Art Rangno – Page 86

Windy, windier, windiest

Pretty much like that title will be the scene for Catalina for the next three days, particularly during the afternoons as temperatures moderate slightly to more normal values in the mid-upper 90s today, while the series of “Tonopah low” pressure centers that will form in Nevada and then move away, are stronger and stronger. The strongest one one is expected to form on Friday. Of course, “as always”, there was a low over Tonopah, NV, earlier today; now its down around Blythe, with cooler air following behind it.

Check our NWS excitement here where you’ll see maps and warnings galore. Also, here, where you can see the 24 h temperature change, a good tool for where cold fronts have passed. At this point, the major invasion of cold air stays to the north. Its later on the weekend it barges down thisaway.

Here are the current satellite and surface pressure map, and the “jet stream” maps (for 500 mb), both from the U of WA. What’s pretty unusual in our domain at 500 mb is how “warm” it is south of the jet stream (where the contours are bunched the most) over central California and Arizona. Its only -5 C at Tucson right now, hardly below freezing, up around 20,000 feet! This suggests that the racing around and outside the jet core on the south side has been subsiding like mad, and in doing that, compressing and heating up.

So what you might say?

Well, thinking of others here, normally, gobs of precip break out in the central and southern Plains States when these big troughs settle into the SW and Great Basin, but this one, on the models for the next few days, hardly produces ANY precip! Its pretty upsetting, really, because this could have been a real soaker out there in those droughty regions; instead the rain is mainly in Montana, the Dakotas and Canada.

And the likely reason is that the air is too hot above all warm and humid air from the Gulf of Mexico that is racing northward in the southern Plains right now to allow deep convection except in isolated areas. So, as warm as the Gulf air is, there will be an inversion that just won’t break down as they often do when they are not so strong as this one will be.

Nice sunset yesterday due to some passing Cirrus spissatus. Today will likely see more examples of those, along with Altocumulus or Cirrocumulus lenticulars, probably more off to the north of us because I see some over there to the north now (6 AM AST).

Bad trough! No precip, just a dusty cool snap ahead

Making its entrance today into the Pac NW is the first stage of that MASSIVE trough, foretold long ago by your NOAA spaghetti factory to begin happening about now, and peak out between May 25th-26th.

Now you’ll understand why, if you want to get a handle on the exceptional things that might be in the weather pipeline, you have to have some spaghetti every day. (Note: right now, 5:10 AM, the “factory” is down, has a bug in the sofware that REALLY makes it look like “spaghetti” because too many lines are shown. Its kind of a hoot. I will have to inform NOAA again, as I did a few days ago, or maybe you can, that something is wrong. Their answer to me back then was that they had not yet noticed the problem; made me think I was the ONLY one looking at them, also funny!) It is a powerful tool, one that also foretold the excessive heat we are experiencing today–recall the “June in May” writeup based completely on spaghetti.

OK, onward…

That second pulse of cold air aloft, the one shown below in the forecast map for the afternoon of May 25th (upper left panel) over Reno, NV, is REMARKABLY strong for this time of year, and will bring exceptionally low snow levels to northern and central California for later May.

And look at how much the surface map (upper right hand panel) is in a dither with the circulation around the low pressure at the surface extending all the way from Illinois to California! Its HUGE!

But what about us? What does all this atmo commotion mean for you and me?

Briefly, just Dust in the Wind, to allude to an old, sweet song by that heavy metal, huge hair group, Kansas, that hit the scene in the 1970s and were quite something I thought. Yep, the dryness in this HUGE trough makes me as sad as their song does about being only a spec of dirt.

Look at the lower left hand panel in the forecast chart below to see what the moisture expected at 700 millibars, about 10 k above sea level, or a little above the top of Mt. Sara Lemmon, for the afternoon of May 25th. It’s grim.

As you can see there are two but regions in the SW and West that have moisture at 10 K; that in central and northern California extending northward and expanding eastward, and a TINY stream from the tropics hundreds of miles to the east of us in western Texas.

Thus, there is no HOPE whatsoever of rain in southern Arizona with this huge system, because, like almost all of our cold winter systems, the core of the jet stream at 500 millibars, that band of wind that circumscribes the Pacific moisture over northern Califonia below, NEVER gets here, dammitall!

And those powerful winds around the outside of the trough core, really representing trajectories of subsided air from the cold Pacific, just race around it, preventing an intrusion of tropical air. The normal tendency for upward motion on the EAST side of all troughs trough is totally inadequate to produce clouds and precip with such dry air. About the only thing you could expect to see is a few filaments of rapidly moving CIrrus, maybe a lenticular or two on the 25th-26th, and, after the cool air moves in on the 26th, a couple of Cumulus humilis. And maybe the same kinds of cloud fragments off and on before that. Otherwise, the only “precipitation” will be “lithometeors”, dust particles. I suppose they might add up to an eighth of an inch over several days. Hahahaha.

Sure looks like the Catalina area will be raked with winds above 40 mph in gusts with this system before its over.

Check the excitement at the NWS here in Tucson here.

The End.

El Nino may be in the works for next winter; stories from the field

Here you can read the latest statement from the Climate Prediction Center on the neutral conditions that have developed in the eastern Pacific Ocean–La Nina is gone–and what it sees for next winter from their computer models. While things are not clear because they are so difficult to foretell, they are talkin’ El Nino some. As we know, the Southwest can benefit tremendously in rainfall when an El Nino develops, and so it is uplifting news to hear ANYTHING about an El Nino in the future and I though you would want to read that, too. Here you can see the last few weeks of global ocean temperature anomalies and how they are changing.

Why talk about next winter now? We should always be looking ahead in life, planning retirement, vacations, what football games to attend next fall, the important things in life; besides, there are no clouds to talk about, only hot air currents, maybe a dust devil, so I need some filler material. Remember when newspapers used filler material to make columns come out even, add some little fact? Those were great.

Too, I may have to dredge up some “stories from the field” to fill in the boring gaps in weather we have today, like that time they almost rolled over our VW microbus on that big boulevard in Madras (now Chennai), India, in August 1975. That big boulevard was reserved that day for the funeral parade of freedom fighter, Kamaraj, (against the British) with Indira Ghandi leading it. We should not have driven on it. Hundreds of thousands of people lined that boulevard for miles that afternoon! You would not have believed that scene!

The crowd. What I look like when I am in India (on the right)

I am still white-knuckled thinking about our knuckle-headed project leader who thought it was going to be OK to drive on that funeral route so we would get back to the hotel faster. He ordered our driver to go onto that boulevard, and then told him to, “just wave at the police”, guarding the route as we drove down it. We were returning from the Madras airport at Meenambakkam where we had been on standby to seed some clouds if they developed over a nearby reservoir catchment area. We were the only vehicle on that boulevard as the people waited for the official parade.

But then some of the crowd, maybe just a dozen or so, took exception to our driving down that boulevard and rushed our microbus. Our driver, sped up and slowed down in spurts, swerving left and right as well trying to shake people off his van. And the ones trying to climb on it did fall off, thank god, but fortunately no one was injured (or run over!)

In another bit of luck, the windows of that microbus were completely opaque due to heavy condensation on the inner surface of the windows, and so the crowds could not see that it was three Anglos in the back of that damn bus violating that boulevard. Heart pounding now as I relive that drive.

A bit farther, the driver somehow found a side street among the crowd and drove ever so gradually through all of those people lining the boulevard and finally onto the side street he knew was there.

That was an awful thing to have done and still regret being a party to it. But, somehow, too, my life was spared so I could write this blog in Catalina, AZ. Interesting. It better be good!

The latest map below (May 9th conditions) shows that the “warms” have it overall in the global oceans, and what’s important for us is that the cooler-than-normal water in the eastern half of the Pacific along the Equator (representing La Nina conditions) has dissipated.

For comparison, shown this map for May 9th is one for February 1st conditions when our La Nina was holding forth. Note the below normal temperatures along the Equator westward from South America across the Dateline on that map, and then look to the new one.

So there are no strong forcing factors at present to alter our climate from “normal.” Still means that the weather machine will continue doing its thing, hot, cold, rainy, extremes, etc., but there won’t be a dominant pattern, the kind that leads to a greater chance of drought in the Southwest and southern states as La Nina’s tend to do in late winter and spring. Yay! Summers don’t seem to be much affected by either of these conditions.

The Big One, that giant trough, is still on the way for implantation in the West, but only wind projected here

Dang. No rain. Likely we’ll hear about low temperature records in parts of California, Nevada, the Pac NW, extreme winds at various places, and hot and windy conditions here and in the Plains States. Very little rain is projected out there as well, at least in the early going of this enormous trough and low system. Starts affecting us on Wednesday; the TEEVEE weather presenters will be all over this one!

Cooler now, but windy, ovenly conditions just ahead

Here is the temperature change from yesterday morning at this time to today at this time, courtesy of The Weather Channel and due to that dry cool front that went through yesterday. Its about 8 degrees cooler this morning here in Catalina compared to yesterday at this same time. Nice.

But, its back to above normal temperatures for a few days after this respite. Normal is around 90-92 F here in Catalina for this time of year, but a 100 F is just ahead I’m afraid. No rain seen in mods for the next 15 days, too. Feeling glum.

Yesterday’s clouds

Had some nice supercooled Altocumulus translucidus clouds yesterday after the Cirrus departed. Here’s a shot that was taken as an aircraft flew through a patch of it. Note fine contrail. These clouds, from the Tucson sounding at 5 AM AST, appear to have been at temperatures between -15 and -20 C, ripe for aircraft to produce icy canals or holes, and that’s what happened. Below is the rest of the sequence, taken from different locations. In the last shot, the tip of that icy contrail began to light up and I thought I might see some color due to refracting ice crystals, but it didn’t happen. These aircraft effects on supercooled clouds are receiving more attention in the scientific community, BTW.

For a time, too, we had our lenticular cloud friend downstream of the Catalina Mountains in its normal position.

Powerful, but dry system progged for later next week

Check this “four panel” out, bottom of blog, from the Canadians from their model run last night. Its valid for the afternoon of Thursday, May 24th at 5 PM AST.

My first thoughts: Egad! Holy Smokes!

Looks like low temperature records will be broken in the West and Pac Northwest as this comes through those areas. However, the thought of the ovenly air over the Southwest at this same time, being drawn into the western High Plains States was alarming. This is because it could get superhot over there as our hot air comes down out of the Rockies. Fortunately, the models don’t show the 120 F temperatures in the Plains my alarmist mind was generating.

What WE will get here in Catalina as this giant trough settles in the West for several days is a LOT of wind and dust in a lot of hot air before the cooler air arrives sometime after May 25th.

This period of wind and hot air will be awful for the fire situation. No rain is indicated with this giant low, too.

I dread these days because you’re thinking about how much is on the line as far as our forests go.

The End.

Cooler hot air riding in from the West later today

Should arrive by later this afternoon as foretold in models, unfortunately, in view of fires, with a lot of wind before and after a dry cold front gets here, too. Check the NWS forecast for Catalina here.

The Cirrus clouds this morning? The only trace of clouds we’ll see with this trough and “cold front” today, if you can call it “cold”, with temperatures still in the 90s. Those clouds will be gone by mid-day.Tomorrow morning we’ll notice a temperature difference!

The weather ahead, as you likely know, fiercely hot early next week, after our little cold front goes by today, followed by another dry, windy, “cool” front around May 25th.

Of course, if you’ve had your NOAA spaghetti plot this morning, you probably already know about that weather change eight days from now. Here’s a chart from last night’s spaghetti run.

What do you see in the map below?

Except here at this blog, you have NEVER seen a weather map like this before! Imagine your TEEVEE weather presenter showing you something like this! Heck, where’s the land? Well, you can see Florida and Communist Cuba in the lower right hand corner. Just remember that Arizona is somewhere to the west of Florida. The outer dotted line is the Equator, where the date changes. (Just kidding, want to see if you are paying attention. Eyebrows should be raised on a couple of counts because TWO things are wrong in that ONE sentence.) OK, on to the map and no silliness….

First, those yellow lines are where the actual weather map contours of 576 and 552 “decameters” at 500 millibars pressure are predicted to be in last night’s run, on the afternoon of May 25th. When those yellow lines bulge southward, as they do in our domain in the West, a trough was foretold in that run. All the other red and turqoise lines help determine how reliable where those two yellow lines will be.

Look at all the red lines pushed down toward the Equator in our sector! There is nowhere in the northern hemisphere where so many red lines (576 decameter contour) extrude so far toward to the south! These red lines are from the same model, but run with slight changes in “initial conditions” (you might think of it as with a couple “bad balloon” readings) to see how robust the “signal”, the predicted features in the model are.

So, when all the lines, as wobbly as they are, do the same thing (extrude to the south, or bulge toward the north as they do northeast of the Hawaiian Islands) then the “signal” is quite strong, and the foretold feature more reliable. So eight days from now, a pretty long time in model predictions, we can be pretty darn confident there’ll be a MAJOR trough in the West that will affect Arizona. See how the turqoise lines also dip southward for the most part.

And what does that mean as far as Catalina weather? Dust, wind, and cooler weather for awhile; “dusty cool snap.”

No rain is indicated at this time, though the summer thunderstorms will be close prior to the dusty cool snap.

OK, I think I have confused things enough.

The End.

Cooking with solar; dusty cool snap still ahead (25th or so)

It was 99 F here in Catalina yesterday.

Spinning entity in AZ today. See it here in the water vapor imagery from the Huskies, the Washington ones. Not much moisture with it, but we did see a couple of….. of…..yes, “Cumulus fractus” yesterday, maybe one big enough to be a humilis, if “big” and “humilis” can be used in the same sentence. In case you missed them:

No ice.

The zoomed shot is because Mr. Cloud-maven person could detect a “pyrocumulus” on top of the Crown King fire on the horizon. Can you?

Here’s the sat image, also from the Huskies, and you can see the tiniest little white spec on the top of the smoke on the left side.

Likely more Cumulus today. Yay.

At least some hot air relief is on the doorstep as a couple of weak troughs buzz the State in the next couple of days, but then its back to The Oven for a couple more.

However, after that, a much bigger cool down is still ahead…

Dusty Coolsnap coming to town

I wish there was a western singer by that name because I would probably buy his/her records.

Anyway, he’s coming to town around the 24-25th-26th, and its going to be real windy, REALLY windy with a lot of dust around, but then we won’t be cooking with solar so much then.

This is due to “big trough” implanting itself in the Southwest then. Will cause a lot of weather mayhem in the West for late May. Here are some scenes from the upcoming “show”, courtesy of IPS Meteostar: Opening the show will be The Ovens, with their hot rendition of 102 degrees (or more) here in Catalina on the 21st.

It will be so great to see “Dusty” after that! Hahahaha. Oh, well, I’m trying really hard here.

OK….now look at all the isobars in the maps below, valid for the afternoon of the 24th and then the 25th! Bunched in the State of AZ those days around that huge low center, first in southern Nevada and then, the next day, over Needles, CA! Wow. It just sits there! This is going to be fun, something besides hot air to think about.

Note, too, all that precip that creeps down into southern Nevada on the 25th. Sadly, that’s about as close as it gets to us here in Catalina. Oh, well, maybe things will “improve” for us as the event gets closer in the models. The real cool down is after the low goes by, after the 25th.

The End.

Fires and smoke

Yesterday afternoon smoke from the Gladiator-Crown King and Tonto fires began spreading toward Catalina. Here are a couple of photos taken toward evening. The first photo is of the Gladiator fire plume and the second has the Tonto fire plume on the horizon on the right. You can see a bit of separation between the two plumes.

As is typical of fires, they flare up during the hot daytime hours as these did yesterday, and those plumes are the evidence from that. This morning, like yesterday morning, the plumes are likely to be more like haze layers than plumes, but then the plume characteristic will likely return this afternoon and evening as the fires heat up again.

Plumes like these in the photos show fairly close origins of fires, where smoke that has drifted in from Alaska or Asian fires would not have the streaks and irregularities in density that you saw yesterday evening. Those from very far away would be more of a whitish vellum over the whole sky in which the layer seems to be almost the same thickness as you look toward the sun. Generally, you don’t see those “long-range transport” layers when looking opposite to the sun.

Below, a satellite image from the University of Washington showing where the two fires were as of 6:15 PM yesterday relative to Catalina (the circle). You can just barely make out the plumes that were heading our way.

Also you can see how close a bunch of Cumulonimbus clouds got to us yesterday evening, ones moving from the N as a new round of rain spread over eastern Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. Sadly, they will stay well to the east of us.

Earth on fire map

How does fire activity in the US and Arizona compare with worldwide fires? Not so bad.

Below is a summary map of fires for the last ten days of this past April as detected by satellite. This image was provided by the University of Freiburg, Germany. These are not campfires, but full blown deliberately set or wildfires.

Kinda depressing. Those in the Saudi desert may just be those due to the burnoff of natural gas, yikes what a waste!

Also, you may notice not so much going on in the Brazilian rainforest, say compared with the jungles in central Africa-Zambia. This is mainly due to the fact that the rainy season is just coming to a close in Brazil,and most “biomass burning” takes place during the dry season, one that peaks in August, but also due to the Brazilian government’s attempts to reduce such fires in the “Green Ocean.”

The End.

Feeling good about others on mom’s day

In this case, we can feel really good about the people and mom’s in Texas today.

Why?

A huge dent was made in the drought there over the past seven days there. Below is the radar-derived rainfall (its not from rain gauges) for just one week ending yesterday in the US, courtesy of WSI Intellicast, one of the writer’s favorite weather sites. Check out the amounts in Texas! Some locales (those yellowish areas) have received between 8 and 16 inches of rain for those seven days! Imagine how good those folks feel in view of all the sad droughty, hot days they have endured over the past 12 months! There has been drought relief, too, in southeast New Mexico. This map, BTW, also still has our little rain event here in Catalina on it, too.

Coming into this “water year”, October 1-September 30th, the drought was about as bad as it could get. See below from US Drought Monitor folks at Big Red in Lincoln. Fortunately, the forecasts for continuing drought conditions in these parts of the SW and southern Plains, largely based on the presence of a La Nina regime in the eastern tropical Pacific, were only partly correct for the ensuing fall-winter-spring period and the drought has been much alleviated. The second drought monitor map, though not yet reflecting the most recent heavy rains (will post that on Tuesday when it comes out), gives you an idea of how our past eight months did in alleviating these horrible conditions, ones that helped drive hay prices so high as us horsey people know.

Also typical of weather patterns: when its raining a lot in one segment of the country, its usually NOT in another segment. So, you can see in the second map, while some of AZ and NM, and the southern Plains have gotten relief from drought, its gotten worse or spread to other areas in the West.

Not much else going on here, other than the chance of passing isolated Cirrus clouds today with a lot of hot air.

Dusty cool snap still in models for later in May, 25th plus or minus a day or two.

The End

Let’s talk about May

Now in a really good web site about weather, clouds and climate, we would have talked about May around the first of May. But let’s face it, this site really isn’t that great. So now we’ll talk about the climate of May on May 11th.

Below is the rain frequency climate, such as it is, for May here in Catalina. Surprisingly, to Mr. Cloud-maven person, there is no downward trend in the chances of measurable rain from the very first days of May until the end as was expected. Instead, each day of the whole month has about the same small chance of rain from the 35 year record mostly made by the folks (Wayne and Jenny) at Our Garden here in Catalina.

Where the rising temperature graph for May, you ask? Well, I don’t do temperature. I am cloud and rain person. A nice graph of the temperature trend for May, which we know is upward on average for the whole month, can be found here at the Western Regional Climate Center, housed at the cloud seeding-inclined Desert Research Institute of the University of Nevada which issues misleading PR pieces on cloud seeding which they conduct for the State of Nevada (no, you won’t find them, in spite of being an academic institution, doing proper randomized cloud seeding experiments, but rather bogus-style “operational” seeding. They’d be AFRAID of doing a proper long-term, double blind randomized experiment using independent evaluators! If I was them, I would be afraid, too, about what such an experiment might tell their long term funders! Don’t get me started on cloud seeding discussions!

Now, where was I?

Oh, yeah, climate. Don’t get me started about the parallels between some aspects of the purveyors of global warming info (I’m talking exaggerations, not the prospect of it which I have to grudgingly go along with, “grudgingly” because I really hope there’ll be an ice age tomorrow when I read some of the exaggerations that come out for the purpose of scaring people, like this or that storm or tornado was due to global warming.

Yes, there are parallels between cloud seeding claims and some of the GW ones, mostly, in this writer’s opinion, driven by the need for funding.

Now, an hour later, back to that graph at DRI…. You can see that the temperature at the U of A rises steadily throughout May on average. We knew that already, so there really wasn’t much point in showing it, but I feel a lot better now having exhausted some hot air myself.

The End.

Dusty humbug produces 0.01 inch of rain in Catalina

When the massive dust cloud rolled in from Tucson-Oro Valley, I heard a neighbor screaming at the kids outside, “Go inside, the rain is coming!” A “humbug” is an imposter, meant to deceive, and for a time, I’ll bet many folks, like my neighbor, thought a good rain was coming along with the darkening sky (composed mainly of….”Altostratus cumulonimbogenitus”–kind of a silly name, some with areas of virga). There were also dark-looking Altocumulus opacus clouds, and Cumulus humilis at the bottom of the As here and there (e.g., see second photo). So, it was a threatening sky to be sure!

Go here to see dust storm roar through Tucson, courtesy of your University of Arizona Wildcats Weather Department. Very exciting! Plus you will see all the cloud movement that was going on before the dust hit.

Below are a few shots from yesterday’s dramatic dust cloud as it rolled and roiled northwestward out of the Tucson metro area and up the Oro Valley. First, a cloud shot that showed truly remarkable Cumulus-Cumulonimbus development east of the Catalinas just after 7 AM AST yesterday. You knew at this point, it was going to be an interesting day with so much so early.

SONY DSC — Then, "whilst" in a local gym, this came round the corner of Pusch Ridge (2:59 PM AST)

All this was caused by the huge splash of rain to the east and southeast of Tucson yesterday earlier in the day. With high bases, and lots of dry air below, as you all know by now, the scene was set for a massive drop of cold air as the rain evaporated below the bottoms of those clouds.

Next: June preview in May

The total of maximum temperatures added together over the next 7 days will be HUNDREDS of degrees! This makes no sense at all, but it does sound dramatic. It will be hot for awhile.

But then what?

Pretty strong signal from the NOAA Spaghetti Factory that another cut off low or trough will barge into the State by the 25th of May. With that would be a strong cooling, and maybe some rain.

The End.