Art Rangno – Page 80

Massing bases, smiling faces

Yesterday’s surprise thunderstorm, rolling off the Catalinas, provided relief with 0.22 inches here. More rain tables/maps here and here. This sight in the first shot, showing it in the formation stage yesterday, was cause for joy:

Due to global warming-induced extra heat over the past few days here, as all extra heat must be automatically assigned (go here to a critical commentary on recent claims like mine above by a still-employed University of Washington Atmo Sci. prof.–wonder how long he’ll last?) combined with a break in the summer rains, our grasses, amaranth, pig weed and such were looking pretty stressed out; wilted, turning yellow due to global warming. One felt helpless to see the green of summer fading so fast due to global warming. (Want to make sure I am on the RIGHT side of this issue, you can’t be too careful these days about what you say in this domain; who might be watching.)

Then, after a near miss to the north yesterday around noon, an initially small thunderstorm that dumped on Saddlebrooke, moved off to the NW, multiplied, and became a real giant on the north side of the Tortolita Mountains, this new, large cloud base (at left) began forming over the Catalinas upwind of us. Time for hope.

Rain was already falling out of the downwind leaning upper portions of the cloud (arrow), shown in the second shot. You might recall that rain that falls out like this is not going to be what it could be, all that it could be.

Imagine dropping a cup of water out of that cloud where the bottom is (arrow), to drift away from the main discussion for a second. What will happen? Since the humidity must be less than 100 % all the way to the ground after it leaves the cloud, a lot of that water from that cup will evaporate. If you could capture the water that originally came out of that cup, it might be 10% of what came out.

How high was that “base” that’s not really a base but an overhang (above arrow in second shot)? Probably at the freezing level, or about 12,000 feet above us. So, if you’re storm chasing, and want to collect the most rain, avoid rain from overhangs!

The next shot shows where you want to be to get the most rain, and in a hurry. Those dark bases managed to hold together and keep reforming as rain fell on the Catalinas. A new strand of rain has overcome the updraft associated with new dark bases, and is beginning to fall out this side of Samaniego Ridge. An arrow has been added to point out this new rain streamer. It reaches near the ground beyond the dead yucca stalk in the foreground. This is where you want to be to collect the most rain, should you be trying to do so.

This time, pouring out a cup of water at the same height as in overhang rain, but inside the cloud, several thousand feet above the bottom, means that there will be no evaporation, and MORE IMPORTANTLY, the cup of water will grow in volume until near the very bottom because the falling drops will bump into and collect floating cloud drops that got in the way. So, if you could collect that water somehow, there would be more of it than what you dropped originally. So, those rain streamers, forming high in the cloud, are doing the same thing, pulling water out of the cloud on the way down, growing in amount.

This was a heartening sight since this new shaft, and the movement rate of the storm as a whole, meant that it would reach ME and Catalina in general) before it dissipated. As it turned out, probably another such shaft dropped right on top of us, judging by the low visibility in the intense rain. Air, rudely pushed out of the way by all that water, created winds to estimated 50-60 mph for a brief time, followed by an almost instantaneous reversal to 5-10 mph. That reversal was really something, as was as the lightning strike back behind me about 100 yards.

Today?

Expected to be dry. End of story. I really don’t enjoy talking much about dry air.

What about Hector-Ernesto, that schizophrenic tropical storm that has come all the way into the eastern Pacific from a birth place in the West Indies, home of calypso music, some weeks ago?

The Canadians think Hector-Ernesto is going to end up as a big rain producer southern Cal, with some rain enhancement here as well. The USA! models think its going to drift north and die before getting much past Baja, where it drifts off to the west. Due to a rain bias, I am only showing the Canadian model result with a tropical storm approaching San Diego and a huge crescent of rain over the Southwest, including over ME (oops, I mean us).

Royally “plugged in”, big and small

Yesterday’s higher based Cumulonimbus clouds were hyper-electrified for some reason. Their bases were running about 11-12 kft above the ground over Catalina at 5 C (41 F). Here’s are two examples of the tiniest thunderstorms I have ever seen (and I seen a lot of ’em, having chased them in the southern Cal deserts in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and for a few days here in the summers of 1964 and 1965. (Egad, you’re thinking; me, too.)

Here are those “tiniest thunderstorms” in the first two shots.

At this point in mid-afternoon, even though the temperature was a baking 104-105 F here in Catalina, hot enough to send plumes of warm air into the ionosphere you would think, the cloud situation for rain was not looking so great upwind toward the northeast.

But those big rollers came, didn’t they!

What these little thunderstorms were telling us about the big boys that grumbled in from the NE eventually, and the ones that developed near us later, was that they were going to throw a lot of electricity at us.

They did not disappoint, though we only received 0.04 inches here in Catalina at this site.

The frequency of cloud to ground strikes was incredible, I think the most frequent I have seen. Here are some shots, in case you were inside watching TEEVEE and Olympics’ beach volley ball from London, which is somewhat understandable:

Some rainfall tables for you to peruse for yesterday:

Pima County Alert gages: http://159.233.69.3/temp/pptreport.txt

U of AZ rain network rainlog.org

“Cocorahs” for Pima County, another, but national rain collecting network

Why were our Cumulonimbus clouds so hyper-electrified?

The simple answer is, I don’t know.

We know that electrification is related to updraft speeds in clouds and separation of hail/graupel (soft hail) and smaller ice crystals like dendrites, which leads to separation and build up of charge centers in clouds because, after bumping into one another, they collect in differents areas of the clouds. They build up charge and spark to one another, and to the ground. I am really oversimplifying this, but that appears to be the main source of cloud electrification, and why stratiform (“flat”) raining clouds and clouds that produce rain without ice, do not spark.

There was nothing in the lapse rate from the TUS sounding yesterday afternoon to suggest higher updraft speeds would develop that I could see. Was it the extreme heat that drove this occurrence? Also, crystal type in the clouds may have something to do with it.

Idle speculation: It has seemed to this observer, that the warmest based Cumulonimbus clouds have not been highly electrified here, at least, not like the ones yesterday. Warmer bases lead to different collections of ice crystals in the clouds, such as huge concentrations of columnar types (rods) called needles and sheaths (hollow columns). At lower cloud base temperatures, these do not occur except at very great heights, and very low temperatures, not in the middle of the cloud as needles and sheaths might.

The weather ahead…

Today: I could not find a single model that had rain here in Catalina today. It’s supposed to dry out due to dry air invading from the east. You can see that here in this water vapor loop from the U of WA Huskies. That dark area in New Mexico and extending into the central Plains is how the imagery represents dry air as seen by a satellite. You can see that while we are moist air right now, i.e., dewpoints are high, we have mid-level Altocumulus castellanus around, distant Cumulonimbus clouds to the WSW as I write, this moisture over us will thin. Still, I have to think we’ll see something in the way of a Cb off somewhere, probably not here, though.

Tomorrow: About the same as today, the mods say. Darn.

The End.

Bulimic Cumulus clouds, filled with portent, disappoint

Why would such skinny, towering clouds be filled with thundery, gushing portent? Its really hard for a cloud to be tall and skinny. Why? Because too much dry air comes in as it rises, both from the tops and sides, and if that air is dry, it can’t go far without evaporating. Too, the drop in temperature with height has to be larger than normal for clouds like yesterday’s to shoot up to well beyond the level where ice can form (glaciate). But they did off and on all day. Mt. Lemmon functioned as a smokestack for Cumulus and even skinny Cumulonimbus, clouds all during the late morning and into late afternoon. There was some thunder here as ONE got big enough to rain that bit toward Charoleau Gap. So, you do get to record a TSTM (thunderstorm) in your log book. No rain fell here.

If you missed those bulimic clouds, here’s yesterday’s movie from the U of AZ. If you watch that time lapse, you will see some of the tallest turrets shooting up awfully fast; I thought they were rising about fast, at times, anyway, as any turrets I have seen in these movies, a marker for how rapidly the air cooled with height yesterday.

Also, here are a few shots of those skinny clouds from this angle here Catalinaland.

OK, quiting visual cloud displays here. You’ve seen enough disappointing clouds, ones that did not live up to their potential like so many of us.

You would have thought massive clusters of Cumulonimbus clouds were about to roll in, spawned over the Rincon Mountains or from the high terrain near Pie Town, NM, rolling westward to pummel the townlet of Catalina again. Some of our more gigantic area storms have been preceded by morning “long tall sallys” like these.

But no.

Looking at today:

The boys in the weather club, like Bob and Mike, were talkin’ good storms today based on their very great and decades-long experience. I, too, am riding the Bob-Mike wave.

Way out ahead; major rain joy, maybe…

I am more excited about the longer term view, one in which when it gets here, will remember what I said with enthusiasm now. Remember our logo, one just like the big TEEVEE stations have:

“RIght or wrong, you heard it here FIRST! Live!”

What “first”?

Tropical storm remnant has been probably unreliably, but hopefully, forecast to come into southern Arizona in 192 h or so. Could be worse; what if it was a forecast that was 360 h from now?

Here it is, courtesy of those folks at IPS Meteostar who have rendered the 00 Z (think Olympics Time Zone) time maps for us. Here’s the low, shown on the first map, on Baja coast. The next map shows that the ENTIRE remnant has moved into AZ! Could be great.

What gives this storm a better chance of getting here than some? The upper level steering is set up to draw tropical storms northward should they drift too far northwest, like a bug getting caught in a spider web; the spider then hauling the bug to its hiding place. Gee, I never thought I would write about spiders here, but there it is; it just kind of popped out.

But, you ask, how do we KNOW, have any CLUE, that the steering, as by an upper level trough, is going to be properly placed to draw tropical storms northward so that they get caught up like a bug in a spider web which after being caught in the web, the spider comes down and takes it back to its hiding place. I really liked that metaphor. We are like that place where the spider is hiding!

Of course, you say, we go to the NOAA spaghetti factory and try to discern how likely it is that a trough will be along the West Coast, positioned to draw storms up thisaway.

The last image is a spaghetti plot of trough contours using what be called, “the bad balloon” approach. Hard to imagine, but the starting points for the model is deliberately altered a bit just to see how wild a few of the contours get. The wilder they get, the less reliable a longer term forecast is.

20120809002012080800_NAM_GFS_SFC_SLP_THK_PRECIP_WINDS_192 — Valid for August 15 at 5 PM AST. Note all the green, denoting rain that fell in the preceeding 6 h.

NOAA “spaghetti plot” valid for the SAME time as the first map, 5 PM AST, August 15th. Shows that a trough along the West Coast is virtually assured. But the “devil”, the storm here, is in the details. While it is a necessary condition, it is not sufficient, since the flow might not exactly draw a tropical storm right to ME. Oops, “us.”

Tracey day

Two maybe three sprinkles occurred in the early afternoon between 1:30 and 2:40 PM for a total accumulation of “trace.” The first from our very own Catalina cloud street off Ms. Lemon. Here it is in mid-afternoon when it was was still right over us, but the clouds in it not tall enough, as earlier, to have something in them that causes precipitation to fall out. (What is it? Hint: Think of the Beatles’ anthem about something that is, “all you need¹.”)

Bubble Cu drifts away, later becoming a “quarter pounder”… Watch the sequence below.

So, what did we get out of this sequence?

Even small clouds, really modest ones at the start, can boil upward and produce a useful amount of rain, albeit in a short-lived life. Between the time it began to rain from this cloud and the end of it from this little cloud was barely more than six minutes, maybe ten. But don’t overlook them; they can still get you wet.

And with that happy ending, let me leave you with this happy ending to our day; yesterday’s sunset Cumulonimbus cloud, and the thought of more of them today! (The weather service says so…here.)

¹ice

Rainbow? Or, after THAT storm, was it the “‘Arc’ of the Convenant”?

What an amazing, Biblical sight¹ that came across the Catalina Mountains yesterday evening, that shaft of intense rain and attendant rainbow! After a day where it looked like rain might not happen here, those earlier Cumulus clouds being pretty lazy really, this behemoth powered across Tucson and the Catalina Mountains dropping 0.56 inches in momentarily blinding rain blown on 60-70 mph gusts, with numerous cloud-to-ground lightning strikes, taking down power lines, and causing a 6 h plus power outage in Catalina. 0.51 inches fell here in 10 minutes!

Oops, forgot to remind you: Don’t forget to go to the movies. Shows the backside of what hit us just as the day ends.

How great this rain will be, too, for our stressed desert-thornscrub vegetation after almost a week of dry conditions. (Only 0.17 inches at Sutherland Heights, though.)

For me, yesterday evening produced the most dramatic sights I’ve seen here in four years in Catalina. I hope you caught it, but if you didn’t, here are a few of the most dramatic ones. The first, penultimate shot was from the front porch about three minutes before bedlam hit Sutherland Heights. Below this, those shots leading up to it.

A repeat of yesterday today? Not bloody likely.

Oh, well, any rain will be great, but drier air is moving in. Check it out here from the University of Washington Huskies’ (some former of whom, if that is correct english which I doubt, are in the Olympics, for example, women’s volleyball, but not in beach volleyball which I seem to be watching a lot of) Weather Department here.

Note the drier air moving in from New Mexico and west Texas in this loop. Just the same, it can still rain here some because while drier, it’s not dessicated air and so the usual isolated Cb should be around. So, keep watching, keep cameras ready and charged.

The End.

^{————————————————————————————————————————————————————-1}Biblical allusion is to the “ARK of the Covenant” whose activity was demonstrated in a movie with Harrison Ford some years.

“Feint” rainbow

For a few minutes yesterday afternoon, it looked like some unexpected rain was trucking over the Cat Mountains from the east-northeast late yesterday afternoon. No one could blame you for getting your hopes up and misleading your neighborhood by saying it might rain in half an hour. Those clouds rolling in from the Catalinas (shown below) were great sights for soaring eyes, ones that look to the skies all the time for rain.

But within the hour, the clouds had broken up, and the shower they produced was reflected by a faint rainbow. Rainbows to the east and northeast are often precursors of rain and wind moving into Catalina. Here is the sad remnants of those albeit weak, Cumulonimbus clouds with their feint rainbow, one that was not followed by one drop of rain here.

A big patch of Cirrus kept the temperature down some during the first half of the day, and so our Cumulus were behind in development compared to areas around us. Here is that bad Cirrus spissatus in case you missed it, that which hung over us so long.

It was quite visible even in the visible satellite image all morning. When it shows up there, you can bet that the Cirrus in that image is thick enough to produce shading and mess up the development of Cumulus under and around it, particularly on marginal rain days like yesterday.

Much Cirrus is virtually invisible in visible satellite imagery; get it? You can see it from the ground (i.e., its visible), those thin wisps of Cirrus, but try to find it in a visible satellite image! This whole line of reasoning and befuddled exposition here reminds me of that Science knee-slapper of a few years ago; that article entitled, “Where are the invisible galaxies?”

Today?

Raining lightly now at 5:25 AM! Yay. A night stalker mass of rain is moving into TUS now as I write. They don’t usually like the daytime and fade as the sun rises in the sky. Sprinkles, very light rain showers (and as always pointed out here, quite emphatically I might add, “sprinkles is not DRIZZLE, dammitall”, to be a little colloquial there!).

Let’s hope this heavy cloud cover we have now (5:30 AM), which you could call, Altocumulus opacus and castellanus due to its height above the ground (its at about 11-12,000 feet above the ground and has turrets here and there). But, to get a little pedalogical you could label it in your log book as Stratocumulus, perhaps with the appendage, castellanus, since turrets are present–those are what’s causing the sprinkles/light showers.

Sunset was nice….

U of AZ mod shows this is our best day for a significant rain, some of that this morning, and some arises later with those afternoon and evening giants we get around here. Hoping so. Tomorrow is supposed to be drier.

The End.

Long distance Cumulonimbus top; cloud review for yesterday, and, big day tomorrow?

The only good Cumulonimbus (Cb) clouds seem to be occurring north of Golder Ranch Drive, about a 100 miles north. which of course, astronomically speaking is actually quite close. Yesterday, with no intervening clouds, it was another chance to see how far can you see the top of a Cb, then use the NWS radar to place it. The Cb top, with an arrow pointing to it in the first photo, is followed by a zoomed shot. The radar indicates that lone, very tall cell was about 10 miles SE of Kingman, or more than 150 miles away! It was common in South Dakota, working with radar in Mitchell and Parkston, to see Cb tops and anvils on the horizon that the radar was unable to see, partly because the radar beam is pointed slightly upward to minimize “ground clutter” as seen in the radar image below around PHX.

annotated 0001E6 — 7:20 PM NWS radar mosaic rendered by the U of AZ.

Review of yesterday; another quiet day (Ed. Note: Getting tired of quiet days)

Yesterday was almost exactly like the day before, with a brief period of glaciating cloud in the same spot beyond the Charoleau Gap from Catalina as the day before. Here are a few representative shots of yesterday.

Can you pick out the icy top in that one little glaciating Cb? Its a little harder to detect this time compared with yesterday.

I feel uncomfortable labeling this little mush of cloud a “Cumulonimbus”, maybe “Cb calvus”, because the fibrous nature of the ice is not yet obvious.

Still it has the attributes of a Cumulonimbus, glaciating top, precip out the bottom, though we can’t see it here. It will produce a radar echo like the little Cb the day before. What we really need, to editorialize some, are categories for these situations like “Cumulonimbus humilis”, “Cumulonimbus mediocris” so that we know that we have miniature versions of those clouds.

We do have, though I avoid it, a category of “Cumulus congestus praecipitatio”, because visual examples, as shown in the last (1987) World Meteorological Atlas, cannot be differentiated from Cumulonimbus clouds, at least, not by me!

The weather ahead

“Quiet time” is coming to an end, not today so much, the computers say, but tomorrow, oh my, could be huge!

Check it out here, courtesy of our U of AZ weather program and their massive Beowulf Cluster of computers.

The End

Official climatologist blasts “educated fools” for mischaracterizing “Arizony”

This just in! Well….I didn’t see it until just now, so its kind of “just in”, the input domain smaller than one usually thinks of when you hear the phrase, “this just in!”

Please begin reading at the second paragraph, which discusses prejudice. It seems some people were carelessly calling Arizona a desert!

Checking your cloud log book for yesterday

My attention began to drift toward a fattening Cumulus cloud beyond Charoleau Gap. After days of Cumulus humilis and mediocris, I was buoyed by the sight of a real congestus cloud there. Would it, could it, GLACIATE, get cold enough on top to form ice crystals and snow?

As you know, and I think the Beatles said it best (a boy group from Britain in the 1960s), in their famous anthem, ” All You Need is Ice”:

“All you need is ice, dah-ta-dah-ta-dah, all you need is ice, dah-ta-dah-ta-dah, all you need is ice, ice, , all you need is ice, etc, etc., etc. (it was a very repetitive song) Furthermore they claimed, “it’s easy.”

It was going to be a great song, scientifically speaking, in many ways, though we know that rain can form without ice at times. However, and I think the boys realized later, that its not always THAT easy (to make ice) when the freezing level is at 15,000 friggin’ feet, and the tops have to reach -10 to -15 C, or about 24,000 feet, as we had here yesterday.

Later, the “Beatles” (BTW, the British spelling of “beetles”, which I doubt many of the Ancient Ones out there knew before I posted that information here) realized, having long been interested in precipitation in their homeland, that the original lyrics were misleading. They decided to update the lyrics to something more accessible and commercially viable, changing “ice” to “love” soon after the first production. You can hear the revised song here.

However, If you replace “love” with the origiinal word, “ice”, it will help you understand the precipitation process here in “Arizony” better.

Where was I?

Oh, yeah, I began to see a ruffle in a Cumulus congestus cloud top that looked like it might be converting from supercooled water (water at below freezing temperatures that aircraft like to avoid) that MIGHT be converting to ice. Then after a few more minutes, much of the time having to talk with another human and missing the important transitional photo stage, it was completely iced-out, this meaning rain was falling out the bottom! Somebody got wet!

Now this was NOT a large Cumulonimbus cloud, but rather, for us, a “mediocris” but here it is. I wondered, in view of its small size and brief lifetime, how many of you logged this cloud? It could have easily been missed.

I am posting photos to help you fill in the correct and complete cloud observations for yesterday in your log books. There were also several forms of Cirrus above the small Cumulus clouds that were prevalent. I figure you were “all over” the Cirrus, but likely missed our little, and brief, Cb.

Here are a couple of cloud photos from yesterday, to check against your log of cloud observations, to help you make sure you got them all. I’ve added some “excitement captions” as well, ones with exclamation marks to kind of get you going.

July 2012: 15 days with measurable rain (with three traces); adds up to 4.45 inches!

And we were one of the drier areas! Many places around us were between 5-10 inches this July making it a pretty memorable one and the 6th wettest July in Catalina since 1977. Here’s the list of those wettest for Catalina:

1. July 2006 7.22 inches 11 days with measurable rain

2. July 1984 6.54 inches 17 days with measurable rain

3. July 1990 5.25 inches 12 days with measurable rain

4. July 1983 4.94 inches 9 days with measurable rain

5. July 2008¹ 4.73 inches 12 days with measurable rain

6. July 2012 4.45 inches 15 days with measurable rain

¹The record begins in 1977 down at Our Garden garden on Stallion Ave and in July 2008, is a mix of their records for the first half of the month, and here on East Wilds Road for the second half, and from East Wilds Road thereafter.

Here is the NOAA 30-day radar-derived rainfall map, ending July 31st, for Arizona to provide an overall picture of how well our State did this July. Also shown is the percentage of normal map. You can find these maps here.

De-briefing for yesterday

A disappointment for sure, since the day before, the models had indicated a pulse of rain moving through in the afternoon. But then they changed by yesterday morning. The rain pulse was gone. That’s what weather computer models do; they say they like you and then they say they don’t, in a sense.

However, if one looked far enough to the south in the evening, there was a Cumulonimbus way off in Mexico, maybe a 100 miles or so, that was exactly headed this way. It lasted about 20 minutes and never crossed the border. Oh, well. Rain hope springs eternal.

Closer ones suddenly popped up to the NE and ENE, quite pretty, but they weren’t moving this way.

There was too much haze yesterday, too.

The Weather Ahead

Seem to have entered a break in the showers now. U of AZ mod (here), crunching data from 11 PM last night, doesn’t think the rain will be back until the 3rd.

We can hope its WRONG again!

Another big day; scattered amounts around us of more than THREE inches again; we only got 0.18 inches!

Trying to be excited for those around us who got all that rain yesterday while we received a paltry 0.18 inches here in the upper reaches of Catalina. Still it was another good little rain for our local desert.

The 24 h rolling archive from Pima County rainfall gages is here. Most seen here? 2.01 inches at Finger Rock and Skyline, Tucson. You’ll see that storm in the movies.

Also, check the more comprehensive U of AZ rainfall network here. In fact, you might as well join up, too. It would get you out of your rut. Think how exciting it would be to go out in the morning and see how much rain fell in your gage in the previous 24 hours! Maybe someday you might win the “rain lottery” and have the biggest amount anywhere in the State! The most reported so far this morning is a deluge of 3.17 inches over by Picture Rocks again. Good grief, have they been getting hammered.

What a July this is turning out to be!

Here we are in Catalina, its late afternoon, it has just rained again, the temperature is a chilly 70 F, dewpoint 68 F (almost saturated), with Stratus fractus just above eyeball level lining the hillsides! Its an amazing scene for an afternoon in Catalina and vicinity in July. And so DARK! Here is that odd scene from yesterday afternoon:

Relive yesterday, as though you were in the city of Tucson shopping possibly, here in this movie, courtesy of the U of AZ Weather Department. The movie is rated “R”, for violence since the sky goes WILD in the afternoon, winds going every which way.

Also, in this time lapse you will get a sense of how rapidly moist air is flowing across us from the east to east-southeast. This movie, comprised of still shots taken every 10 s shows movement, like the day before, that is phenomenal for summer, more like a winter scene when winds are normally strong. There are even Altocumulus lenticular clouds (almond shaped ones) hovering over and just downwind of the Cat Mountains! Amazing.

But check the CHAOS in the mid and later afternoon. Unbelievable. Areas toward the Catalina foothills, during this chaos, got another 1-2 inches again yesterday.

In contrast, let us now look at the very same day in a time lapse film in Seattle, Washington, where Mr. Cloud-Maven person spent 32 years, most with the U of Washington Huskies Weather Department. Here it is. I sum up the totality of that movie for July 29th below:

Bor-ring!

Those Seattle skies, for the most part, were like eating plain, cooked oatmeal everyday, all day.

Below, the start of our exciting day, the middle, and the end has already been shown above. Lots of nice rain shafts SUDDENLY collapsing down out of clouds. A sequence of the big northwest Tucson storm early in the afternoon that moved off toward Marana is included as part of the middle. That shaft really fell out fast, and how you could detect the icey tops BEFORE the shaft appeared. I try to point out how you might have been able to do that in this sequence, and thus, and quite importantly, impress your friends and gain status and some kind of weather sage.

Today?

Just looked at the latest AZ mod output, as you can here (forgot to past link until now, 8:08 AM). Colored splotches are where it is supposed to have rained that HOUR. That model has a much less active day today, but much more active tomorrow. Cumulonimbus clouds in sight today? Oh, yeah! But, none are SUPPOSED to get us today. But these mods are always slightly inaccurate, so keep watching this afternoon. Should be another photogenic day, if nothing else.