A historic 7-days of weather; another real cold episode ahead

“A historic 7-days of weather”  or “An historic 7-days of weather”?   Check this grammar site out, in case you were wondering,  like this English language buffoon was.  There must be simpler languages I can learn…

Check out the national records that fell during the past seven days here.  You can view them here, but its best if you go to the original site and poke around.  Pretty amazing week.  You should feel pretty bad if you didn’t set some kind of record where you are, somehow got left out. Also, maybe I should check for locusts and big earthquakes…in case things are coming to an end overall.  Just kidding, astrocatastrophists, thermageddonites (warm and cold ones1), etc.

record events 7 days

Interestingly, he sez, this was all foreseen in the models more than a week out, mentioned here, and the reliability of that severe weather pattern buttressed by those crazy looking NOAA generated “spaghetti-Lorenz” plots that Mr. Cloud Maven person often displays that evaluate the degree of chaos out there by running models over and over with DELIBERATE little errors.  Imagine, how bad things would be if we did that, added deliberate errors to everything we did every day that added on top of the inadvertent ones:  “I think I will err today by putting too much electricity into my computer, modify plug to fit in a 220 receptacle, plug it in, see if it runs faster.”  In a way, those crazy plots are doing that to see how much things change with errors we know about (since the obs contain errors that we don’t know about).  So running the models with little errors is to see how robust a forecast is.

The weather ahead

Enviro Can GEM mod is seeing more rain in AZ late Wednesday into Thursday than our WRF-GFS, so I like it more than our own and it would behoove2 you to check it out for yourself to see if I am lying again.  Still, its a slight upper level storm that drifts in from the southwest from off Baja.  There will be great middle and high clouds no matter what happens.  Rain extreme amounts are wide, zero (USA WRF-GFS) to a tenth of an inch here in Catalina by Thursday evening.  Would fall from mostly mid-level clouds showing virga first.  Best estimate, therefore:  0.05 inches.  Oh, well, SOMETHING is in the works.  You can see it spinning around out there off Baja here from the University of Washington Huskies Weather Department.

The weather way ahead

Check this out, you Lorenz plot expert.  I went crazy when I saw this, really points to a great chance for a substantial storm on the 20-22nd.  Need more rain for those spring flowers!

Valid at 5 PM, December 20th.
Valid at 5 PM, December 20th.

 

Above is an example of a strong signal for a big, cold trough 10 days out, something like we in the West have just experienced, though probably not “historically cold”  not quite as cold as the present situtation all over, and along with that, another great chance for  a good rain here in Catalina.  As we say, CMJs,  “Tell your friends.”  Your favorite weather person should be all over this by now, going “deep”, you might say, with his/her audience giving them a brain thump.

Not real happy, though,  about another round of low (properly, not “cold”) temperatures.

Your clouds today?

Cirrus-ee ones, maybe heading into thick ice clouds we call Altostratus.  Get camera ready for great sunrises and sunsets over the next couple of days.  Could be extra spectacular.

The End, of the excitement for today.

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1During the global cooling hysteria (hahaha, sort of)  during the late 1960s and early 1970s, my Department Chairman at San Jose State, Dr. Albert Miller, who smoked a lot and died when he was 54 years old, suggested to me that we put soot on the growing Arctic ice pack to melt it off and increase the amount of sunlight absorbed at the ground to ward off global cooling.  If the earth’s snow cover go too big, it was posited at that time, it might cascade into a complete glaciation of the earth due to feedbacks caused by too much reflected sunlight by the increasing snow cover.

2Interesting that an expression seeming to pertain to perissodactylas (hooved critters, i. e,. ungulate mammals) is used in conjunction with advising people to do something.  “Behooved”?  Could be, but isn’t, put on hooves?  Try not to think about this all day so that the work you have to do suffers.

By Art Rangno

Retiree from a group specializing in airborne measurements of clouds and aerosols at the University of Washington (Cloud and Aerosol Research Group). The projects in which I participated were in many countries; from the Arctic to Brazil, from the Marshall Islands to South Africa.