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.
All I can say about this plot is, “wow” here and then once more in the caption:
Valid at 5 PM AST, April 28th. Wow. The periodic storm threats will continue for AZ for the foreseeable future, which is about two weeks. Temperatures should be moderate, too, for April. Patterns like this also lead to tremendous storms in the Plains States. It might be time to get out there.
“BN”, sometimes referred to in the media as the, “Godzilla Niño” of 15-16.
Before, one year ago, the drought status as presented by the National Drought Monitor folks there in Cornhuskerland, Lincoln, NE:
First, a legend, no, not a story, though we could write one, “The Legend of the Ghost Niño of 2015-16“, but rather a guide to the colorful drought intensities on the maps below:
One year ago
Western drought status as of April 7th, 2015.
Now let us look closely below–you’ll have to–to see what the Big Niño has done to ameliorate drought so far THIS water year (since Oct 1):
Western drought status as of April 5th, 2016!
Of course, the giant low centers spinning around in the central Pacific sent a stream of large waves over and over again that blasted the Cal coast. That was expected, and verified. But not much else did. Drought should have increased in the Pac NW–recall it was forecast to be drier and warmer due to Niño conditions. Instead, the Pac NW had record amounts of winter rain!
Cal, especially, central and southern were to be slammed. Southern Cal residents were advised to consider purchasing sandbags in one media story last fall. And, of course, we here in AZ are profoundly disappointed; conditions have only improved some in the north part of the State.
Well, of course, there’s not one dry meteorological eye in the house after a bust of this magnitude. And when our best models predicted giant West Coast storms that looked like the kind we were expecting due to the Niño, even though they were 10-15 days out, they seemed sure to happen. CMP, bloated with confirmation bias, was sucked in several times this past winter.
Sure, we knew that Niño correlations with weather are not 1.00, that is, perfect, still, the “signal”, the size of the Niño, was so huge we figured it had to come through with those mighty storms striking the lower West Coast as happened in 1982-83 and 1997-98. Those correlations, as strong as they were, of course, were limited in number since these large events are rare. Those correlations will, let us say in place of cuss words, “degrade.”
Oh, me, what will we say when the next Big Niño appears?
The weather ahead
You’re probably pretty excited about the wind and very cold air just ahead. CMP is. And, with the jet stream at 500 mb (18, 000 feet or so–5.5 km above sea level) eventually circumscribing us with its charateristic moist lower region of air, we should just enough moisture for some isolated very light showers, probably just in the Catalinas, during the period of low freezing levels that hits late Friday and continues through Sunday. Low freezing levels mean even moderate Cumulus clouds could form ice, leading to virga.
Amounts could, at the most, only be a few hundredths here, and most likely we will be missed; precip just limited to snow flurries on Ms. Mt. Lemmon and thereabouts. The U of AZ mod sees the cold blast arriving late Friday after dark.
On the other hand, Saturday and maybe Sunday as well, will be good days for you to practice your ice in clouds detection skills in smallish Cumulus clouds.
The weather way ahead
Still looking to see at least two more troughs and chances of rain during the last two weeks of the month. NOAA ensembles suggest so. Best chances, 23rd-25th, and again around the 28th or so.
Some cloud shots from our little 0.01 inch rain day on Tuesday:
6:02 AM, Tuesday. A summer-like scene, complete with thunder frames the post dawn hours.10:35 AM. After the morning excitement cleared off, a pretty Cumulus congestus erupted north of Saddlebrooke town. There’s a hawk in the photo.12:12 PM. That Cumulus congestus and its sisters, were able to reach the level of glaciation, and wind shear, send a plume of ice downstream toward the east, and rain below that overshooting turret.2:36 PM. Pretty much the perfect cloud for ice in cloud studies. As the air warmed aloft and capped the Cumulus clouds, this one just poked up high enough to form some ice. It would have been a great sample to determine the temperatures and cloud conditions at which ice onset in clouds on Tuesday.4:16 PM, Tuesday. Those shadow and sun highlights that make our mountains so darned pretty. I just never will be tired of these views!
Since the forecast given HERE for large Cumulus clouds becoming Cumulonimbi did not happen last evening, it seemed appropriate to show some wildflowers as a distraction. First, a light, purple one of some kind; second, what we here call an “Arizona rose”, those fabulous blooms that form on prickly pear cacti. The photos below were, in fact, taken late yesterday afternoon as the forecast of the development of those larger Cumulus was failing to materialize.
Wouldn’t it be great if we could GM these to have long stems?!
Now that you’ve forgotten the erroneous forecast of large cumuliform clouds made here yesterday, I would like to point out that the cooler air up top has finally arrived in the pre-dawn hours today, and we do have Cumulonimbi in the area; even some LTG over there by Mt. Graham around 4 AM as this is being written.
However, bases are pretty high, 7,000 feet above the ground, and so only the central cores of the rain shafts are producing much rain to the ground right now. However#2, these are the kinds of situations that incredible photos of long virga trails during sunrise can be gotten. Be ready! The whole situation is moving east pretty rapidly.
Yesterday’s clouds
10:22 AM. Cumulus fractus and humilis topped by Cirrus spissatus enhance a blue sky.10:28 AM. Wow, a Cumulonimbus capillatus top can be seen just beyond Mt. Sara Lemmon! And it only mid-morning! This is a test. A patch of Cirrus has aligned itself above some small Cumulus clouds topping the Lemmon. We’re you fooled for a moment? I hope not.5:13 PM. More Kelvin-Helmholtz billow clouds at Cirrus level. Pretty rare sight, actually. Shows waves in the atmosphere. Don’t want to fly in them. This was about the greatest cloud excitement of the whole late afternoon and evening.6:06 PM. “Slab lifting” by our incoming upper level thingy has led to the formation of a couple levels of flat clouds, Altocumulus lenticularis, some Altocumulus perlucidus (honeycomb look), and some Cirrus perlucidus way up top. Some small to moderate Cu can be seen on the horizon. Was still thinking they might “pop” as cooler air moved over us. You might be able to see that some of the little cloudlets at Cirrus-levels started out as droplet clouds before transforming to ice. Ma Nature likes water so much it almost always develops first before ice even at temperatures below -30 °C. Pretty amazing, really.
Thunder just now! Wow. 5:20 AM. Sorry for the delay, had to go outside and check things out. Really will be a fabulous sunrise!
6:16 PM. Still thinking it might pop. Didn’t even see ice as that Cumulus turret declined.
Though the clouds faded as the sun went down, there were still some highlights on the Catalinas that made it a near perfect day.
6:17 PM. What’s to say? We’re so lucky to be able to see scenes like this in Arizona.
The weather ahead
Turbulent, changeable, unsettled through the remainder of April. More chances to add to our 0.73 inch total so far for this month. Stay tuned to your favorite media weather folk!
It doesn’t get better than this for April in old Arizony. We’ll make up a lot of lost precip ground this month. In this series, you’ll see MANY days with the maximum winds curling around us, good for precip here as one trough after another barges into the Great SW from the Pacific. !Fantastico! !Commensar la lluvia del Niño! !Ya lo creo!1Getting pretty excited here.
With this series, April rainfall in the Sutherland heights should be twice or more above normal (that is, at least an inch). ‘Bout time.
The End.
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Oh, yeah, the title. I slipped off the keyboard some in the dark and got some inadvertent gibberish. But gibberish sells. Lot of people will now drop by, their curiosity peaked and piqued, “What the hell izzat about?”, focusing on the key word, “storm.” People in deserts like storms. Gibberish is one of the innovations that’s been developed here, btw. You don’t see it too often, except maybe in political campaigns.
1Oh, yeah the title; “has bi-lingual content” We’re desperate for readers here, and this is clearly a cheap ploy (is that redundant, “cheap ploy”?) since I know only a few sentences in Spanish, though my second wife was Hispanic2; that should count for something. Also, I do know that the first exclamation mark should be upside down, but can’t do it.
2Being as nosy as you are, you probably want to see her, maybe you don’t believe me, too, I just said that to get more readers….
Yesterday was a great day both for airborne researchers studying the onset of ice in clouds, and for my followers to test their “ice” Q detecting abilities, to come up with a clever play on words there.
What was so great about yesterday’s clouds?
Well, they were real cold, bases up around 9,000 feet above Catalina (about 12,500 feet above sea level) at -7° C (19° F). Excellent. Nice data point.
Cloud tops?
This is what was pretty great for you and me; they didn’t overshoot much, the clouds were pretty flat, not very deep, not a lot of flight time needed climbing to cloud top to see what it was around here. That means that if you are flying around up there sampling clouds for ice content, that the tops you smashed with your aircraft were pretty much the ones at the temperature that the ice crystals you ran into later formed at. Remember, when cloud tops first rise up, they usually have little detectable ice (the ice crystals are too small for your instruments, or, they haven’t formed yet, takes a little time.
When there are big overshooting tops, an inexperienced, well, crummy researcher in an aircraft finding the ice, as it is usually found, lower down in the cloud, might put the origin of the ice at the temperature of the collapsed top, not at the lower temperature where it formed and the original top reached up to.
So, the lack of much overshooting made it a great day to assign the ice you found to the right cloud top temperatures.
What else was great?
It was a marginal day for ice formation here in the Catalina area, so you get a good data point on when ice starts to form in clouds given that base temperature. As the cloud deepens upward, more ice would be expected with the lower temperatures.
And, as noted by Ludlum way back in the 1950s, and by Prof. Battan right here at the University of Arizona which I did not attend, btw, that level at which ice and precip onsets changes from day to day (largely related to how warm (crazy isn’t it?) the cloud base temperature is. On days with warmer cloud bases, the ice onset temperature is also higher. For example, in summer here, its not unusual to have ice onset between temperatures of -5° and -10° C (23° and 14° F) when bases are warmer than about 10° C.
Anybody still out there?
So, yesterday, with the deepest Cumulus clouds around 2,000 to three thousand feet thick right in our area (they were deeper elsewhere), tops were running around -15° C, this temperature, as you know, leads to the formation of plate-like crystals, hexagonal plates, stellars (Christmas card crystals), maybe some spatial dendrites (stick out in different directions) if the latter crystals were in the Cumulus cloud long enough. If the concentrations of ice get high enough, you’ll get “snowflakes”, interlocking dendritic crystals. A single, good-sized snowflake might have 20-50 individual dendritic crystals.
Is anybody still out there?
Below some shots from yesterday afternoon when there were traces of ice spewing out of local clouds. Did you see those regions and note them in your cloud diaries, that’s the important question.
3:23 PM. A nice view of the overall scene around here with our small Cumulus clouds (Cumulus humilis and mediocris). You see a house in the distance off this dirt road. Pretty say when you think that in America some people still live on dirt roads.3:49 PM. Oh, there’s a nice little Cumulus toward the Charoleau Gap. Doesn’t seem to have any ice…. Let us look closer, and, of course, we look for ice to appear at the downwind edge where cloudy air has been in the cloud the longest, see if anything is falling out.3:49 PM zoomed view. Oops there it is, a little ice, single crystals, concentrations likely lower than 1 per liter of air. You wouldn’t expect to find any “aggregates” here, since they require higher concentrations of ice to bump into each other and lock together. Wow, this is an incredible amount information based on a little hazy spot in a photograph!4:13 PM. Lets look over here toward the south. OK, there’s an obvious ice haze beyond the Catalinas, but what about the cloud in the middle? See anything coming out the downwind (right) side?4:13 PM zoomed view of the fall of ice crystals out of this cloud. This patch of ice haze is so obvious it would have been pretty embarrassing for you not to have noticed it, made a note about it. Of course, we care so much about ice because that’s where nearly all of our rain here in Arizony comes from, as you know, recalling the work of Wegner, Bergeron, and Findeisen, where it was shown that an ice particle in a water cloud will grow at the expense of the droplets around it. For a time, it was thought that all precip of consequence was due to that process, but not so. Ask Hawaiians. Or powder snow lovers about storms consisting only of little dry ice crystals, no water drops in those clouds.
Stormy weather still ahead as noted here I don’t know how long ago. April looking more and more to be a generous month of rain here in Catalina. But will those showers be too late for May flowers?
In the meantime, step aside; a cold front is upon us, a dry one, unfortunately. Should arrive by noon, bringing some small Cu here and there, some Stratocu piling up against the Catalinas, and maybe some lingering Altocumulus lenticular clouds which we got right now (4 AM) downwind of the Catalinas.
As of 4 AM AST, the 24 h temperature change. The blue blob shows the encroaching cold air.
Barometer will rise, too, as the cooler, denser air piles on top of it. There’ll likely be a brief windshift to the NW, followed by backing to the SW again.
Over the next couple of days, the deep cold air in the interior of a lingering, massive trough will settle over us, dry up top, but enough moisture in the lower layers below to produce eventually deeper Cumulus, though not today, ones likely to reach up to the “glaciation” level, which will be close to -12° C to -15° C in this situation beginning later tomorrow through the April 1st. The bases of the clouds will be near the freezing level.
Glaciation means that ice will form in those Cumulus clouds, and some (snow) virga will drop out the bottom. So, some snow showers or just light rain showers are likely on the Catalinas, maybe a trace or hundredth here, too, beginning later tomorrow through April 1st.
Should be some really pretty deep blue skies, too, cloud shadows producing quilt-like patterns on the mountains, that sort of thing we are so lucky to enjoy here.
As you know, this end of month March “lion” (at least in wind, anyway) was long foretold in the NOAA spaghetti. Remember how we could laugh at model outputs that didn’t have a big trough here at the end of the month?
But now we wait and see if we can drain a cloud or two of a hundredth. Overall rain chances not looking so “strong” now out of this whole several day situation. Dang.
Clouds will be around today, especially after the cold front goes by, but its unlikely they’ll have anything drop out the bottom.
Why?
“2warm4ice”, to be that bit textual.
Model says today’s cloud tops won’t reach -10° Ç, our magic temperature where we can usually start to thinking about ice forming in AZ clouds, those with our usual cool bottoms.
Of course, if you’re really sophisticated, you know that the temperature at which onsets in “continental” Cumulus clouds like we have here in old Arizony, is related to cloud base temperature:
The warmer the cloud bottom, the higher the onset temperature for ice1, “strangely believe it”, as we like to say here after Jimmy Hatlo the cartooonist thought of it first when he was making fun of RIpley’s “Believe It Or Not.”
Now onto the forecasting frontier, forecasting weather patterns way ahead, to far in advance and too specific to be truly professional
Let’s start with something easy. Its gonna warm up real good after this big trough goes by– see spaghetti below, where a big ridge moves over us for a couple of days. It won’t last.
Valid at 5 PM AST, April 3rd. Notice, too, that unlike most of the spaghetti pe degree of chaos introduced by the deliberate errors input at the start, have little effect (as usual). The blue and red contours are bunched really well. So the positions of the ridges and troughs are normally well predicted out to this time.
Then, uh-oh, as Robert Ellis Orrall used to sing, in 192 h, predictability begins to fall apart, but not real bad, and it shows a trough is moving in over us.
Valid at 5 PM AST, April 5th. Red contours are bunched enough so that a nice sized trough in the SW is pretty guaranteed.
Finally, at the extreme end of the medium range forecasting frontier, this:
Valid at 5 PM AST, April 12th. Stormfest Southwest!
Hence, the conclusion that we share that April, will in fact, have measurable rain. Of course, we only average about half an inch in April, as the overall climatology begins a serious a battle against rain heading into the ovenly days of May and June.
The End
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1The old English cloud scientist, Frank Ludlow (1952, Quart J. Roy. (haha, “Royal”, oh my) Meteor. Soc.) noticed this first, then that great Soviet Communist cloud scientist, A. M. Borovikov and his companions did (1961, Israeli Translations). Finally, Rangno and Hobbs woke up and noticed this tendency in 1988, (Atmos. Res.) and then again in 1995 (J. Appl. Meteor.–you’ll have to go quite a ways to find the relevant diagram) in their cloud studies and in comparisons with other ice onset reports.
Imagine, rain! Yep, that’s right. You heard it first here, right or wrong, as we like to say, over and over again because we can’t think of anything else.
After a couple of minutes of intense scrutiny, cloud maven person has decided to wake up and go blogulent that the computer prog showing a huge upper trough over the SW in 13-15 days, March 29-32nd is accurate. Will be cold, too. Little crybaby snow birds might be heading back to Wisconsin or Michigan when this cold spell hits. Just kidding, flat landers! (Actually, they’ll be leaving us due to being little crybabies when the temperature hits the 90s-100s every day, temperatures we true Arizonans laugh at.)
Adding to the pile of “credibility” here is that this March came in like a “lamb” I think. Has to go out as a “lion.” Or so the saying goes. Science and folk lore, that’s what you get here.
Here’s the actual computer forecast of the trough from last evening’s global data as rendered by IPS MeteoStar:
Valid at 5 PM AST, March 29th. Potent trough takes over the whole of the western US. Note the critical wind jet at this height (500 millibars) is over and south of Tucson, a nearly mandatory requirement for cool season rain here. (Unpublished study, Rangno, 1974; covered the whole US, that study, too.
Pretty exciting isn’t it, jet stream way to the south like that?
And this after our too-long-dry-spell pretty much since the first week in January, the dry spell associated with the strong “El-None-yo”, to be sarcastic after ALL the high expectations for copious rains, the incredible wildflower bloom that would be our pleasure to experience this spring following the pounding rains due to the Big Niño meteorologists and media got so excited about.
Poppy hills, down Bowman Road here in Catalina. Yes, we have some poppies, but they’re stunted looking, as are the other wildflowers around, struggling to survive in all the dry air since the fall and early winter rains.
But, no. Moving ahead after draining some emotion…. Thanks for listening.
So’s why CMP going out of what seems to be a long, thin limb here, that other forecasters are afraid of doing, that is forecasting with confidence something so far in advance?
Well, of course its because we got us a pretty darn strong signal again in the NOAA “Lorenz” or spaghetti or “ensemble” plots, where errors1 are deliberately put in the data to see how wildly the outcomes vary. If the outputs don’t vary a lot, then confidence can be high about a forecast. “Varying” is seen in how wildly the lines (contours) on these plots are. Below, an example where there’s not a lot of confidence….
Valid 5 PM, Saturday, March 26th. Really can’t have too much confidence here. Arizona is in there somewhere. This came out a few days ago. Quite a knee-slapper.
(Below we discuss, in contrast, the one from last evening and how we used one of these crazy plots before):
Rememeber, first, how to spell “remember”, and then that’s how we knew for sure a big trough would be over us even 10-two weeks ahead back whenever it was when we got a little rain and it was damn cold for a few days this March.
Valid at 5 PM AST March 29th. Relative bunching of red contours of the 500 millibar height contours indicates forecast confidence can be high for a trough in Arizona and the West in the last couple of days of March. So, I’m going for it.
Since this forecast of a good chance of rain late in the month is likely to be quite accurate, there’ll be no need to update you after today.
The MAIN thing to remember, in a teaching moment, is to not be afraid when a model run comes out with something vastly different than what I just wrote about 5 minutes after I posted this, to wit, this VASTLY different model output based on data just 6 h after the model outputs above. I laughed at it, since spaghetti rules, not a single model output. That’s the teachable moment, I think.
Valid at 11 PM AST March 29th, almost the same time as the model output showing the giant trough in the West. Not here though. From a spaghetti frame of mind, a real laugher, this one. (I think.)
The End
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1 Hahah, as though we don’t make enough of them when we vote and stuff; remember that saying about why there’s an eraser on the top of a pencil? Very profound. And, “hey” look at the state of this planet? We need an awfully big “eraser” these days.
People were wearing jackets as temperatures got locked down below 80° F the past few days, the wind blew once in a while, sometime lifting baseball caps off “gray hairs”, and gray skies hovered over Sutherland Heights for TWO and a half days!
A surprise, few-minute gusher in the early afternoon yesterday was enough to tip the old Davis tipping bucket rain gauge once1, too, to add another 0.02 inches to the 0.08 inches we were drenched with the night before.
What’s ahead. I dunno.
Really thought THIS storm was gonna be a doozie here, not in Mexico as it is now, for Pete’s Sake. Some weeks ago it was read by my reader (s?) here that we had only a 10% chance of LESS than 0.20 inches. In fact, we had a 100% chance of 0.10 inches.
I did not see that coming. But at least March 2016 has recorded SOME rain. Some insects benefited I’m sure.
Climate folks (Climate Prediction Center) are still predicting a wet March-May for us, at least as of mid-Feb. Unfortunately, its only a little more than two inches that makes that three month period wetter than normal here in Catalinaland as we begin to dry out, and heat up.
Time for another, “I love this map so much”, so fully packed with portent:
“Valid” (what a joke) in two weeks, March 24th, 5 PM AST. Giant low moves SEWD toward the Cal coast. Strongest winds on the back side tells you its shifting southeastward. Look how big it is!
Frankly, now as the jet stream in the northern hemisphere goes to HELL in the spring, the “Lorenz plots” or “spaghetti” are pretty clueless. As an example of “clueless” look at the spaghetti plot that goes with the map above:
For March 23 at 5 PM AST. No real clustering of lines anywhere so forecasts will be wild for this far in advance. That low could really be anywhere. There’s not quite so much chaos in the heart of winter when the jet is strongest and geographic jet stream anchors are strongest, like Asia.
Bottom line: NO rain days ahead, maybe a close call over the next TWO friggin’ weeks. Expect to see 90s on a day or two, as well. “Dang”, as we say in the Great Southwest.
Some clouds of yore, including yesterday.
As a cloud maven junior person, you should compare the shots below and try to chronologically unscramble them using your photos. Also, I would like you to name these clouds. Please keep your answers to yourself. hahaha (ACtually I am being lazy and just threw these in “willy-nilly” (huh, what’s that from? Will have to look it up some day.)
Am working on a true science story-book talk, something I wanted to write up before “tipping the bucket” as we meteorologists say about death. Its kindle-sized, maybe would take 3 h to present if it was an actual talk, having more than 250 ppt slide-pages! I won’t be at the TUS book fair, however, this year….
The End.
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1FYI, when a meteorologist dies, we meteorologists say that he has “tipped the bucket”, NOT “kicked the bucket.” Its an especially reverent phrase for us.
Looks like it will be on March 7th. Pretty sure thing at this point, maybe 75%-99% chance of rain here in Catalina, combining “spaghetti1” with other forms of forecasting.
7 AM AST Addendum: Hell, why not go for some amounts due to extra confidence:
Min in The Heights: 0.20 inches (10% chance of less); max, 1.00 inches (10% chance of more). The average of these “mental ensemble2” extrema, 0.60 inches, which is usually closer to the actual value.
This best guess estimate for the total between midnight March 7th and the evening of the 8th, or over about a 42 h period. Weather gaming is fun.
What’s your prediction?
—————-T. I. P.————————————
Remember, too, as a “truth in packaging” disclosure statement, that this forecast is being made by the SAME person who forecast about 12 days ago or so, rain here in the last week of February which didn’t happen, along with large Cal and AZ blasting storms in early March.
In fact, here and in southern Cal, we had “anti-rain” in the last week of February! This in the form of high temperatures, dry air, and that combination resulting in unusually high evapotranspiration rates with those high temperatures (anti-rain, since whatever surface water, soil moisture, plant moisture is disappearing into the air). In other words, that forecast could hardly have been more incorrect.
Hell, to cuss some more, almost as bad as those forecasts for a drier than normal winter (DJF) for the Pac NW by big forecasting authorities like the Oregon State Climatologist among many others.
In fact, when they were making those forecasts, they were staring at record wetness in the Pac NW! Incredible! Both SEA and PDX have set DJF records for the amount of rain this winter! Wow. It doesn’t get much worse than that, except maybe here sometimes.
People are mad, too, in southern Cal where they were advised to buy sandbags due to the excessive flooding and rains foretold for their winter. Well, we’ll see if March can bring back some of the lost credibility, though, frankly, its hard to do.
Think of all those global warming forecasts of a steady rise in global temps made back in the early part of this century which didn’t happen. Wow. Lost some credibility there, and those forecasters had to move to a new expression, “climate change” to cover up the bad forecast.
Temps on the rise now, so watch out! “Global warming” rising from the ashes more and more now, too.
Changing the subject quickly, the Washington Huskies softball team had a pretty great weekend at the Mary Nutter Classic Tournament in Cathedral City, CA, where it was real hot (90 F), too. The University of Washington was the writer’s former employer.
Whistling here: where are you Niño? Com’ere! Hmmmph, nice name for a dog I think, which is what it has been so far for the Southwest.
The End
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1 Formally, called “Lorenz plots” by yours truly, and should be by others.
Valid at 5 PM AST on March 7th. All the red lines are WAY down there in Baja California central. Means a pretty sure thing that the jet stream will be south of us when this incoming trough goes by and as you know well by now, when the jet at THIS level is south of us, you almost always get rain. Some 95% of the Nov-Apr rain that falls in Tucson falls with the jet at this level to the south of us.
I dropped everything I was working on, a kindle-sized science piece, after I saw what is being presented to us today. Wanted to generate some happiness out there; its just who I am, except maybe when I am talking about cloud seeding. Then I get mad about all the shenanigans that have happened in that field, and I want you to be mad, too. (Kidding, sort of).
Check this out in the annotated spaghetti if you don’t believe me:
Valid in 14 days, 5 PM AST, February 28th I can’t wait! Its finally happening, that wet Niño period we’ve been waiting for all year, and have only seen sputtering in starts and stops.
Next, look at this behemoth, Mothra-sized jet street, oozing into the southern portion of the West Coast, the kind of thing we’ve been waiting for with the Godzilla-sized Niño, to allude to more monster movies, ones you probably went to, as a matter of fact. From IPS MeteoStar, these delicious progs valid in about two weeks:
Valid Monday, February 29th, 11 AM.Valid Monday February 29th 11 PM AST.Valid at 11 AM AST, Tuesday, March 1st.Valid 11 PM AST, Tuesday, March 1st. Oh, my, this is incredible how far south this powerful jet is, scooping loads of moisture toward Baja, southern Cal and Arizona. This would be something if it materializes….
Now let us recalll that the models had almost exactly these kinds of forecasts back in early January, as Catalinans enjoyed some beneficial rains associated with storms looking like those expected with Niño winters.
Recall, too, that in an overzealous blog, your cloud maven person announced the destruction of California in a couple of weeks due to those incredible progs; “FEMA get ready!” Homes to fall in ocean, couple feet to foot and a half of rain in the last two weeks or so alone. Well, there was only a little less than two feet of rain in that predicted time, and it was WAY up in the northern fringes of Cal. Homes, are falling into the ocean, though, due to the big surf that’s been occurring with big storms, too far off to make it rain much in Cal south of Frisco, though. Still going on, too.
Now about what’s ahead, way ahead.
Once again I announce the destruction of portions of California due to exceptional storms now on the horizon in the models. And, its not too late for those kinds of storms–remember what happened at the tail of February into the first few days in March 1938 in southern California and Arizona.
Why possibly make the SAME mistake again?
Because we got us such a BIG Niño, and….I can’t remember what else. Oh, yeah, I think it can’t be held off forever as far as generous SW rains go and I have been looking for this to happen.
Besides, let us, too, remember the 97-98 giant Niño. Remember how it appeared that not so much was happening into JANUARY except north of ‘Frisco in Cal, then the colossus hit all of the State and AZ in late January through February ’98?
Well, we’ve seen the northern portion of Cal get slammed, along with the Pac NW so far.
What if the transition to the blasters farther down the coast is a month late, in late February into March instead of late January into February as in ’98? Could be.
That’s what I am thinking/kind of hoping for, too.
These “outlier” model predictions from the 06Z (11 PM AST global data) that just came in a couple of hours ago–there’s been NOTHING like them in ALL of the prior model runs, so that’s why they’re outliers at this point I think–represent the “REAL DEAL.” This is it.
The Cal calamity expected in January begins with these model runs, that is, occurs at the end of February into March. And who knows how long after that? Remember, the best of the Niños is in late winter and SPRING!
Disclaimer. Cloud Maven Person is overly worked up here, and credibility naturally goes downward if being worked up is going up.
This lowered credibility is due to subjective internal influences such as looking for a return of those astounding progs that came out in early January ever since.
But, I am SURE this time (like a compulsive gambler would say), the above progs have got it right now. That Niño storms we have been looking for all this time will start to arrive before much longer.
