There aren't many days like this left us. Oh, the nice days won't be going anywhere, but these warm temperatures --- like those we enjoyed yesterday, and will again today and tomorrow --- are due to become increasingly rare.
We'll see sunny skies today with a high temp around 80, five degrees above normal. We can thank some of that beautiful September high pressure for this weather, and then we can kiss it goodbye come Wednesday, and perhaps for the rest of the work week.
It's still very early in the autumn season, so most of the cold fronts that pass through this way, while they may clear our region, don't yet have the oomph behind them to keep on going once they have.
Another case in point should come later this week when a cold front is progged to stall to our south, close enough to keep us in a moist, easterly flow, with the soggy conditions and cool temperatures that typically accompany it.
Meanwhile, in geological news, yet another supposed moon rock has come a cropper. The Netherlands' national museum tested what it thought was a moon rock only to discover it was a fake (it was in fact a piece of petrified wood). There are a lot of fakes out there, which matters because the real moon rocks can fetch six figures on the black market.
Back during the Apollo days the Nixon administration gifted some 130 countries with moon rocks from both the Apollo 11 and 17 missions, but somewhat incredibly, no record was kept of what went where.
"NASA turned over the samples to the State Department to distribute. We don't have any records about when and to whom the rocks were given," a NASA historian told the Associated Press. "The Office of the Historian does not keep records of what became of the moon rocks, and to my knowledge, there is no one entity that does so," countered the State Department.
Yesterday's extreme temperatures in the contiguous United States --- High: 98 at Imperial, Calif.; Low: 27 at Yellowstone, Wyo. The moon is currently a waning crescent, 27 percent illuminated.