Once in the “behemoth-of-the-month” club some 10-12 days ago in the models as a major rain producer this month, and even its timing on the 28th was WELL-predicted as far back as that, yesterday’s storm and powerful trough aloft was ultimately a disappointment, producing only 3 hundredths here. That tiny amount of rain was phenomenally well predicted in the SHORT term, however, with no model thinking it would be anything more than that in Catalina a couple of days away. Still, with SO MUCH bluster aloft, it was disappointing.
Early yesterday morning, and against the model predictions, as the Cumulus congestus piled up over the Catalinas and to the west through northwest, visions of squall lines danced in my head; surely an arcus cloud with a wall of precip would roll through Oro Valley/Cataina later in the morning or early afternoon with a substantial, if short-lived rain. Maybe we’d get 0.25 inches, not less than a tenth.
Cumulus congestus powered higher into Cumulonimbus clouds for a time to the northwest, giving momentary support to that thought of a rip roaring squall line, maybe some lightning with it.
But no.
They soon moved away and the sky began to change into more stratiform (flat) looking clouds, no congestus to be seen anymore by about 9 AM. The disappointment was huge, kind of like that girl you thought was flirting with you, but then you find out you were deluded, had completely misread the situation. Yeah, it was that painful when the congestus were gone.
Here are a few early shots, ones that created so much early excitement, so much portent, those early bulging Cumulus congestus clouds. Still kind of pretty to look at, like that girl I was thinking of, but I wasn’t good enough for her (actually, that should be plural); maybe they didn’t like all the weather talk, who knows?
But no rain fell on us from this promising scene. Why? No ice in those clouds overhead/upstream.
What’s ahead?
This:
You got yer moderately high probability of a low center WAY down off’n Baja, kind of meandering around down there, not sure what to do, in the last night’s spag plots. That low is located just about where our great rains of last Saturday came from. Remember, like your horse, weather has a memory, knows the “trails” you’ve forgotten, and so its not too surprising to see a weather pattern replicate itself in a future forecast map. Gives it a little credibility.
The actual model runs, at times, have had a lot of rain as this system, after fiddling around down there off Baja like the last one, suddenly ejects northeastward across Baja into Arizona on the 4th-5th as the higher latitude westerlies give it a shove. An example, from IPS, and from one of the wettest model runs, naturally, is shown below, the one from last night’s 11 PM AST global data. Presently, the main conundrum is whether part of this meandering, sub-tropical low center will come out on the 4th-5th, before another part combines with a strong Pacific trough on the 7th, kind of a “two for one” situation.
Can’t tell now, of course, which of these scenarios will verifiy, but there WILL be a low in place off Baja soon that, as we like to say, will be “filled with rainy portent” for Arizona again.
The End.
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Did you know that psychologists have a lab standard called, the Passionate Love Scale?
Stage 1 is marked by “obsessive-delusional thinking” (this so funny!), and “euphoria” when things seem to be going right, as in some weather maps I’ve seen.
