The Tucson storm passes by Catalina like so many other September storms

With continuous thunder and threatening skies for Catalina, the mammoth Tucson storm that dropped a record 2.83 inches for the wettest day ever in September at the International Airport passed by Catalina early yesterday afternoon.  Here’s what a fraction of it looked like (using a bad ISO setting, darn it).  Also at the TUS AP it has become the wettest September of record halfway through the month with over FIVE and a half inches!

Of course, we here in Catalina land have been missed by most of those heavy September rains and have had only a crummy 1.17 inches.  Still, better than nothin’.   And there have been some fabulous sights during these past days.  Below are a couple of shots from yesterday.  That easily visible roiling motion in that last shot, if you saw that Cumulus congestus-going-to-Cumulonimbus, was a real indicator of how unstable the air was, that is, how easily it could go upward yesterday.  This situation us due to the cooler air aloft we have right now, along with mid-80 temperatures at the ground.   This is the kind of roiling, churning action you see in those big boys in the Plains States, East, and South when severe weather lurks.

Mods think we have a chance for rain today, too.  Maybe it will be our time, we will win the rain lottery today.

Below, thanks to the U of AZ, we have a time lapse movie of part of the storm, anyway, to the right side of the image.

Dreamy weather ahead:

Of particular excitement in the longer range NCEP (“government”) models, although almost certainly wrong as they usually are that far in advance, is that a tropical storm advances toward Arizony in early October.  Mark your calendars.  Might as well.


 

 

 

 

 

 

 


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.