About real clouds, weather, cloud seeding and science autobio life stories by WMO consolation prize-winning meteorologist, Art Rangno
Hazy thunder and rain day
0.17 inches at Sutherland Heights, 0.39 inches at the Golder Bridge, 1-1.5 inches in some spots in Oro Valley. Coulda done better here, but HECK, it rained, and that’s always good. Desert greening up real fast.
Thunder started around noon in a strangely hazy, murky-looking sky, more reminiscent of a back-East, warm, humid, pre-storm day where the only blue is a tiny hole above the observer; clouds and rainshafts virtually invisible. OK, I’m exaggerating a little, wasn’t really THAT bad here, but it was noticeable to all CMJs I’m sure.
Since the flow was from the east and southeast here, we have to blame the smoky, dusty and hazy skies on New Mexico, Texas, or Mexico. But, let us check before throwing out unsupported accusations of hazy, possibly bad air sources. From NOAA, this:
Problem solved. Was mostly dust from the El Paso area.
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Recall, humid days need NOT be hazy. We get some gloriously high visibility days here on some of the most humid ones in the summer because the air is so clean.
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Now for clouds….as a short cut, since I take and post too many photos due to an obsessive-compulsion with documenting them along with captions occasional captions containing immature “humor” (as below1), I recommend you go to the movies as a way of bypassing a lot of cloud blather:
Cloud Movie ( Remember that in this movie, what’s above us is on the left hand side of the frame, past Pusch Ridge.)
Below, your cloud day in still photography, beginning with the day’s highlight shot.
Looks like today might be the last thunder day here in the Heights for awhile, as an unusual mid-July dry spell sets in. Still looks wet late in the month.
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.