Cloudy with Stratocumulus; 0.11 inches in the bucket so far

Here’s your cloud day for yesterday, a fairly complex day for your cloud diary entries:

7:27 AM. Altocu with Cirrostratus above.
7:27 AM.   Looking SW along Equestrian Trail Road; Altocu with Cirrostratus above.
7:45 AM. Altocumulus perlucidus over the Catalinas.
7:45 AM. Altocumulus perlucidus over the Catalinas.
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12:38 PM. Stratocu begin to move in under the Altocumulus layer.
2:47 PM. Altocu OR, Stratocumulus lenticularis began appearing, suggesting strengthening winds aloft.
2:47 PM. Altocumulus  lenticularis began appearing, suggesting strengthening winds aloft. This was an odd location for such clouds, perhaps responding to uplift ahead of the Catalinas.  Haven’t looked at Froude or Richardson numbers, though, to see if this is reasonable hand-waving.
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3:02 PM. Looking NNW at Stratocu (“the boring”; is State Cloud of Washington, and Oregon, for that matter) with a little Altocu on top.

 

4:33 PM. Stratocu.
4:33 PM. Stratocu.  Kind of characterized the dull, dark,  late afternoon and evening hours.

 

Intermittent R- to R– expected during the day today.  Hoping for a quarter inch (forecast to friends early yesterday morning, 0.225 inches;  will be ecstatic if more falls.   Latest AZ mod has about that amount here, and over half an inch in the Catalinas.  Usually, though, those amounts are on the high side.  On the other hand, if the details about where the the rain band shown below are off a bit, we could do far better than the 0.10 to 0.25 inches predicted.   Here’s the accumulated precip predicted for today from that model:

Accumulated rain until 10 PM AST tonight from the U of AZ model run at 11 PM AST, the latest. Much needed, nice heavy band of rain across AZ!
Accumulated rain until 10 PM AST tonight from the U of AZ model run at 11 PM AST, the latest. Much needed, nice heavy band of rain across AZ!

 

Next rain threat continues for the 12th, plus or minus a day.

The End

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.