2015-16 water year, Oct-Sep, off to good start in Catalinaland

2.83 inches of rain fell in October in Sutherland Heights, Catalina, Arizona, a little more than twice normal for here (based on Our Garden’s record dating back to 1977).    Our Garden is located off Columbus and Stallion here in Catalina, some 2 mi and a bit lower than this site.

The greatest Oct rain at Our Garden or here?

The year was 1983, of course, with 5.61 inches, for perspective.  Nearly all of that fell in the first four days!

Will November continue the above normal rainfall here?

Nope1.

The End

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1Wanted to be particularly decisive today.  As a matter of fact, women love decisive men,  FYI, to spice up the blog with some life knowledge outside of clouds and weather, besides this being a cheap trick to attract more readers of gender.

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Huh?  New thought.  Advice columns have millions of readers!  A cloud blog like this one, 2.  Wonder if I could do advice, to help people live better?  Oh, here’s one that’s just come in:

“Dear CMP:  I want to cut my long hair because I LOVE the convenience of having short hair, but my boyfriend won’t let me. What should I do? Gale.

Dear Gale.  Your boyfriend is right.  No woman should have short hair.  Best of luck, CMP.”

Gosh, that was pretty easy…   I think I could do it!

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COntinuing WEATHER discussion….

Sure, we got us Big Niño now,   but they don’t have much effect in November unless some  TS2 comes up from Mexico way.   Niñoes effect more of the later winter and spring, as a rule.

1addendumLong period of “troughiness” is still in the works for the first half of November, but the amplitudes of the troughs will not be great enough to give us much in precip.  Remember,  gotta have the jet stream in the middle levels (i.e., at 500 millybars pressure, 18 kft or so) over us or south of us this time of the year  to get precip.   About 95% of our rain in the cool half of the year has to meet that criteria.  Therefore, it  takes high amplitude trough with the jet stream in the middle levels of the atmo curling around us to bring us rain.

Now wind, we’ll have lots of that from time to time as those troughs go by.

2 “TS”–not in the colloquial sense of the expression, but  rather in the tropical sense.  Well, I guess if it was a HUGE TS that came up, the colloquial sense might be OK…

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.