Some showers in the forecast, but the wet weather will not last very long

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The second half of the weekend looks to bring dry and slightly cooler weather. You can expect partial sunshine and breezy at times. The temperature will only rise into the upper 60s. If you are heading out to the Bills game you can expect similar weather conditions in Buffalo. Temperatures will in the 60s at game time and it will be breezy at times. Winds coming in off Lake Erie could gust to near 30 mph.

Another cold front will be cutting through the Great Lakes on Monday with an arrival time in Rochester by evening. As the front approaches, it will turn breezy once again with winds gusting to near 30 mph again. The temperature will rise again into the low 70s.

Norris snatches pole position in wet Russian GP qualifying

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Mclaren driver Lando Norris of Britain steers his car during the qualifying session at the Sochi Autodrom circuit, in Sochi, Russia, Saturday, Sept. 25, 2021. The Russian Formula One Grand Prix will be held on Sunday. (AP Photo/Sergei Grits)

SOCHI, Russia (AP) — Lando Norris took pole position for the first time in a rain-hit qualifying session for the Russian Grand Prix on Saturday after timing his final fast lap to perfection on a drying track.

The McLaren driver set the pace with a time of 1 minute, 41.993 seconds in the dying seconds of the session after switching to slick tires as the racing line dried. He pushed Carlos Sainz of Ferrari into second place by half a second as George Russell took third for Williams, dropping Lewis Hamilton to fourth. Championship leader Max Verstappen has a penalty and starts at the back.

“It’s my first pole position and hopefully the first of many,” said Norris, who fought to keep his car under control on dry tires in the still-tricky conditions.

“There were plenty of corners where I thought I might have gone in a bit hard here and it’s all going to go rather wrong, but it didn’t. So that’s just, I guess, the level you’ve got to be at to be in this position,” he said. “I’m happy I took those risks and made those decisions because they paid off the way they have. Many times during the lap, I thought it was all going to go quite badly wrong.”

Norris’ McLaren teammate Daniel Ricciardo recorded an upset win at the last race in Italy after Hamilton and Verstappen crashed. Following that up with another McLaren win in Russia will be tricky, not least because the long straightaway in Sochi allows cars behind to draft off the leaders into the first corners.

“Probably the only place I wouldn’t want to be pole is here with the straight down to turn one,” Norris said.

Third is another impressive qualifying result in the rain for Russell, who was second in a wet session in Belgium last month — which turned into a podium when rain meant the truncated race was run behind the safety car. He is moving to Mercedes for next season.

“Hopefully Lando will give me a nice little slipstream into turn one,” Russell said. “We’ve got to be aiming for the podium. We’ve got nothing to lose and we’re just going to go for it.”

Hamilton set the early pace on intermediate tires, but errors toward the end of the session proved costly. The Mercedes driver bumped the wall while coming into the pits and had to change his front wing, and the long delay meant his new slick tires cooled off. After going out, Hamilton lacked grip and had a spin late in the session.

Hamilton said he was “incredibly disappointed” by damaging the car and apologized to the team. “These things are sent to try us, and as much as I feel terrible right now, I’ll turn it into a positive and try to do the best we can,” he said.

Hamilton, the defending champion, will be chasing his 100th career win on Sunday at a track where he has won four times in the past, and where Mercedes cars have won all seven F1 races to date. His teammate Valtteri Bottas starts seventh, and Verstappen’s Red Bull teammate Sergio Perez is ninth.

Verstappen leads the championship standings by five points from Hamilton but will start from the back of the grid in the race Sunday because he changed his engine. Mindful of the slippery conditions, Verstappen didn’t try to set a time in qualifying.

Verstappen said incidents near the front of the field would play into his hands during the race.

“I try to score points, but I need a bit of help with things going, let’s say, a bit wrong in the front,” he said.

The Dutch driver had complained of a lack of straight-line speed during Friday practice, even against slower cars, which would hamper him in cutting through the field, but said Saturday that was “not fully representative” of how the Red Bull would work in race conditions.

Charles Leclerc of Ferrari has a similar penalty, as does Nicholas Latifi of Williams.

Heavy rain through the day and low light raised doubts over whether qualifying could go ahead at all, after the Saturday morning practice session was canceled. While waiting, seven-time champion Hamilton skipped down the pit lane under an umbrella in the style of the musical “Singin’ in the Rain.”

More AP auto racing: https://apnews.com/hub/auto-racing and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports

Looming La Niña May Push Western Drought From Bad to Worse

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LOS ANGELES (CNN) — Global scientists reported in August that due to the climate crisis, droughts that may have occurred only once every decade or so now happen 70% more frequently. The increase is particularly apparent in the Western U.S., which is currently in the the throes of a historic, multiyear drought that has exacerbated wildfire behavior, drained reservoirs and triggered water shortages.

More than 94% of the West is in drought this week — a proportion that has hovered at or above 90% since June — with six states entirely in drought conditions, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. On the Colorado River, Lake Mead and Lake Powell — two of the country’s largest reservoirs — are draining at alarming rates, threatening the West’s water supply and hydropower generation in coming years.

Though summer rainfall brought some relief to the Southwest, the unrelenting drought there is about to get worse with La Niña on the horizon, according to David DeWitt, director at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center.

“As we move into fall, from October on, the Southwest U.S., based on all the best information that we have, they’re going to see persistent intensification and development of drought,” DeWitt told CNN. “There’s, at this point, not any indication that they’ll see drought relief.”

La Niña is a natural phenomenon marked by cooler-than-average sea surface temperatures across the central and eastern Pacific Ocean near the equator, which causes shifts in weather across the globe. In the Southwest, La Niña typically causes the jet stream — upper-level winds that carry storms around the globe — to shift northward. That means less rainfall for a region that desperately needs it.

NOAA’s latest projections show a 70& to 80% chance of La Niña emerging during the Northern Hemisphere winter season. With La Niña conditions coupled with warming temperatures, DeWitt said the Southwest will see enhanced evaporation that will intensify drought in certain places.

“The net water balance going forward, from this point as the summer monsoon ends, is that we’re going to see conditions continue to dry out,” DeWitt said. “Places that have droughts will kind of persist or intensify, and places that don’t have drought right now because it was recently ameliorated, we expect drought is going to redevelop.”

NOAA published a report this week on the Southwest’s historic drought, addressing a key question of when it might end. The answer, according to the report, is that the current drought could last into 2022 — or potentially longer.

“More widely, my guess is that for much of the West, the current extent and magnitude of this drought is locked in until at least mid-2022,” Justin Mankin, assistant professor of geography at Dartmouth College and co-lead of NOAA’s Drought Task Force, told CNN.

The NOAA report concluded that climate change-fueled drought will continue to worsen and impose greater risks on the livelihoods and well-being of over 60 million people living in the Southwest, as well as the larger communities that rely on their goods and services.

“This has big implications for drought mitigation measures for different water districts, many of which are working hard not only to manage the impacts of this drought, but to invest in longer-term adaptive measures to be resilient to more droughts like this in the future,” Mankin said. “Given scant resources to do both, these water districts need our support.”

The nation’s largest reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, are at record-low levels. Both are fed by the drought-ravaged Colorado River watershed and supply drinking water to 40 million people and irrigation to rural farms, ranches and native communities.

The Bureau of Reclamation in August declared a water shortage on the Colorado River for the first time, triggering mandatory water consumption cuts for states in the Southwest beginning in 2022.

Projections released Wednesday show a 66% chance that water levels at Lake Mead could drop to a level that would trigger even deeper cuts, potentially affecting millions of people in California, Arizona, Nevada and Mexico.

The agency also projected a 3% chance that Lake Powell next year could drop below the minimum level needed for the lake’s Glen Canyon Dam to generate hydroelectricity. In 2023, the chance of a shutdown grows to 34%.

Drought and blistering heat has fueled major wildfires in the West this summer. According to Philip Higuera, fire ecology professor at the University of Montana, warming temperatures caused the record-low level of rain and humidity that dried out trees and vegetation, which in turn ignited more wildfires.

“You can have the same amount of vegetation in a forest but, if it’s wet, it’s not available to burn,” Higuera previously told CNN. “These regions across the West that have record dry fuels, that makes more vegetation available to burn — so, basically, more of the forest is participating in these fires.”

Oregon’s Bootleg Fire, which started in July, became the second largest wildfire in the country this year; meanwhile, California battled the Dixie Fire — the largest in the U.S. this year and second-largest in state history. Currently, firefighters are battling the lightning-sparked KNP Complex and Windy fires, which are threatening Sequoia National Park and national forest.

According to Mankin, the longer-term fate of the Western drought remains bleak. What’s needed now, he said, is several years of rain and mountain snow to replenish the draining reservoirs and rivers.

That becomes more unlikely as the climate crisis worsens. Experts say the West will only continue to see more droughts like the present one in the years to come — and only rapid, immediate cuts to fossil fuels can halt this harsh trend.

“Global warming is making the atmosphere over the West warmer and thirstier, such that even the rain and snow that was once normal may be too little to quench it,” Mankin said. “The only way to stop the kind of atmospheric demand increases that have made this drought so impactful, is to stop combusting fossil fuels.”

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