Warm, sunny weather brings break from cold

Wintry conditions expected to return, as early as next week

Albuquerque is looking at blue skies and temperatures 10 degrees above normal this week, but don’t be packing away your sweaters and winter coats just yet.

“It’s going to be clear skies, quite pleasant, with plenty of sun,” said meteorologist Clay Anderson of the Albuquerque office of the National Weather Service.

He said Albuquerque-area highs today through Sunday are expected to range from 61 degrees to 64 degrees. Lows over the same span are forecast to climb from 28 degrees tonight to 36 degrees on Saturday night.

After a week featuring some days in which temperatures dipped into the low to midteens at night and highs fell shy of 40 degrees, a week of sunny days with temperatures in the low 60s probably looks pretty good to a

lot of people.

But think of this week more as an intermission than an end to winter.

Andy Church, also a meteorologist with Albuquerque office of the National Weather Service, said there is a “fair chance” for a wetter, colder weather pattern as early as the first part of next week and that such a pattern appears to be shaping up for New Mexico during the latter half of February.

This week, however, Anderson said temperatures might punch their way into the low to mid-70s across New Mexico’s eastern plains on Wednesday. Across the state, he said, temperatures will be 5 degrees to 10 degrees above average on Tuesday and 10 degrees to 20 degrees above average Wednesday through the weekend. Albuquerque’s record highs this time of year are in the low 70s.

The city’s precipitation total since the start of the year is 0.40 inch, or 0.09 inch below average, and Church said El Níño conditions that helped make 2015 New Mexico’s fifth-wet test year on record are still very much intact.

“El Níño is hanging tough,” Church said. “We still have abnormally high sea sur- face temperatures (over the Pacific).”

High sea surface temperatures drive moisture-laden El Níño weather patterns.

Anderson said the state’s snowpack is doing very well compared with this time last year.

For example, snowpack in the Pecos River Basin is 151 percent of average this week, compared with 67 percent of average last year. The Jemez River Basin’s snowpack is 117 percent of average this week, compared with 71 percent last year.

The snowpack in the Rio Hondo Basin in southeastern New Mexico is 152 percent of average, compared with 63 percent last year, and the snowpack in the Mimbres River Basin in the southwestern part of the state is 179 percent compared with 91 percent last year.

“Those numbers may be coming down this week with higher-than-freezing temperatures over the next week or so,” Anderson said. “Hopefully, that will change (with colder, wetter weather) toward the middle of the month.” But right now, blue skies are all we see.