?

Here we are again facing a cloudy and damp Monday, this time a federal holiday.  There was a bit of clearing overnight that allowed the temperature to plummet to 37 degrees around 2:30 a.m. at the Univ. of Mary Washington’s weather station, but clouds have begun rolling back into the region ahead of the approaching upper level short wave trough.  I have mentioned these weather features before and below is a forecast graphic that illustrates what one looks like at the 500 mb (18,000 foot) level:

The white circle encloses the short wave trough which is a “wrinkle upon a wrinkle” in the upper atmosphere, i.e. it is a smaller disturbance riding along the larger dip in the upper level winds (the “long wave trough”).  These short wave troughs typically move quickly as they surf along the fast-moving upper level windflow and create clouds and precipitation.  When such a feature forms in southern Canada during the winter and dives southeastward toward the east coast of the U.S. we call it an “Alberta Clipper”…but that’s still a coupla months away so we’ll leave that discussion for later.

Enough weather lessons for one day.  Suffice it to say that the ‘Burg will have light rain – likely not more than 0.1 inch – and clouds through tonight (Monday) and perhaps into early tomorrow morning.  Then the rest of the week looks to be sunny and warmer with highs in the 60′s (F) and lower 70′s into the weekend.  So to answer the question posed in the blogpost title:  Not necessarily!!

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