About real clouds, weather, cloud seeding and science autobio life stories by WMO consolation prize-winning meteorologist, Art Rangno
Author: 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.
Many of you probably were gasping for air after having seen the WRF-GFS model outputs from last evening’s 5 PM AST global data.
A large hurricane, really more the size of its typhoonic big brothers in the western north Pacific, and one that also dwarfs the late tropical remnant, “Newton” , that came through here a week or so ago, is shown to move along the SAME path as Newton into Arizona in about 13 days from now.
For those few of you who did NOT peruse the 00 GMT, CUT, Z output, here are the fantastic fantasy hurricane depictions that this model, with all of its calculating power, shows entering AZ on the 26th. Kind of fun to see even if it is bogus because it indicates that such a strong tropical cyclone could come through here one day.
Below, from IPS MeteoStar, these, maybe the best fake AZ hurricane depictions I have ever seen. Note all the isobars, i.e., lines of equal pressure with this tropical cyclone in AZ, and then remember for all its rain, little Newton had virtually no signature on pressure maps! Hell, the pressure didn’t even fall at Nogales as Newt approached. Pitiful.
But it wouldn’t be like that in this fantasy hurricane. Tremendous pressure falls would occur as it entered AZ giving your microbarograph quite a workout as the pressure plummeted and then went up as the center passed by.
You do have a microbarograph don’t you? If you don’t, think about it.
“Invalid” (haha) for 5 AM AST September 25th.Invalid for 5 PM AST September 25th.
Next, you’re curious, though, about what steering pattern caused this hurricane, previously shown to stay far offshore and dissipate over some jellyfish and plastic particles way out in the Pacific in the models.
Let’s look, again from IPS MeteoStar at the steering situation at 500 millybars, or in around 20,000 feet or so:
Here the configuration. You’re breathing a sigh of relief, maybe even chuckling: “That’s not gonna happen.” Ludicroous really, though withing the slightest realm of possibility, maybe one in a thousand. Like kicking a field goal that goes through the uprights after bouncing off an opposing player’s helmut. I mean, it could happen, like a golf shot at Carmel that bounces off a stunted cypress and goes into the hole from 500 yards out, or…. OK, enough of that.
What you need to have any confidence is a big trough along or just offshore as we had with Newt, not a slight little itty bitty eddy aloft that has to be in exactly the right location at EXACTLY the right time. I mean, its like a ball that goes for a home run after it bounces of the center fielder’s head1 …
Hold your cash on the sand bags.
Finally, there’s really nothing from the spaghetti factory that supports this. Boohoo. What you need in spaghetti is strong support for a trough along the coast, not the below:
Valid at 5 PM AST September 25th.
Yesterday’s clouds
Spectacular Altocumulus castellanus and floccus (no virga) passed overhead during the morning. I hope you documented them with a few photos.
9:11 AM, on the trail looking at a superb example of Altocumulus floccus. Estimated height, 12,000 feet above ground level. No ice visible, so tops likely warmer than -10 C. The bases of these clouds evaporated almost as soon as they formed, but the tops not so much, rose steadily after bottom disappeared. Tallest ones were likely more than 1,000-2000 feet tall.12:16 PM. By this time, which was good, smallish Cumulonimbus clouds recurred over the Catalina Mountains mostly east of Ms. Lemmon. Nice stages of ice development in the tops from newly risen, no sign of ice (right side here), to frizzy all ice remains (left side here), over and over again.
Horse story
Have to depart from clouds and weather to tell this tale. Yesterday I stopped here to let the mighty Zeus rest a little. I let him graze “off leash” on some of the still-green nettle grass in a gravel parking area next to our cottage. I then went to get a pail of water for him, the pail being on the north side of our house. When he saw I was leaving, he immediately followed me like a dog. It was kind of cute.
But as we got to the gravel outside the north porch of our house, our two dogs, Banjo and Emma were going nuts at the sight of a horse outside the north windows.
Zeus got distracted by all of the commotion in the house and went onto the porch to look in one of the windows to see what was up, or maybe he saw his own reflection and thought it was another horse? Here is the hilarious scene:
2:21 PM yesterday. Zeus looks in to see why the dogs are barking so much.
The End
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1This actually happened in South Dakota, at Mitchell’s Cadwell Park, during a baseball game I played in ’72. I was catching in those days for Mitchell Commercial Bank. Our center fielder, a track star, ran to get a scorching line drive to medium depth center, and racing to his left, reaching up to grab it, the ball instead bounced off his noggin and went some 40 or 50 feet over the fence! He was OK. We had no “concussion protocol” in those days. Had a chance to bat against the legendary Canova, SD, pitcher, Lee Goldammer in that game. Whiffed on three pitches; was maybe at bat for 30 seconds.
Former Hurricane ‘Newt’ brought some real humidity, low clouds with unusually warm bases (around 15-20 ° C) to Tucson and Catalina yesterday as its remnant center passed just about over us.
Old Newt was “dragging” here as a tropical storm, aloft it was pretty strong still, brought near hurricane force winds on isolated, high, mountain tops. Mt. Hopkins reached 59 kts from the ESE before the “eye” passed nearby and the winds turned to the west. And in the Rincon Mountains a gigantic 6.39 inches was logged, and a site on Mt. Graham reported 6.43 inches. (Thanks to Mark Albright for these reports.)
While Sutherland Heights received only 0.29 inches in that all day rain, there were eye-popping totals in the Catalinas. Take a look at some of these, Dan Saddle near Oracle Ridge, nearing 6 inches in 24 h! Below, 24 h totals ending at 2 AM this morning, which pretty much covers Newt:
0.28
Golder Ranch
Horseshoe Bend Rd in Saddlebrooke
0.59
Oracle Ranger Stati
approximately 0.5 mi SW of Oracle
0.24
Dodge Tank
Edwin Rd 1.3 mi E of Lago Del Oro Parkway
0.35
Cherry Spring
approximately 1.5 mi W of Charouleau Gap
0.79
Pig Spring
approximately 1.1 mi NE of Charouleau Gap
0.47
Cargodera Canyon
NE corner of Catalina State Park
0.31
CDO @ Rancho Solano
Cañada Del Oro Wash NE of Saddlebrooke
0.39
CDO @ Golder Rd
Cañada Del Oro Wash at Golder Ranch Rd
4.13
Oracle Ridge
Oracle Ridge, approximately 1.5 mi N of Rice Peak
4.25
Mt. Lemmon
Mount Lemmon
1.61
CDO @ Coronado Camp
Cañada Del Oro Wash 0.3 mi S of Coronado Camp
2.17
Samaniego Peak
Samaniego Peak on Samaniego Ridge
5.91
Dan Saddle
Dan Saddle on Oracle Ridge
3.54
White Tail
Catalina Hwy 0.8 mi W of Palisade Ranger Station
3.66
Green Mountain
Green Mountain
1.77
Marshall Gulch
Sabino Creek 0.6 mi SSE of Marshall Gulch
Your cloud day yesterday; we don’t talk about today. That’s for tomorrow.
The day began with one of the great examples of Nimbostratus, that technically a middle -level cloud greeted us at daybreak in what was one of the great examples of the phantom cloud, the true precipitator, usually hidden from view by lower clouds such as Stratocumulus. But, yesterday morning, there it was, “Ns” naked as could be. I know many of you have been looking for a good shot of Nimbostratus to add to your cloud collection for a long time and I could feel the joy out there when I saw it myself. I only took a couple of shots myself, wish now I had taken more of an extraordinary scene.
6:49 AM. Nimbostratus! Note how high the bottom is, a bottom marked mostly by falling precip, usually snow because steady light rain is so relatively transparent.6:52 AM. Looking NNW toward parts of Saddlebrook/Eagle Crest developments. Notice the nice, relatively uniform, blurry gray, the “blurry” look due to falling rain, the perceived bottom, at the melting level, snow is melting into rain. In winter, therefore, the “bottom” or base of Ns, absent lower clouds, appears lower to us because the snow level is lower.
Then, as the light rain here moistened the air hour after hour, low clouds, such as Stratocumulus and Stratus fractus began to form along the mountains, producing some interesting “tracers” of the chaotic air movement over there by the Catalinas under nearly calm conditions. Newt disappointed in his wind accompaniment.
1:41 PM. Stratus fractus clouds lined Samaniego Ridge, Stratocumulus or weak Cumulus topped it, with a higher layer of Stratocumulus above that, That highest layer was once the much deeper Nimbostratus, but now has lost its deep part, so its no longer “Ns” since its not precipitating.1:42 PM. The deep stratocast has departed, the remaining clouds in the foreground are Stratocumulus. The darkening bases on the horizon southwest of Pusch Ridge are where Cumulus and Cumulonimbus clouds filled with rain are piling up, likely due to the light winds coming together down there, maybe in the low center that was once “Newt.”
Later in the day, as the highest, coldest cloud tops associated with those beautiful Nimbostatus clouds moved off to the NE, and our cloudscape became a mix of deeper Stratocumulus with Cumulus and isolated Cumulonimbus cells, they produced true drizzle and misty, visibility-reducing “warm rain”, that rare type of rain that falls here from clouds lacking in ice, began to be observed producing Hawaiian looking rain on our mountains, delicate shafts of rain whose small drops slanted away from the base.
2:32 PM. Misty drizzle and very light rain! When did this transition happen?2:32 PM. Hard to tell the difference here in a photo between the pure, naked Ns, and this lower drizzle,misty rain producing cloud likely topping out well below the freezing level. I’ve seen these transitions before, but I missed this one, where a Stratocumulus deck starts to look a little fuzzy on the bottom as the drizzle, very light rain starts to come out (due to tops rising, drops at the top getting larger, at some point crossing over the “Hocking” droplet threshold of larger than about 38 microns in diameter, where they begin sticking together when they hit). Here, the transition from non-precipitating Stratocu to I-don’t know what has already taken place during between the photos at 1:41 and 1:42 PM. Should drizzly, relatively shallow clouds like these now be termed, Nimbostratus? Or Stratocumulus praecipitatio,to emphasis the shallowness? A question definitely for the cloud philosophers to haggle about. No member of the cloud maven club would be punished for calling this scene one showing “Nimbostratus.” However, the drizzle and very light misty rain should have told you it was from a far different cloud structure than that associated with true Nimbostratus, always a deep cloud with ice in it, often topping out at Cirrus levels.
Here, you might well erupt with, “This doesn’t look like Hawaii, but Ocean Shores, Washington, or some other coastal location along the West Coast on a spring day having Stratocumulus with drizzle!”
You would be correct in that eruption.
Below, an example of drizzle drops on your car’s windshield:
3:50 PM. The tiniest drops you can make out on the window are drizzle drops. I focused on them and you’ll have to click on it to get the full size to be able to see them. I was so excited to see some more of them!
Later, it was to look little more “Hawaiian”, but if you’ve been to Hilo, you know its mostly cloudy all day.
“Warm rain” or rain due to the colllision-coalescence process, is also mainly associated with “clean” conditions, ones low in aerosol particles that can act as cloud condensation nuclei. The fewer the “CCN” the fewer are the droplets in clouds, and the larger the individual cloud droplets are when saturation and cloud formation occur. So, by yesterday afternoon, certainly, it was doggone clean here, no doubt aided by washout in that light rain we had.
Particularly heavy rain with low visibility fell just south of Catalina yesterday afternoon around Ina and Oracle just after 4 pm. However, that rain did not have those HUGE drops that we see from unloading, deep, Cumulonimbus clouds making this observer think as heavy as it was, it may have been due to a Cumulonimbus topping out at less than 20,000 feet, where the temperature would have been too warm for ice. The 500 mb temperature yesterday was a tropical-like -3.7° C on the TUS sounding, almost unheard of with a rain situation here. This, another sign of tropical Newt, since tropical storms/hurricanes have warm cores.
lacking in those huge drops we see in our thunderstorms, this rain likely formed from the “warm rain” process except maybe in the very heaviest rain areas. It was a special day.
You probably noticed how quiet it was; no thunder around, for one thing, indicating the updrafts in the clouds were not very strong, and that was another indicator that the clouds may not have contained ice. Without ice, hail and graupel, soft hail, you don’t have lightning.
The lack of lighting, the all day off and on rain, such as you might experience at Hilo, Hawaii, on the windward side, made it seem like you were in Hilo, Hawaii, or one of the other wet spots on the windward side of the Island.
3:27 PM. Another, to me remarkable misty scene reminiscent of oceanic and coastal Stratocumulus with drizzle and light rain3:52 PM. In the meantime a much deeper cell had developed to the SW of us, down around Ina and Oracle, where an inch and a half of rain fell. Look how the bottom is so close to the ground, like at a temperature near 20° C, about as warm as a cloud base can be here! And the warmer the base, the more water is going up into that cloud! Very exciting scene! Well, they all are to people of cloud maven persuasion.4:24 PM. Into the bursting cloud. Still, drops were not HUGE, as you would expect, but extremely numerous, rain rate over an inch an hour in the heaviest parts. Was taken I around Oracle and McGee, and of course, not while driving. That would be crazy. Only looks like it.6:32 PM. One of the more Hawaiian looking scenes, fine trails of rain dragging along the Catalina Mountains. The slope of the rain coming out absent much wind down low tells you the drops are small, probably near drizzle sizes. And the “shaft” if you will, is diffuse, indicating the small drops are spreading out due to the little turbulence there was making it fuzzy around the edges. Maybe, anyway.
This September 8-10 model-projected Arizona deluge caused by a dying tropical storm? Then followed by four more days of rain around here?
Probably.
But you wait a lifetime to see model outputs like this, and so I’m going to save it here, even if it is “fantastic”, “phantasmagorical”, surely imaginary in a sense, is model craziness, etc.
Nevertheless, treasurable moments in model output have been given to us desert dwellers overnight, the kind of rain-in-the-desert projected events that Hallmark cards were made for.
Here are the panels from IPS MeteoStar, a division of Sutron, where you can buy meteorological sensors, real good ones. I am posting so many of these panels, which is a little crazy in itself, because in 24 h this series (linked to above) will be overwritten by the next model run from 5 PM AST global data today, and we will likely never see such a wet series again foretold in a model. in our lifetimes. Who knows, it COULD happen, but prepare for a broken heart:
Now that most have left this blog to go elsewhere, let us have some spaghetti to see if there is any hope that a tropical storm-sucking trough will be along the West Coast, and in a position to draw a hurricane northward along the Mexican coast by its southerly steering winds aloft.
Valid at 5 PM, September 9th.
As you can see, a trough (emphasized by the blue lines above) is destined to lie along the West Coast, in a position to steer any tropical storms toward Arizona that might be moving up the Mexican coast. So, it looks like the chance of a tropical storm entering the state is certainly a fair amount greater than zero around the 9-10th of September.
Also, I am also posting way below a new (!) not-previously-published. but rather rejected- by-important-scientists-a-long-time-ago-manuscript FYI!
Very exciting! (Hah!)
Its published now, though, isn’t it???!!!
“Online.”
Its about science and how it works, and how it has failed; examples given. I put it down toward the bottom of a normal blog because I am shy.
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Clouds from a few days ago, August 26th, now that the “choke point” in uploading photos to Word Press has been, at least temporarily ameliorated.
Here’s the sequence as a great cloud bottom drifted toward us from Pusch Ridge on the afternoon of the 26th. If you saw this coming, you should have been clearing channels around the house for excessive water flow. I forgot to.
Unloaded 0.45 inches at this site. 1.69 inches up on there on ol’ lady Lemmon. We sure needed this dump! Below, one of the great cloud bottoms of our time, that of a Cumulus congestus cloud, filled, as we say here, with rainy portent (maybe hail, too):
1:44 PM, August 26th. Note just a tinge of shading on the right side. First drops, the biggest ones, or even hail stones are just coming out.1:48 PM. Cloud beginning to bust open with rain now; updraft collapsing over there. Now its a Cumulonimbus.1:53 PM. Nice shafting over there, but will the cloud base overhead now split open over us?1:54 PM. Looks really good almost overhead toward Saddlebrooke! Just don’t unload after you go by! Note scruff of lower cloud (called, “pannus”) caused the the outflows of storms to the SW of Catalina. Not long enough really to be a “arcus” cloud, but clouds like this are almost always associated with a shift in the winds that helps build clouds overhead by acting like a micro-cold front, the rain-cooled air lifting the warmer, humid air ahead of it, and some of that warmer air being cooled to its condensation point producing these lower shelves of cloud.2:07 PM. The height of the storm, the visibility down to a hundred yards or two is all. This particular intense period hardly lasted a couple of minutes before it let up noticeably.
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Pedagogical or possibly, pedantic (boring) module
Update alert for the posting of new (!) not-published rejected items by this Arthur:
(the original title, submitted first in 1997), final rejection in 1999 (Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc.)
The reviewers, Harold O., Danny R., and someone named “Anonymous Reviewer B”, guessed as, “”B”, for “Bernie S.”
Those in the cloud seeding culture don’t need the names spelled out. Harold O. is part of the “old guard” cloud seeding culture, while Danny R. is part of the new cloud seeding guard, one that has gone on to be a science superstar since his early work at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem under the leader of the Israeli cloud seeding experiments. He did some work there on the clouds of the Mediterranean and satellite interpretations of them (available in Hebrew only the last time I checked).
While Danny R was there during the time of the reporting of the benchmark Israeli 2 randomized experiment by the leader of the experiment (1976-1986) he himself was not involved in those (ultimately flawed) analyses. Later, he participated in the unraveling of the 2nd experiment with Israeli statistician, K. Ruben Gabriel in 1990, J. Appl. Meteor. Half of the 2nd experiment’s results had been previously omitted, an omission which produced an apparent, unambiguous “confirmatory” success of the Israeli 1 experiment, for the short of it.
The 1990 development in Israel, in essence a retraction of what everyone thought was an unambiguous cloud seeding success, plus the fall of the equally important, earlier benchmark randomized experiments in Colorado, at one time also claimed to have proved cloud seeding by the National Academy of Sciences (Malone et al 1973), were the primary reasons for composing the piece being posted today. You may also know that your very own Catalina “cloud-maven” was in Israel in 1986 for 11 weeks, in doubt of those “hard-to-rain” clouds that were being described by the leader of those experiments, resulting in “Rain from Clouds with Tops Warmer than -10° C in Israel”, (1988, Quart J. Roy. Meteor. Soc.). This was to some degree the first crack in those experiments. (Of course, I would say that!)
How could such glowing, but ultimately critically flawed journal papers appear ultimately involving hundreds of journal pages? What went wrong with peer reviews?
I attempt in this piece to describe in this piece how science is supposed to work, and these pretty amazing chapters of science in cloud seeding, and offered some possible solutions.
At one time, Prof. Peter V. Hobbs, named to write up a status piece on Clouds-Climate for the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in 2003 or so, was going to use the “rise and fall” of the Colorado and Israeli experiments in this piece I have just posted. He was going to demonstrate how we scientists can think we have proved something, but upon closer inspection, find that we have not proved at all!
Peter Hobbs was concerned that the then many unknowns about clouds were not being treated properly in climate models (being parameterized too crudely), and therefore those parameterizations of clouds in climate models could lead to erroneous conclusions concerning the amount of global warming that might be ahead.
In his take on this MS, and that “rise and fall” section in particular, Peter, who was not one to dole out compliments very often said of it, “This is pretty good.” Peter had not reviewed it beforehand.
Ultimately, Peter contracted pancreatic cancer and was unable to submit his status summary to the WMO.
As well as some shots of that violent blast that hit the CDO HS and the area around Concordia Ave. One ALERT gauge reported 1.34 inches! Nice. The uprooting of trees wasn’t so nice, however.
Sutherland Heights whiffed again on rain, except for that little sprinkle just after 8 PM, sad to say.
4:37 PM. What a great looking pileus of Cumulus congestus with a little pileus veil at the very tippy top. This is heading toward being a Cumulonimbus calvus (remember, “calvus” means “bald”), the most ephemeral stage of Cumulonimbus. This stage doesn’t last long since its when the cloud droplets are disappearing because of the rapid formation of high ice particle concentrations inside the turret. Remember, ice and water don’t stay together long; water disappears, evaporates due to mixing of environment air around the turret, all that ice sucking the life out of those poor droplets since water vapor molecules love ice more than being inside a droplet when ice is around and they escape to the nearest ice particle, which then gets fatter and fatter, cannibalizing those droplets in a sense.
4:52 PM. Jumbo Cumulus congestus has congealed into a complex of Cumulonimbus clouds, riding the north wind that was about to sweep into the Sutherland Heights later in the evening.6:32 PM. WIth the gush of north winds, Stratocumulus and Cumulus bases quickly covered the sky, some piling higher into Cumulonimbus clouds.6:55 PM. Northerly wind and associated line of Cumulus above it grow into Cumulonimbus clouds. Very pretty scene. But tops not doing much here, so big dump not likely without something changing, which did! The older wispy turret above the larger rain shaft is already sinking back. The new shaft is coming out of the youngest, firmest looking turret.6:55 PM. Zoomed view of the top of turret where the new rain shaft is coming out. That bubble on the right side is just starting to show its ice externally, though grauple (soft hail) and/or hail were already hidden inside it as evidenced by that new thin rain shaft. Notice the younger turret behind it is higher, and therefore colder, and must also be full of precip. Watch out below! It doesn’t show the “softness” as the droplets evaporate in the presence of ice likely because its still on its way up, and condensation onto drops is faster than removal of vapor by ice. Watch out below, #2.6:57 PM. In the meantime, the Catalinas reap a nice sunset shower.7:08 PM. That new turret is now unloading around Ina and Oracle. Very exciting and a pretty scene, too, with the glow of the sunset. This storm was to go on for another hour.7:23 PM. Slightly out of focus, but you can see one of the MANY strokes of lightning that accompanied this tremendous downpour.
AZ mod (from 5 PM data last evening) thinks we have a chance for an afternoon dump today, Thursday.
7:21 PM, August 13th. A sky so full of portent that evening after a clear day. This our last chance for rain for quite awhile, but Sutherland Heights and Catalina whiffed on this incoming complex of thunderstorms. But, we had a fabulous light show from a cell that developed almost overhead, pf Sutherland Heights as dark fell, but a little to the SE, dumping heavy rains in the Romero Canyon/Pusch Ridge area.7:16 PM., August 13th. A very dramatic looking shelf cloud (Stratocumulus) spread across and otherwise completely clear sky that evening providing a great sunset photo op. Northerly winds of 25-35 mph and a temperature drop of about 10 degrees accompanied this scene.6:57 PM. The churning, roiling motion of this turret was remarkable, almost like time-lapse there was so much of it. That easily seen churning was evidence of how unstable the atmosphere was on this day. It was unusually cool for summer at 20, 000 feet or so above us. leading to a strong drop in temperature from the 100 F or so at the ground. So, as the warmer air that clouds represent relative to their surroundings, made them more buoyant than usual as they climbed upward; a hotter than usual hot air balloon, if you will, one that goes up faster. Stronger updrafts are thought to lead to more lightning compared with Cumulonimbus clouds having weak updrafts.3:57 PM, August 13th. Even slender clouds could shoot up and reach the “glaciation level” where the tops became comprised of only ice crystals, and sent long plumes of ice out from the parent cloud. The long trail of ice shows how much the wind increased with height at the top of this cloud. As that evening’s storm approached, all of the anvils from the many Cumulonimbus clouds that were approaching were mostly kept from view so that you couldn’t see them. This cloud also poses a naming enigma. Its got an ice plume, a very little rain fell out on the left side where Pusch Ridge begins, but no shaft is visible. It can hardly be called just a “Cumulus” cloud, and yet the more accurate label, “Cumulonimbus” with all of its attributes, makes one a little uncomfortable due to the lack of a visible shaft.
The End (of the cloud discussion)
New “not pubbed” item:
I’ve added RViewpoint_10-24-06_submitted date Aug 31, 2006_final, something that’s been sitting around for years! Spent a lot of time writing it, but ultimately deemed it a hopeless task that it would be published in the Bulletin of the American Meteor. Soc. under then current leadership in the weather modification domain of that journal, and ultimately never bothered to submit it. I was sick of the conflict, for one thing. Haven’t read this piece in years, either, but just wanted to do SOMETHING with it so here it is on this blog.
A longer piece, “Cloud Seeding and the Journal Barriers to Faulty Claims: Closing the Gaps“, also worked on again in spare time at home, for about two years, with the final rejection in 1999 under pretty much the same Bulletin editorial leadership. In this MS, I had a chance to get in, but the specific reviewer whose demands the Editor said I had to meet, insisted that I indicate in the manuscript that the lead scientists in the faulty published reports I wrote about “did the best they could under the circumstances” in the two early benchmark experiments, those in Colorado and Israel. I knew from direct personal experience that wasn’t true; I couldn’t write such a bogus statement that might have made the difference in “getting in.” So two years of on and off effort went down the drain. Sometime soon I will add this second futile effort to the “not pubbed” list! I have a number of those….. It didn’t help either that the two leading scientists whose work I questioned were also the two most beloved scientists in this field.
As with all but one of these pubs (Hobbs and Rangno 1978) in the domain of weather modification, they were done at home, outside of grant funding work while I was at the University of Washington in the Cloud and Aerosol Research Group. And, as I sometimes alert audiences to, working at home on stuff year after year. thousands of hours involved, could be considered a “crackpot alert”. Well, I think of myself as a “good crackpot.” haha.
Surfaris. Except it wasn’t funny. This song begins with a mocking laugh. Well, maybe “mocking” is correct.
Used 90 min of video on an “incoming” yesterday, thinking we’d get shafted pretty good as a thin line of heavy Cumulus congestus transitioning to Cumulonimbus passed over, maybe a quarter or more of an inch from both warm rain and ice processes1 in a line of clouds produced by the winds resulting from a strong fall of rain from a cell just north of Biosphere2. I am sure you were thinking the same thing and are profoundly disappointed today, not only by that one, but also by that Big Bopper that formed in the late afternoon around the same spot to the north-northeast of us.
10:33 AM. Icy topped cell has unloaded N of the Biosphere2 and a line of heavy Cumulus have formed above the outflowing wind boundary, creating a line of rain headed this way!10:49 AM. Outflow winds pushing nice, fat Cu up, and its getting closer raising hopes.11:16 AM. Good rain shafting moves into Saddlebrooke. I can feel the huge drops! MIght even be an all warm rain process shower, too, Wind shift almost here, though it is taking its time, I begin to think.11?39 AM. Shaft thinning by the second! Dammitall. Wind shift, rain drops still not here! This is now looking horrible. Cloud base above wind shift narrowing, falling apart, too. This could be the worst day of my life.11:58 AM. Rain, wind and wind have quit. Shaft is transparent, Code 1 maybe, easily seen through. 0.04 inches registered by Davis Vantage Pro Mark IV super-duper personal weather station.
Wished I’d copied that Wundermap of precip amounts at personal weather stations, but here they are, to reinforce the concept of a “wipeout“:
Wind blast here out of this event? Oh, maybe 12 mph.
What started out as a happy day turned sad in a hurry.
And this wasn’t the only “wipeout“! A worse one happened in the late afternoon that was far more excruciating; pain unbearable. A real explosion into gigantic Cumulonimbus occurred in a broken line, again in the area north of Saddlebrooke. It appeared one had produced a huge outflow for a time–probably was up toward the Biosphere2.
Some background. Here’s how it all started with a gargantuan line of Cumulonimbus and Cumulus congestus clouds in familiar broken line from just north of the Tortolitas to our northwest to north of Oracle to the northeast shown in the photos below, all taken at 3:43 PM. CMP wasn’t looking when this eruption of activity suddenly occurred, and seemed to happen elsewhere as well. May have been that afternoon temperatures just reached that higher point to send these big boys up there.
3:47 PM. Looking toward Tucson as this embarrassing formation arose, Cumulonimbus calvus erectus. This tall, slender cloud was incredible because it showed how great the instability was on this day. Fat clouds we know can rise up to become huge purveyors of rain, but narrow ones like this need a lot instability, lots of humidity around the growing turret so that it doesn’t evaporate, and a good updraft so that it doesn’t take to long to reach 30-35 kft level, as estimated here. So, it was real demonstration of the type of air mass we had this day.3:55 PM. Crushing rains are now dropping out of those behemoths to the N-NE. Surely a blast of wind will come shooting south toward us!
After feeding a horse on another property, I am racing back home to experience “The Blast”, and the rain in its full glory. I stopped to grab this photo, heart pounding.
4:12 PM. “Holy Criminy!” Look at this thing, and I can just now begin to see the arcus cloud forming (just to left of where dirt road disappears) on the nose of the winds coming at us! This will be incredible!4:24 PM. There she is! Arcus rolls toward Catalina pumping clouds up above it, though, you know, those clouds above the arcus don’t look as big as maybe they should. Some doubt begins to creep in.
The arcus cloud and the once proud Cumulonimbus cloud and its incredible rain shaft wiped out, the bottom of it vaporized if that’s possible by rainout, the wind push out of it unable to reach Catalina, in spite of an auspicious start. I now insert a picture of a horse, Zeus, to keep your interest up, maybe raise your spirits after such a debilitating cloud stories as are found here today. Animals, such as dogs, miniature horses and donkeys, are often used in psycho rehab units, especially for depressed persons, such as you are right now after reading this. So, I am really doing this horse insertion for my reader, whom I have depressed royally today:
Zeus, a Paint breed horse, 16.2 hands tall, eating. Has a pleasant disposition overall.6:09 PM. Some people no doubt had two or more inches fall on them from those storms north of us, and the day ended cool, humid and overcast due to multiple layers of clouds from Cu, Ac, and As from anvils, with isolated showers as shown here toward the SSW toward Tucson. It was nice to be outside, swatting gnats and such a minor nuisance.
The End (for August 3rd–falling behind more and more!)
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1As a cloud maven junior person, of course, you know what I am talkin’ about when I mention “warm rain” and “ice processes.”
Some apocalyptic cloud scenes can be Cumulus that explode suddenly into Cumulonimbus, and Cumulonimbus clouds with their foreboding (unless you live in a desert) rain shafts, and their predecessor shelf clouds like “swirly dark Stratocumulus”, and arcus clouds, the latter, a lower line of clouds just above and a little behind the wind shift at the ground, usually just ahead of the main rain shaft. While we didn’t get to see an arcus cloud yesterday, we had some dramatic swlrly dark Stratocumulus clouds to scare us. I say “swirly” because if you looked up yesterday evening as they passed over, you would have seen rotation in them.
These can combine, as they did yesterday, to make you think someone might drop out of the clouds and fix the world1. See those scary photos below, way below as it turns out.
This monster collection of Cumulonimbus clouds (“mesoscale convective system” or MCS in weather lingo) with swirly shelf clouds preceding it barged over Catalina later yesterday afternoon after it appeared that not much was going to happen all day. Heck, there wasn’t even a decent Cumulus over the Catalinas until after 2 PM!
The result of this system slamming Catalina was the usual strong preceding winds roaring down from Charouleau Gap way and points north or northeast. The winds were not as damaging as three days earlier.
Then the rain! So nice! Got 0.55 inches of rain here in Sutherland Heights, an inch and half on Samaniego Ridge, and 1.65 inches on Ms. Lemmon.
Worth watching is the U of AZ weather departments time lapse video, especially beginning at 2 min 50 s into it. That’s when the big group of Cbs begins to make its presence known from the east. What is interesting, and what I have not seen before, is that you will see the tops of a thunderhead farther west, that icy part up around 30,000 to 40,000 feet, shoved backwards (back toward the west) by outflow at the tops of the huge incoming system. Very dramatic.
Yesterday’s clouds
1:30 PM. Yawn. Its 103 F, dewpoint 60 F. Baby Cu begin dotting the Catalina Mountains.2:14 PM. Cumulus congestus finally arises within the local cloudscape. Looks like the top is high enough to convert to ice.
Detour: detecting ice in clouds….some practice shots
As the burgeoning cloud maven junior person you, of course, know how important the appearance of ice in our clouds is. You got ice; you got precipitation, which is snow up there, soft hail, hail, frozen drops.
2:19 PM. The declining right side of this cloud has ice in it, but its hard to detect for most observers. Only the BEST of the cloud-mavens could scream out, “there it is!”, before its more obvious to the less gifted CMJPs.2:22 PM. Well, too easy now to see that there’s ice in those little fingers extruding out from the body of the cloud; evaporation of the cloud drops has left the slower evaporating ice “naked” so-to-speak. It also in the higher turret, and would be termed a “calvus” topped Cu, properly, Cumulonimbus calvus, though not much fell out of this one, close to Saddlebrooke.3:31 PM. In the meantime while I wasn’t looking, Mt. Lemmon erupted sending a plume of cloud droplets, higher up, ice, skyward to at least 35,000 feet ASL. Indicated a phenomenal amount of instability afternoon, instability that was about to be realized in a line of mammoth Cumulonimbi.3:49 PM. “Eruption” just about over. Notice how skinny the root is now, AND that the top of the stem of convection is now only about half as high as in the first shot. Like a wild fire plume that has cooled off, the plume height goes down. Still formed ice on the right side, as you SHOULD be able to see. You should also be guessing that those were likely warmer habit crystals, like needles and sheaths. I did, if that’s any help.4:38 PM. Another cloud jack (Cumulonimbus eruption indicating a whole lotta instability), tops probably far above 40,000 feet. A lower portin of the anvil drifts southward toward Catalina. This one was dumping somewhere near the Biosphere 2 landmark. Note that anvil, lower right. That was our incoming major complex of Cum5:17 PM. WOW! This was magnificent, and just one of the many large Cumulonimbus clouds racing toward the Catalina Mountains. This is the one that in the video, the crown of it can be seen forcing the air over us in the opposite direction. Still, it was not certain at this time these storms would make it here. And, this is looking ESE, while the storm movement was from the ENE.5:25 PM. The “Menace of Charouleau Gap”. Many of our worst storms roll in from the ENE, toward Charouleau Gap, and many who have lived here will tell you and this is the archetypical seen for those storms. A sudden blackening of the sky beyond Charouleau Gap. These darker clouds are rarely the ons producing the storms, but are riding a strong NE wind surging toward Catalina, about to produce some mayhem. The winds always arrive before the rain. And, as a few days ago, there are times when ONLY the wind arrives, there is not enough instability aloft to allow the storms to drift past higher terrain without falling apart. On this day, they will make it.5:48 PM. I am going to work this scene over because it is associated with one of the more spectacular storm sequences here in Catalina, one that comes up usually a few times every summer. The anvil outflow aloft is thickening and lowering, and the outrider shallow Stratocumulus are racing out and along the Catalina Mountains. Things are changing incredibly fast and the NE wind is about to hit.6:05 PM. Walking the dogs to beat the rain, The NE wind has hit, the power line wires are howling. The sky continues to darken and look ominous, but….no rain shafts have come over the mountains, a cause for concern.6:21 PM. The shallow clouds ahead of the rain area continue to spread down and out from the Catalinas. A small opening in the clouds allows this dramatic highlight. I like highlights.6:22 PM. Let’s look a little closer at this spectacular highlight. Wow! This is just as good as a bolt of lightning.6:33 PM. Maybe time to get the Good Book out, cram for the finals…. This was really quite the sight, considering it had been so sunny just a couple of hours before. Again, these are fairly shallow clouds riding the outflow winds, now gusting 35-45 mph in Sutherland Heights. The mottled bases here indicate that there is no organized wide updraft to launch them into deep Cumulonimbus clouds at this moment, anyway.6:34 PM. Finally, a major new rain shaft emerges over Samaniego Ridge, upstream of Catalina!6:35 PM. Looks like more and more people are dropping off Word Press as these files are going in pretty easy now.Here, the apocalyptic cloud formation rolls down and out across Oro Valley, with heavy rain just to the left.6:43 PM. A rare sight, wind driven rain streaming off the tops of the foothills of the Catalinas. The winds were likely hurricane force (>64 knots, 74 mph) to do this. Samaniego Peak received 1.50 inches during this storm.7:21 PM. Sunset in Catalina, July 29th. The sun does not have a sharp disk, is rather blurry, because the light from the sun is being scattered by large particles like rain drops which bend the light so that we can’t see the disk’s outline. When its smog, the particles are of the order of micrometers and a sharp disk will be seen because the sunlight is not bent around large particles. I think Einstein said that…7:21 PM. Orange and rainy as sunset procedes as usual.
Only the largest hailstones up there can make it to the ground as such here in Arizona due to our high summertime freezing levels. The rest melt into raindrops, some of which are large enough to reach the ground. Those downpours that suddenly emit from cloud bases were always hail or graupel (soft hail) aloft.
Sometimes in deep stratiform clouds attached to clusters of Cumulonimbus clouds, and with especially moist air from the base of the stratiform layer to the ground, clusters of ice crystals we call snowflakes make it to the ground without evaporating as steady light or very light rain.
Last night as our storm was coming to an end, it is likely that THOSE drops were once snowflakes rather than soft hail or graupel.
The End (finally)
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1Huh. Maybe that wouldn’t be a bad thing. I am very concerned about microplastics (particles 5 millimeters and smaller) in our oceans, resulting from the breakup of larger plastic items we’ve been throwing in the oceans for decades. Seems those tiny particles are getting into everything, including the fish out there! It would be great if someone could get rid of them.
The models are FINALLY suggesting a return to our expected July weather by the very end of the month and a normal-looking August one, at least at start of the month. Daily thunderstorms rumbling around on the Catalinas, some drifting off the mountains, drenching us here The Heights.
Will make our July average rainfall in the Sutherland Heights?
Our average is 2.70 inches and presently we’ve recorded just 1.16 inches with only five days to go. But, before I make a guess, let me check the latest radar imagery here at 8L17 PM…. OK, got a little rain headed this way.. Excellent.
But, no I think we’ll be close to average, that we’ll go over 2 inches here. The steering aloft is weak, but will be from a good directions, from the E to NE, over the next few days and that should allow, as today, cause showers to drift off the higher terrain to us. Being closer to the mountains we might get more even if those showers peter out farther to the west.
It will be fun seeing what happens, and how close we come to our 2.70 inches average between now and July 31.
1“Junly”: (Joon-lie”) Meteorologically, a month in July in Arizona that is more like June; has very hot days, way above normal temperatures for July, and little rain, except that all of the above occurs with more humidity.
Again, a cheap appeal to gain readers, this time to UFO folks that might drop by this site to investigate a possible sighting, raising number of visits to above 2 per day….
The CoCoRahs gauge had 1.00 inches, the NWS gauge, 0.97 inches, but the online Davis tipping bucket gauge had a serious undercatch due to wind and high rain rate, reporting only 0.80 inches.
If you live in this area, you were treated to quite a nice spectacle, one that happens only a few times a summer here. A non-precipitating cloud lingers and grows almost directly overhead, at first not looking like much, but broadens and darkens, and then the hole opens up to empty all the water up there. If you saw this spectacle, and you saw the first signs of the plug being removed, the appearance of the long, dark column (compare to “The Thin Blue Line”). Having anticipated this very event by standing around doing nothing for awhile, the correct thing to emote as a cloud-maven junior, is, “Oh yeah, baby! Come and get me!” I could feel the joy out there as this was happening!
At this point you have about 1 minute to tell your neighbors they are going to get smashed. There was some thunder up there before the plug came open, telling you how deep the cloud was above the base; it wasn’t faking as can happen. Of course, at this point, if you had radar, you would have seen an echo up there before the opening occurring, but that would be cheating.
I think our big black cloud that cried (compare to the little white cloud that cried song) was the result of wind from storms southwest of us colliding with a light NW wind right here. And with little strength in the guiding winds aloft, it sat over us for a longer time than usual.
Got some nice wind out of it, too, as the rain shaft, aided by evaporation, slammed down on Catalina/Sutherland Heights, pushing hot air out of the way, scattering chairs and cushions all over, kind of a mess really, but it was worth it.
But before I continue with this interesting and dramatic story of our storm, I wish to report that I was distracted by what initially appeared to be floating “trash” just before the storm, tumbling around up there at least a few hundred feet off the ground, and south bound, performing maneuvers that perhaps were not human. It went near the ground and then back up again, did some crazy things1.
I did not see evidence of other trash or a whirlwind or “dustnado” adding to the mystery. First, I think we can rule out the most obvious explanation, that it was a party balloon with just enough helium in it to stay afloat, just drifting along in the wind and revealing all the turbulent eddies one might find on a day with Cumulus clouds…. That’s, of course, is what they would want us to think….
2:07 PM. A piece of trash is seen racing toward the ground, but then goes back up!2:08 PM. The “trash” has ascended a couple hundred feet.2:08 PM. After losing sight of the “trash” it reappears underneath this cloud base. Later, the cloud rain a little. It began to look more like an asteroid here, something from outer space.2:11 PM. The mysterious object continued on its trajectory toward the south possibly Mexico with whatever cargo it might have contained.
Now, continuing on to our storm story….
3:43 PM. A larger cloud base begins taking shape over and NW of the Cat Mountains. Here’s where you should have begun paying close attention. No rumbles at this point. Note how offensive overland wiring is. This is a blight I thought I should show you.3:50 PM. Now this is getting real exciting! Look at the size of that base! While there have been a few duds of this size, this is really looking good. What happens in a “dud”? Instead of having a nice solid dark base, light and dark spots start to appear, and you want to cry. Didn’t happen yesterday.3:51 PM. Focusing in on darkness and solidified base, indicating a nice solid updraft is feeding the cloud above here. The appearance of light and dark mottling would have indicated that the updraft is weakening, breaking up. (From the cloud base collection: yours for $800 today only.)3:57 PM. I am beside myself, snapping photos left and right, out of control, hard drive will surely overflow. But just look at how portentious it looks now. Now you’re looking for the opening, the drain, the spigot, the water fall, and be amazed at how much water can drain from a cloud in a short time.4:01 PM. Thar she blows! One of the great moments in weather is be under the shaft emergence. And there it is at last!4:01 Zoomed to hole in sky; fallout in progress. 30 s later than prior photo. You just cannot imagine how exciting this is, with lightning forking around, too.4:08 PM. I’m in the house now, note reflection. Lightning too close and vicious. Didn’t take long to close down after “the hole” did it? The big Sutherland Heights burst hit starting now.
Some damage shots after the wind and gush of rain:
Example of flooding (in a swale for that). Sometimes toads appear.Example of damage due to wind. I had to move the chair back onto the porch, wash sand off.
Then there was a lot of lightning toward Romero Canyon, a cloud to ground strike every few seconds. Really was quite amazing:
Some rainfall reports for the Catalina area on the morning of the 19th:
Precipitation Report for the following time periods ending at: 03:04:00 07/19/16 Gauge 15 1 3 6 24 Name Location ID# minutes hour hours hours hours —- —- —- —- —- —- —————– ——————— Catalina Area 1010 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.08 Golder Ranch Horseshoe Bend Rd in Saddlebrooke 1020 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 Oracle RS 0.5 mi SW of Oracle 1040 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.47 Dodge Tank Edwin Rd 1.3 mi E of Lago DO Parkway 1050 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.04 0.16 Cherry Spring about 1.5 mi W of Charouleau Gap 1060 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.12 Pig Spring about 1.1 mi NE of Charouleau Gap 1070 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 1.34 Cargodera Canyon NE corner of Catalina State Park 1080 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 CDO @ Rancho Solano CDO Wash NE of S-brooke 1100 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.67 CDO @ Golder Rd CDO Wash at Golder Ranch Rd Santa Catalina Mountains 1030 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.24 Oracle Ridge about 1.5 mi N of Rice Peak 1090 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 1.02 Mt. Sara Lemmon 1110 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.16 CDO @ Coronado Camp 0.3 mi S of Coronado Camp 1130 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.35 Samaniego Peak 1140 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.55 Dan Saddle on Oracle Ridge 2150 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.59 White Tail Catalina Hwy 0.8 mi W of Palisade RS 2280 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 Green Mountain 2290 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 1.54 Marshall Gulch Sabino Creek 0.6 mi SSE of Marshall Gulch
The End
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1Remember when you were a kid and when you saw trash up high, you knew there was a whirlwind around and you looked for it so you could jump in it? Those were the days, weren’t they?
