Might get a shower today, likely our last day for a summer one, one spawned by all that residual tropical humidity we still have today in our lowest layers. Don’t really have a great chance for rain today, and the whole rest of the month looks dry, but you might see a shaft somewhere off in the distance. That would be nice.
Then it gradually dries out more and more in the days ahead, and, without the high humidities we’ve been immersed in for some months now, we’ll have to suffer through cooler nights, even a cool daytime snap is foretold in the models around the 20th.
Kind of sad when you think about it, because all that green we have been enjoying with our bountiful summer rains (8.91 inches here since July 1st), will be turning brown. Makes me think of that California song that was so popular some decades ago, “All the leaves are gray, and the sky is brown, I went walking for awhile on a winter’s day…”, etc. etc., the song referring to the gray coating of smog on the leaves that fall off trees there.
Here is the radar-derived rain report for the nation for the past 90 days, pretty much mid-June through mid-September (June 11 to September 11). Except where blocked by mountains, radar-derived rainfall amounts are really quite good. Check out those 8-15 inches blobs in southeast Arizona, and along the Mogollon Rim! Cool. What’s best about this period is that it took a huge bite out of some of the nation’s worst droughty areas during this spell, here in AZ, mountains of CO, KS, the Southeast. You can go here to create your own maps of rain. Below that is the AZ radar rain map from Intellicast for just the past WEEK. Its amazing. Check out those 4-8 inches (!) blobs in the south part of the State.
I think I will go walking in the desert this week and say goodbye to all that green because in a couple of weeks a lot of it, our grasses and remaining wildflowers, will be as dry and dead as Mars.
In the meantime, a reprise of yesterday’s clouds in the usual “cloud diary”; the light rain that produced 0.15 inches, somewhat disappointing. No thunder, either. Here are some of the best scenes, to me, anyway:
Will be hanging clothes up to dry in the house for extra humidity until July 2013 I suppose.
The End.