Water continues to flow in the Sutherland Wash!

It was a great day to hike to that wash, too.  Began with a nice sunrise; missed the nice sunset, darn.  Hope you didn’t.

But the highlight of the day was seeing that water was still running in the Sutherland Wash, some eight days after our great snow.  Like so many things that happen to meteorologists, I didn’t expect it.

Your cloud day yesterday

Was an interesting day because at times it looked summer-like due to Cumulus formations over the high terrain, Kit Peak to the Catalinas.   The scenes below are mainly from a hike1 out to some native rock etchings.

7:22 AM. Sunrise Altocumulus.
7:22 AM. Sunrise Altocumulus.
10:38 AM. Petting zoo.
10:38 AM. Petting zoo.  I wanted to hop on this cow and ride it so bad! It seemed so docile.  Wanted to just how riding a cow would feel like,  have a new life experience.  Didn’t seem to mind the several of us going by.
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10:42 AM. Glinting rocks through the Tucson smog layer. Yep, it rounded the corner and trucked on up along the Catalinas, kind of like our Stratus fractus does on some days. Mixed out later, of course, as Cumulus clouds ate some of it.

 

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11:07 AM. Its always so special to see water in our washes. This scene just due east of the “brown house” and before the “Rusty Gate” heading up the east side of the hills. Pretty regular equestrian crossing point.  The water was gone some few hundred yards farther downstream.
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12:09 PM. Nice display of Altocumulus perlucidus, while the summer-like scenes began to emerge. Note the Cumulus congestus forming over Kit Peak on the horizon, center. Pretty exciting to think of summer already!
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12:53 PM. This pretty summer-like scene out there on the trail just behind the Old Lloyd Golder Ranch. The small Cumulus clouds were even streaming off from the S and SSE just like they do so often in the summer! There are some Altocumulus perlucidus clouds above them.
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The grasses along the washes are already a few inches high! Nice to see that green coming along so well after 3.82 inches of rain in December (rainlog total that assigns the 7 AM measurement to the prior day since 0.96 inches was measured on Jan 1. Usually its put on the day of the measurement.)
Due to the wetness, Seattle-like mosses are beginning to appear. Expect mushroom hunting to be a big tourist industry later this winter.
12:31 PM.  Due to the wetness, Seattle-like mosses are beginning to appear. Got a little homesick there for a second. Expect mushroom hunting to be a big tourist industry later this winter in Arizona as more storms line up for us.
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2:23 PM. Cumulus pile up into the Altocumulus layer above, helping to enhance it. Didn’t see any ice or sign of precip coming out of these clouds, though was watching closely as I am sure you all were, too, for a “first ice of the day” report in your cloud diary.

Detecting ice module below.  I hope most of you logged this as your first ice sighting of the day.

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4:08 PM. Whilst scouring horizon to horizon, saw this gem at last: ice! What, you can’t see the ice? Too far away? See the following photo for zoomed version.
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4:08 PM. Zoomed shot of glaciating complex of Cumulus, some virga, light rainshower below it. Still can’t make it out? See next shot with annotation.
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Tops, from TUS sounding perhaps briefly as cold as -12 C before subsiding to lower, warmer levels. Almost certainly a case of “ice enhancement” or “ice multiplication”, a situation where there are many more ice crystals in a cloud than can be accounted for by ice nuclei, solid substances on which ice crystals form.

While waiting for still more rain, The End.

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1Two of the people I was hiking with are very important meteorologists; faculty members at big universities with big Ph Ds,  Wikipedia pages, give lectures all around the world about what they know.  While I myself am not important, if you can align yourself with important people, befriend them in some way, and then go on to tell your friends that you have befriended that kind of person and do things with them, YOUR own mediocre life seems greatly enhanced.  Let us not forget the guiding words to a peaceful, successful life as told to us in “Deteriorata.”

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.