Monday, Sept. 8, 2003 | 9:44 a.m.
The weather will turn windy and cooler as the hot, humid air of summer exits Southern Nevada today, forecasters said.
"The atmosphere is beginning a transition to a more fall-like pattern with drier and slightly cooler air moving in," Kim Runk, National Weather Service forecaster, said Sunday.
Two weather systems pushing into California from the northwest are driving the cooler temperatures and winds.
Today's high should be in the mid-90s with winds gusting from 20 mph to 30 mph.
Sunday the high was 99 degrees, a far cry from the record for Sept. 6, 107 degrees in 1977.
But this year has been more of a typical warm desert summer, according to National Weather Service records.
This July was the hottest on record in 66 years of record-keeping in the Las Vegas Valley, said National Weather Service forecaster Jerome Jacques.
The average July temperature is 91.2 degrees and this year it was 94.8 degrees, Jacques said.
July 2002 was the second hottest on record at 94.5 degrees, he said.
"From the old-timers I've talked to, this has been closer to a normal summer,"' Jacques said.
There has been 5.29 inches of rain this year, while normal rainfall for this period is 3.30 inches, he said.
"So we're 1.99 inches above normal," Jacques said, but the brief, intense rains of August did not put a dent in the drought.
After five years of drier-than-normal weather and no winter snowpacks to speak of, the drought still continues.
And drought relief is not expected in the near future.
The Climate Prediction Center issued its latest forecast for persistent drought through November in most of Nevada.
Intense thunderstorms are not likely to return to Southern Nevada in the coming week.
"We're no longer getting the moisture off the Gulf of California and ... Mexico," Jacques said.
"I don't see any return of the monsoon flow this week."
By next weekend daytime temperatures could be in the 80s, forecasters said.
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