A second nice rain here in droughty Catalina! Thought 25 hundredths would be great from that little rainband, but no, we milked that system, appropriate language for rural regions, for no less than 45 hundredths, both here on Wilds Road and in Sutherland Heights. Very Seattle-like morning, too, with DARK low hanging clouds. Now our November rainfall is almost at our Catalina average of 0.97 inches with 0.93 having fallen already!
And if you were watching closely, and I suspect you were, you might have seen a little “graupel” (tiny snowballs) fall out of some of the Cumulus congestus (second shot below)-Cumulonimbus clouds (third shot) yesterday afternoon here. Historical query: wasn’t there a song decades ago by the farmer, Don Hoe, about tiny snowballs? Sounds familiar anyway.
Graupel, and hail for that matter, often show up as strands, or fiber-like regions of precip falling out the bottom of clouds, and you could see those from time to time yesterday afternoon. That last shot is a shot taken by someone while at the same time they were driving (good grief!) down Tangerine looking toward the Catalina Mountains. If you look hard you can see “strandedness” in the shaft to the left of the short rainbow. (The little rainbow terminates, of course, where the precip becomes ice and not rain.
Continuing about strands from cloud bases, that’s is definitely the base area of the cloud you want to be under to see things bouncing off the ground or your car or the biggest drops. Saw some graupel (also called, “soft hail”) yesterday myself at Golder Ranch Drive and Oracle.
Such a pretty day, too, with the mountains so white in the morning, capped by nice orographic clouds in the afternoon. See some of this photogenic day below.
Canadian teaser
How exciting it was to wake up this morning and see that the Canadians had provided all of Arizona with a MAMMOTH, drought-denting storm in their overnight model run for November 12-14th. Check out these model images below, valid for the mornings of November 12th and 13th, respectively. (The entire original series can be found here.)
In comparison for these two output times below, I reprise the Canadian model output based on the data but 12 h earlier than those just shown below them. In yesterday morning’s model output, rain had not even gotten to San Diego by the morning of the 13th, and a pleasant, but really kind of decrepit (just a couple of isobars around it) low center is shown STILL offshore.
But in last night’s run for November 12th, a giant low is centered in California, 994 millibars central pressure no less, with MANY isobars around it covered the whole western US practically! The low is nowwhere near San Diego anymore, but rather over “Sacramenta”, CA!
Those many isobars in the latest model run mean lots of wind, and with that wind, huge amounts of cloud laden air are going to be smashed into the coasts of California and Baja California, and with that, lots of rain as that wind drives in against the mountains. And you can see that happens in those colored regions, lower right panel of the 4-panel model output), that’s what happens on the 12th and 13th.
This was SO EXCITING to see! I wanted to call all my friends and let them know about this.
But alas, this very wet scenario is likely just a teaser since there was too much change from the prior model run. In hoping it will actually happen you may just as well be hoping that your horse, last by 6 lengths in the far turn, will spurt to the front by the finish line. Too, this drought denting scenario was not at all seen in the US models (seen here). Rather, our NCEP model run resembles the old Canadian model from yesterday morning, one that showed a relatively weakly precipitation system go over us. Dang. Still, they all do show more rain ahead, that’s the upside of this whole blog today.
So, some kind of bad data likely got into the Canadian model. Still, its not impossible that the Canadian model is on to something, and that’s where the final ray of hope lies, is that somehow later today, the Canadian model sees the same rain drenching result over AZ on the 12th and 13th, and also, the US models see it as well. So, lots of anticipation today to see how things change. A more reasonable guess, one that I would make, is that the Canadian model is not completely goofy, and that the US models will strengthen the storm on the 12-13th when they ingest this morning’s data.
Will post likely disappointing new results (trying to be objective here) later in day when progs come out based on data taken globally about right now (4:40 AM AZ time).
