Smoke attack

It was hard to see all the smoke around yesterday morning after the two previous stunning days with high visibility.  I was thinking I had never seen so much smoke in Catalina as I saw yesterday morning.  Here is some photos of that awful event:

7:56 AM. Heavy dark smoke layer evident to SW. Some Stratus clouds also were present.
7:56 AM. Heavy dark smoke layer evident to SW. Some Stratus clouds also were present.

 

8:40 AM. Normally, in my experience here, such smoke is husbanded to that region south of Pusch Ridge. But no, not yesterday, its HERE! What an awful view this was!
8:40 AM. Normally, in my experience here, such smoke is husbanded to that region south of Pusch Ridge. But no, not yesterday, its HERE! What an awful view this was!
8:45 AM. In this photo not taken while driving, you can see that there are TWO plumes the lower one drifting south from the area of the Golder Ranch-Sutherland Wash development of expensive custom homes that might have been burning wood for heat, while aloft is another plume. I could not tell where that came from, even in this time lapse from the U of AZ. Note how the Stratus clouds in the morning change direction in movement.
8:45 AM. In this photo not taken while driving1, you can see that there are TWO plumes the lower one drifting south from the area of the Golder Ranch-Sutherland Wash development of expensive custom homes, some of which might have been burning wood for heat, or something else woody, while aloft is a second, separate plume. I could not tell where the higher one came from, even in this time lapse from the U of AZ. Note how in the movie the Stratus clouds in the morning change direction in movement.  The movement at first is from the west-northwest (left to right), and those clouds contained the higher smog layer.  So, could it have been from PHX???                    ———–                                                                                                                                                                    1Smokey the Bear reminds drivers that only you can prevent smoky, well, a lot of it anyway.

In the afternoon, the smog was gone, mixed through a greater depth, the layering destroyed by the convection, those rising currents and compensating downward ones, that cream any morning layering. The dilution effect, and it also could have been that the aerosol load (smog) decreased with time, made things look much more clear. To this eye, there was still a lot of smog present, just diluted in the space between the ground and the bases of these small Cumulus clouds shown below. Still, there were so many pretty scenes on this horseback ride with a friend that I took more than 100 photos! Some water was present in some of the little washes, always nice to encounter, and some vividly green spots of of emerging growth (shown last).

The final point worth mentioning for pedantic reasons,  is that yesterday afternoon’s TUS sounding indicated the same cloud top temperatures as the day before, about  -12 to -13 C.  Yet, there was no ice dropping out of those clouds.  The day before, with the SAME cloud top temperature, ice and virga were widespread.

What’s up with that?

Ah, the complexities of ice formation in clouds!

When clouds are small and have a lot of droplets per liter in them, likely hundreds of thousands yesterday, given all the smog around, the drops end up being especially small because so many form on some of the smog particles (called “cloud condensation nuclei”).

In repeated flights at the University of Washington, we found that the resistance to form ice is dependent on not just on temperature, once thought to be the sole controller of ice formation, but droplet sizes in clouds as well.  Small droplets sizes in clouds meant they were less likely to form ice, given the SAME cloud top temperature.  Altocumulus lenticularis clouds are the poster child for ice formation resistance in clouds with their tiny drops, often having to be colder than -30 C before ice forms.  On the other hand, clouds in the pristine Arctic around Barrow in the summer time, over the oceans away from continents, and in deep, warm based clouds even polluted ones, form ice at temperatures higher than -10 C when the drops in the clouds are large and have reached precipitation sizes (more than 100 microns in diameter to millimeter sizes).

So, it seems likely that yesterday, our shallower, pollutted clouds had smaller droplets in them than those deeper, less polluted clouds of the prior day in which we saw so much ice form in the later afternoon with about the same cloud top temperatures as yesterday.  It is also the case, that when clouds are in large patches as they were the day before, that ice formation has more time to take place, and that, too, may be a factor.

Complicated enough?  Yep.

2:18 PM. In the Catalina Mountains on the way to Deer Camp trail. Cumulus humilis dot skies. No ice evident.
2:52 PM. In the Catalina Mountains on the back from the Deer Camp trail. Cumulus humilis dot skies. No ice evident.

 

2:18 PM. Cumulus humilis sitting around over Sutherland Heights, and the Oro Valley
2:18 PM. Cumulus humilis sitting around over Sutherland Heights, and the Oro Valley

3:21 PM. In the Catalina foothills above Sutherland Wash.

The weather ahead

After another round of cold, this one dry cold just ahead for us, the heat is on by early March, and along with that heat in most of the West in early March, likely record cold in portions of the East. Check this 500 mb map out for the afternoon of March 2nd, produced by last night’s WRF-GFS model run at 5 PM AST, rendered by IPS MeteoStar:2013022300_CON_GFS_500_HGT_WINDS_192

Look at the size of that cold trough and low center!  Huge!

That isn’t the only weather news ahead, cold in the East, warm in the West in March. Our upcoming cold shock that hits on Sunday, is caused by an unusually powerful upper trough that dips down into Texas after it blows by us, then roars northeastward across the South on Monday and Tuesday. Expect to read about godawful tornadoes in the South on Monday and/or Tuesday.

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.