Fanciful Interpretation Of Our Cool June

This article seemed very playful and it made me smile:

So far this June the average high temperature in Sacramento has clocked in at a paltry 80 degrees, a full six degrees below a normal June.

That's painfully obvious to veteran Sacramento gardeners and farmers who've taken note of the short tomato plants and slow-growing fruit.

Kelly Redmond, a regional climatologist at the Western Region Climate Center in Reno, said lower-than-normal temperatures in June have "held up the snowmelt a little bit."

Extending the life of the snowpack can help with water supplies over the summer and even prevent forest fires because vegetation doesn't dry out as quickly.

...The weather patterns leading to cooler June temperatures in Sacramento trace back halfway across the world – to the western Pacific and Japan. There, in an area of convective activity – thunderstorms – the pattern is interacting with high pressure that persists in an area just north of Hawaii. This mix pushes the jet stream farther south than normal. This, in turn, has opened the door to storms and cooler temperatures over California.

I'm not quite so playful - maybe more prosaic. The trough off the West Coast has just been terribly persistent (as with the high pressure system north of Hawaii and the Japanese mirror trough on the other side of the ocean. When trough-ridge-trough arrangement stays in place for weeks, the weather stays in place for weeks too.

I got all holistic looking at the World surface weather forecast for today:

You can tell the Southern Hemisphere is the winter hemisphere, because of how tight the isobars are there. The temperature gradient is much greater in the Southern Hemisphere right now. And the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), where Air France's AF447 met its doom, shows up as a nice, pleasant green belt of precipitation clear around the globe, just north of the equator.