Yesterday, after an ordinary beginning,, finished in a spectacular, if likely artificial way. Let us work our way through yesterday’s cloudulations:
7:39 AM. I thought this was a cute display by this little cloud, making its own little shadow rays as the sun made its way up from behind the Catlinas.7:40 AM. But what kind of cloud is it? It, to these eyes, is all ice, but LOOKS like an Altocumulus cloud. But those clouds are all or mostly comprised of liquid drops. And you can see that this little guy is well BELOW a higher layer of ice cloud, we might call CIrrostratus, or a thin Altostratus. Oh, well, let’s move on to something explicable….
7:41 AM. Hmmmm. Quite a linear virga feature over there. There are THREE cloud layers evident here, a thin Altocumulus layer, that dark cloud on the left, and patch of what I could call, Altostratus extending from the left corner to the right corner, and a thin layer of CIrrostratus on top.7:41 AM. Let’s go zooming and check it out…. Though we don’t know for SURE, anytime you see this kind of linear virga anomaly, you should be smelling aircraft exhaust. Now, when you think about our fabulous sunset last evening and what that looked like, take a closer look at this photo.
Later that morning…..
10:53 AM. It was nice to see low clouds topping Sam Ridge at dawn yesterday, the lower boundary layer air (where convection takes place) moist for a change. Later they devolved into small Cumulus (humilis and fractus).3:29 PM. A day with mostly ice clouds on top of Catalina, but here, off in the distance below the Cirrostratus, is an invading layer of Altostratus and Altocumulus that will set the stage for sunset glory later. You may be able to detect a faint halo, upper center. By the way, Cirrostratus typically deepens downward to morph into Altostratus, usually an ice cloud, too, but is deep enough to produce gray shading, and when its really thick or has embedded droplet clouds, hides the sun.4:02 PM. Yep, moving right in. This is a very complex scene. There’s aCirrostratus ice layer. upper right quadrant , on top of everything. Below that, what appears here as a distinctly lower separate layer, a mix of Altocumulus (those dark cloudlets composed all or mostly of liquid droplets) and Altostratus (mostly or all ice, the smudgy more diffuse dark areas) . We can never forget that Altocumulus can morph into Altostratus, which would then be called, “Altostratus altocumulotransmutatus.” Tell that to your friends! (Well, maybe not.)4:15 PM. Caught this bumpy aircraft contrail at CIrrus levels. Look how how the exhaust and water vapor that formed this, though output from an aircraft in a steady state, how the wing tip vorices (apparently) get entertwined at regular intervals with more exhaust and water vapor in those blobs.
But let’s go zooming up to flight level and take a closer look for a second:
A “mammatus” (or as the ladies like to call it. a testicularis contrail (the resemblances are pretty good). Almost certainly this is due to combining wing tip vortices. Many aircraft now have devices to defeat wing tip vortices, phenomenon that reduce flight efficiency. In both cases above, the ice particles have not grown enough to produce fallstreaks. These images tell us that SOME aircraft that produce ice in supercooled Altocumulus clouds, as we in Catalina have seen lately, are likely to have bunches of ice trails rather than a continuum if produced in a uniform cloud, anyway.
Now, where was I? Got mammatus on my mind again. I love mammatus so much… Oh, yeah, that sunset yesterday…..
5:13 PM. Ran out to check sunset status, and saw this feature advancing rapidly toward Catalina.5:18 PM. Zoomed view; getting close to passing overhead. You might be able to notice that these pretty regularly spaced trails are BELOW the Altocumulus clouds, and there’s a clearing that’s been produced. All evidence of an artificial production of these trails. But belng below the Altocu, you might also have started to wonder whether the setting sun would light them up….
And the sun did its job….producing one of the greatest sunset scenes we’ve seen in a long time, even if phony (haha):
5:23 PM. Not zoomed, still a few minutes away to overhead passage. Very exciting to think this was going to pass overhead!5:23 PM. Zoomed view. Again the pretty regular spacing is circumstantial evidence that nature didn’t do it.5:25 PM. Thank you sun! Looks pretty round again, which is good.5:27 PM. Oh, so pretty.5:27 PM. Zooming again. Wow.5:28 PM. Another view of the same thing.5:28 PM. Our trails compared to the rest of the Altocumulus deck. Not much going on elsewhere in the way of natural virga.5:29 PM. Taking WAY too many photos of the same thing. Out of control… Here I demonstrate that with another photo of the same thing.
5:30 PM. After the trail hoopla, it was time to concentrate on the fabulous sunset taking place to the southwest of Catalina.5:30 PM. Zooming in on interesting features; long trails, one with a clearing above it. Was it another aircraft-induced trail of ice and clearing above it? Probably. The trails to the left aren’t as obviously produced by an aircraft, but I do think so anyway in this burst of objectivity. Recall that I have been trained as a “scientist” and don’t care if I am wrong, but only about truth, as best as I can make it out.
Finally, let look at the TUS sounding for last evening, see how cold those Ac cloud were with the ice trail in them:
Results of the Tucson rawinsonde balloon launch yesterday at about 3:30 PM. Goes up at about 1,000 feet a minute, so takes about 100 minutes to get to 100, 000 feet. They pop somewhere around that height or a little above. THought you like to know that. They have a little parachute to that when they come down, they don’t bonk you too hard. Once in awhile people find them in remote areas downwind. You can send them back in to the NWS, too!
The astounding thing here, something that goes against everything I believe about clouds, is that it is indicated that the Altocumulus, lacking much natural ice, was at -30° C! Yikes! No wonder aircraft were producing ice trails and stuff yesterday afternoon.
You have to conclude there were almost no natural “ice nuclei” up there at, oh about 24,000 feet above sea level. This is not the first time for such an occurrence of liquid clouds sans much ice at low temperatures1, but they are rare IME. This would never occur in a boundary layer cloud, that is, one where material from the earth’s surface is getting into the clouds, like the omnipresent dust, or biogenic ice nuclei.
The weather ahead
Some “fantasy” storms with rain in them for Catalina, are now seen on the model predictions beyond a week. Spaghetti is favoring this new development now. So, something to keep an eye on.
The view from here? Precip here is “in the bag” because going on subjective feelings, I really want to see a good rain here!
The End
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1The famous John Hallett said he saw an Altocumulus lenticularis sans ice at -35°C in a conference preprint! Rangno and Hobbs (1986) claimed to have detected droplets in Altocumulus like clouds at the top of a storm on the Washington coast at -44°C. Their claim, first published in a conference preprint, was later rejected by the J. Atmos. Sci.
The full moon of December 11, 2008. Thought maybe you’d like to see it in case you missed it, or see it again if you did see it. Maybe you had a special memory with this moon.7:09 AM. Altocumulus perlucidus with a little lenticular underneath.7:10 AM. Zooming and zooming.7:10 AM. Zooming some more.7:14 AM. Iridescence is evident in the cloud ripples just above the mountain silhouette.7:16 AM, Contrails were soon visible in our Altocumulus layer, the aircraft making it at the right edge of the photo. Appeared to be in a climb out going right to left. And, when you see these “high temperature contrails” in Altocumulus, you can be sure ice will form and rifts will develop as a little bit of light snow develops and falls out. The jillions of ice crystals in the contrail cause the droplets in the Altocumulus to evaporate, in a way, gutting it. An ice crystal is like a low pressure center when amid droplets; the droplets evaporate and those water molecules deposit themselves on the ice crystal, a process named after the discoverers, Wegner-Bergeron-Findeisen. Eventually the crystal is large enough to settle out and a clear streak results unless the air is rising rapidly and can replace the droplets (as generally happens in storms). Sometimes the lift in the Altocumulus layer is enough that a clear canal caused by an aircraft can fill back in after many minutes.7:18 AM. Two aircraft contrails, about a minute old. After two or three more minutes, they will not be visible within the cloud, though ice is forming, decimating the droplets around the intense streamers of ice in the contrail.7:28 AM. The small ice canal (the ice is hanging just below the Altocumulus clouds–kind of hard to make out, but its there.7:42 AM. Those little clear streaks are hardly noticeable now, partly because they were quite narrow, and because of perspective and things bunching up in the distance.
Suggested locations of cloud layers. The Altocumulus layer in which the contrails were embedded seems to be at -25°C, a “normal” temperature for this kind of “high temperature contrail”. In general contrails are not supposed to occur until the temperature is below about -35° C and the air is moist, thus they are usually seen amid or near Cirrus clouds. not down in Altocumulus. See usual contrail height at Cirrus levels in moon photo.
As the morning wore on, the Altocumulus deck faded away, moving east, and we were left with some Cirrus clouds, but what kind?
10:58 AM. Cirrus of some type, but notice there is absolutely no fibrous details (strands and such) as we normally see in Cirrus. Could be transverse waves in a Cirrostratus deck since Cirrostratus can be fog like, have no detail, in a version we call, Cirrostratus nebulosus. The up and down motions would cause clearings perpendicular to the wind up there. The lack of strands and uniformity in these bands suggests very tiny ice crystals, ones having very little fallspeeds.2:34 PM. Some nice “hovercraft” clouds, Altocumulus lenticularis off in the distance SSW. Hung around out there for a couple of hours.3:17 PM. This one appeared to be concave upward, which was a little odd. Zoomed view next.3:17 PM. Looks like the inside is higher than the outside. Huh.
Well, that was it for photography yesterday.
Doesn’t seem to be any reliable indication of rain in sight. Oh, sure, rain here pops up in the models almost every day, but its about 12-15 days out. As the model gets closer to the day it predicted rain, it seems to go away like the “water mirage” on a hot paved road; always ahead of you, but you never get to it. We’ve had some major rains indicated in the models as of a few days ago, but spaghetti was never very high on those events (clustering those crazy lines in a trough over us), so it wasn’t even worth mentioning.
Many strange1 and wonderful sights were seen yesterday; I could feel the excitement out there as one cloud microstructural mystery after another regaled our Catalina skies.
7:24 AM. Here, a tiny highlighted flake of Altocumulus floating above a mass of light snow/ice crystals, maybe straight below it. This is one the classic mysteries we deal with in “cloud microstructure”; the oddity of nature preferring to generate a droplet before an ice crystal at least to somewhere in the -30°s C. Liquid clouds often are at the top of Altostratus and Nimbostratus (rainy or snowy days) providing the tops aren’t too much colder than -30° C. How strange is it to have liquid water at the lowest temperatures in a cloud system, with all the ice and snow underneath, as shown in this photo (though here they are no longer connected).7:24 AM/ I think there is itty bitty droplet cloud at the very top bright dot there. A droplet cloud was likely much broader to have produced all the ice we see below that bright dot of liquid cloud.7:26 AM. Looking afar, to the SW, there’s what appears to be an Altocumulus (droplet cloud) with a few ice crystals underneat it, especially to the right.
How cold are these clouds? Lets look at the TUS sounding, launched at about 3:30 AM yesterday morning.
The TUS rawinsonde balloon data for yesterday morning before dawn. That Altocumulus layer, and the other clouds above were likely at the pinched point above, topping out at -27°C and up around 23,000 feet above sea level (400 millibars), pretty darn cold. But, as you saw in the 3rd photo, not a lot of ice is being generated at this temperature by that patch of Altocumulus clouds to the SW. Not sure why, but its pretty remarkable and that is likely due to small droplet sizes AND a lack of ice nuclei, most of which are known to originate with soil particles When you see these rare occurrences of all or mostly droplet clouds at low temperatures (<-20° C in particular, get ready to see hole punch and ice canals produced by aircraft, a kind of inadvertent cloud seeding.
That bank of Altocumulus was racing at more than 50 mph toward Catalina, and so it got here in a hurry. And, as it got closer, it was also getting more into some airways at that height, possibly descents into PHX since the height of those clouds was below normal jet cruising levels at 23,000 feet Above Sea Level.
7:55 AM. This is one of the strangest sights I have ever seen. Why? On the left side of this photo, the clouds are completely glaciated, composed of ice, while along a line to the right, there’s no sign of ice in Altocumulus clouds that appear to be at the same height (namely, temperature). I have no explanation for this scene, except those involving a lot hand-waving, so we’ll just let go, except that we speculate that the Ac layer was a little lower (warmer)? Could have been.
Now for the aircraft effects. Hardly a few minutes go by before aircraft began marking up this cold Altocumulus layer. Notice that it doesn’t seem to be producing much or any ice on its own, making aircraft inadvertent seeding lines and holes where tremendous numbers of ice crystals are generated immediately present. Here’s the first of many:
8:16 AM. An icy canal due to the passage of an aircraft rips through this pristine layer of Altocumulus whose temperature was around -25° C. The view is looking S toward Tucson, but is unlikely to have been an aircraft landing there because this layer was above 20,000 feet Above Sea Level. An aircraft lanidng at TUS would be much lower, this close. The passage of the aircraft was likely 10 or more minutes before this photo.8:19 AM. The ice canal is broadening due to turbulence, and ice is not plainly evident to all Cloud Maven Juniors or we will have to go over discerning ice from droplet clouds at the next club meeting.8:20 AM. A view of the northwest end of this aircraft-produced ice canal. Several others became apparent, too.
Heading for Catalina, this:
9:11 AM. Heading for Catalina, a whole mess of aircraft induced ice in that poor Altocumulus layer. The hole punch was likely due to an aircraft climbing out of or descending into TUS. The age of a hole that large, with ice below it like this would be something of the order of at least half an hour to an hour old. Just behind the hole is a new contrail in the Ac clouds,9:23 AM. Hole punch area and ice canal arrive over Catalina! Losing control here, taking photo and photo, now looking for stragne optics, usually observed with aircraft produced ice particles because they are so numerous, compete for the available moisture and therefore remain tiny and perfect, prisms, plates, short column ice crystals, ones that can do a lot of optical stuff.
Here’s the south end of that ice canal:
9:24 AM. Also note iconic horse wind vane, and real wind vane atop a personal weather station. Doesn’t everyone have a “PWS”?
Looking straight up at the icy heart of a hole punch region caused by an aircraft. I am sure you have never done this before! This is gonna be a great blog with all these new things for you!
9:27 AM. Look at the detail in the ice, those fine, fine strands! Amazing. The thickest strand might be due to the higher liquiid water in the heart of one of those little Altocumulus cloudlets. ??? Look how much wind shear there is, those little itty bitty ice crystals falling so far behind the parent cloud, the streamers flattening out because the poor little guys, already undersized to begin with, are getting smaller and smaller, the fall velocity getting less and less until the strands are almost horizontal.9:27 AM. Looking at this gorgeously uniform layer of Altocumulus perlucidus 9honeycomb of elements) translucidus (no shadows). To me this is a phenomenal scene, though maybe to u, not so much, which is understandable.9:30 AM. The expected intense optical phenomena began to occur in these aircraft contrail remains. Here a parhelia, or sundog. More fireworks in a bit.9:30 AM. While the parhelia was in its full display, very intense, this was the ice canal passing overhead. Look at the regular spacing of these strands of ice, Might be due to the spacing of the cloudlets in the Altocumulus layer, the spaces between them not producing much ice, or, as we know, contrails tend to clump behind the aircraft likely due to wingtip vortices interacting and combining masses of exhaust water and crud. This is now about an hour and fifteen minutes old, since we saw it way out to the west at 8:16 AM shortly after it formed.9:37 AM. Here’s what a new aircraft contrail in these clouds looks like, this one about 60 s old looks like. Note all the irregularity in the contrail from the get-go.
As the south end of the original ice canal began to enter the refraction zone for simple ice crystals around the sun, usually at the 22° degree halo position, things began to light up with a particularly bright circumzenithal arc (more often observed on a halo) or colorful (in this case) partial “reverse halo”. The colors (iridescence) due to the refracting of light within very small ice crystals. Normally iridescence is seen near the sun in Cirrocumulus clouds or the then edges of other droplet clouds. Very exciting.
9:44 AM. A part of a halo curving in the wrong direction, away from the sun! (This is actually called a circumzenithal arc).9:44 AM. Taking up you up thousands and thousands of feet via a zoomed view. Pretty cool, eh? Notice how much its moved in just seconds, You really have to let your coffee get cold if you’re a photographer and you want to get the best shots of this kind of phenomenon. You really can’t do anything but keep watching every second!9:44 AM, again. All these changes took place within the minute between 9:44 and 9:45 AM! Here, the next grouping of ice strands is being lit up.9:48 AM. Just a pretty scene. Altocumulus perlucidus translucidus, pocked with aircraft contrails, if you look real close. Make me move: $1 billion dollars…9:54 AM. Its not even 10 AM and now this comes along, this fabulously complex zone of CIrrocumulus (at the same level of the Ac clouds) at the tail of the Altocumulus. You can see the much higher Cirrus going crossways, lower center. See TUS sounding for height of Ci.
Then this strange sight:
12:29 PM. A row of Altocumulus or Cirrocumulus, each formed by a little upward bump in the atmosphere of a layer just a hair below saturation. Just rising a few hundred feet or so causes these cloudlets to form. Why aren’t they everywhere? Might be drier. Bumps like this are always present in the atmosphere, especially if there are mountains upwind. Not taken while driving, of course, ; just looks like it thanks to photoshop.
The day closed out with a lower layer of Altocumulus moving in, this layer, according to the TUS sounding, at “only’ -17° C, and little ice detected. Below, at 2:09 PM:
2:09 PM. Altocumulus perlucidus translucidus. A natural conversion to ice is occurring on the right side of the photo.4:42 PM. So pretty these Altocu.
4:41 PM. A strand of finely patterned Cirrocumulus shot out of the SW as the sun declined.The Tucson afternoon rawinsonde . launched around 3:30 PM. The Cirrocu in the above photo was likely also at the Cirrus level indicated above.
U of AZ mod thinks so light rain will develop around here in the mid-later afternoon.
The End
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1“stragne” above, originally an inadvertent typo, but left in place as another cheap trick to get draw the curiosity of readers who might wonder what stragne is.
“Too many pictures, for one site…”, a continuing theme here1, to paraphrase “? and the Mysterians1“.
Two stations near Picture Rocks reported 1.25 and 1.35 inches, respectively, so some major rain fell fairly close to us. You can see the amount arounds around the State or here at the Banner U of AZ rainlog,org site.
Below your October 8th, 2016 cloud day, a Saturday in which the author’s former company fubball team, the Washington Huskies, spanked the Nike University of Oregon Duck, 70-21, ending years of futility against the billionaire’s sports teams. Too bad Washington multi-billionaire Gates is more interested in saving the world instead of helping the Huskies get better in sports like Phil Knight does with The Duck there in Duckville, OR….
Oh, well, off task there for a minute. I’m back now!
7:06 AM. Pretty Cirrus uncinus (tufted ice clouds with the larger ice crystals falling out where the wind is not as strong as where the head is) with a few Altocumulus over on the left.8:43 AM. The really sharp-eyed cloud maven junior person would have noticed these little icy trails in a sliver of Altocumulus or Cirrocumulus. These supercooled clouds were converted to ice along the path of the aircraft. The brighter one is the most recent one and is so white due to the extremely high concentrations of tiny (order of 10s of microns) germ-like ice crystals. Concentrations would be something like 10s of thousand per liter. Once formed, they compete for the available moisture, some evaporating, some able to grow larger and fall out just as ice crystals do in Cirrus clouds. The less white trail is older and is one where the crystals are spreading out and also evaporating so the concentrations are much less. Presently it is believe that the air going over the wing of a jet drops the temperature to below -39° C where crystals form spontaneously and can survive and grow within a supercooled water cloud egad this is getting to be a long caption.
Now, here where the excitement begins. Recall Mike L. and Bobby Maddox, both super experts concerning convection, called for severe storms and large hail today due to what the models were showing in the vertical wind profile and the amount of moisture available. Below, we start yesterday chapter of convection, and see where it leads.
3:47 PM. Beginning to think Mike L and Bobby M are going to be wrong. Cumulus in the heat of the day have only reached moderate, “congestus” sizes around here, though Cumulonimbus cloud tops can be seen off in the distance.2:50 PM. Another pretty sky scene with an ineffectual Cumulus congestus there north of Saddlebrooke. Looks like is has a little ice ejecta on the far right, middle. But see how any rain would fall out not within the main cloud body but out the side away from the base. More evaporating of any drops would occur. This is happening due to the moderate southwesterly winds higher up, with slower winds from the south below. Thinking about taking a nap….2:51 PM. On second thought, maybe I should see how the septic repair is going…. Looks OK. Wonder how many thousands it will be?2:58 PM. Even though it looks like Mike and Bob are still going to be wrong, at least someone’s getting some good TSTMS (weather text for “thunderstorms” in case you do that, but don’t do it whilst you’re driving, a public message from your CMP. Some cloud science: On the right is a turret that’s climbed up beyond the level of “glaciation” but still contains tons of water. Center left, is a complex of turrets a little behind that one that are taller, and in those tops you woud find little or no water, just ice crystals. Can you see the difference in texture between the rising turret full of water (though graupel, hail, and small ice crystals are likely inside it)3:58 PM. Septic crew was asking, “where’s the hail you said would happen today?” I corrected them by saying that Mike and Bobby told me that, I didn’t personally make that forecast. I told them, hang on, things are starting to happen. And, about this time, the NWS started to issue severe TSTM alerts for Cochise County due HAIL and high winds! Still, it didn’t yet look that great for us here in Catalina, Oro Valley area. The Cbs shown here are that “tough.”4:27 PM. Still kind of bored, think I’ll take picture of an interesting shadow pattern.4:34 PM. Gads, looks awful out there. Only the anvil is left of a former thunderstorm toward Twin Peaks as the wind shear aloft rips from it from its root base. Not too bad there on the left, though. Still looks like a dud day for us in Catalina anyway at this moment.4:55 PM. Modest Cumulonimbus forms in the lee of the Charouleaiu Gap. Notice here that looking to the NE you can only see the rising turret part of this Cumulonimbus. The anvil is trailing downwind away from you, some of that anvil can be seen at the far right,just above the ridge. But you can clearly see some precip is falling out of this, Code 1 (transparent shaft) likely because as we saw earlier, the precip is not falling through the whole depth of the cloud but is falling from a higher portion of the cloud that has been blown off toward the NE before the precip got going in it.5:01 PM. Yikes, when did this happen? Must have been between commercials during football viewing. You can only go outsie during commercials so you miss some things. Bobby and Mike are going to be correct for our own backyard! Hope we get something, and it appears to be upwind of Catalina!5:06 PM. Just because it was pretty. Cumulus congestus tops, brilliantly white (that higher one in the back).5:31 PM. More commercials allow a quick trip down the road to get this. Of concern, the shafting is shifting rightward and away from us. What’s upwind is now the Code 1 transparent rain. BUT, the base in the middle of the photo, and close by, looks great! Perhaps some stupefying dump will emerge from that and grow more good base material exactly upwind of us!5:58 PM. Another discouraging day of promise gone unfulfilled here in Catalina/Sutherland Heights. Feelling sad, though I would take a funny picture of my shadow whilst walking the dogs at half time, makes me look bigger than I really am. made me smile amid the dismal sprinkle that started to fall, giving us yet another “trace” of rain day.6:06 PM. There goes our complex of rain, thunder and lightning off into the distance. Still, the scene was great.6:08 PM. Day ended with some dramatic, colorful scenes, something said here alot, but true.
The End.
1If you don’t believe ? said something like that, go here
The clouds were somewhat of a disappointment yesterday, not the stupendous photogenic day CM was expecting.
Maybe CM is total fraud, gets Big Oil funding and should be investigated by Rep. Grijalva as other weather folk are, like the great Prof. and National Academy of Sciences Fellow, Dr. Judy Curry, a friend, and about whom I say on a link to her blog here, and from this blog’s very beginning, “The only link you will need.” I said that because Judy2 is a top scientist, and is eminently fair in this polarized issue.
I am in real trouble! Will remove that link immediately1 before our very own “climate thought enforcer”, Demo Rep. Grijalva, AZ, finds it using a spy bot! No telling how far down the influence chain it will go, maybe all the way down to here, where there is virtually no influence!
Back to clouds…….
Only late in the day did the delicate patterns expected to happen ALL DAY appear, again, with iridescence, always nice to see.
The media, Bob, and our good NWS, of course, are all over the incoming rain in great detail. In fact, it will take you half a day to read all the warnings on this storm issued by our Tucson NWS.
So why duplicate existing information that might be only slightly different than the prevailing general consensus on the storm amounts, and then maybe be investigated for going against a consensus? No, not worth it. Best to be safe, not say things against The Machine. (OK, maybe overdoing it here.)
In the meantime, the upper low off southern Cal and Baja has fomented an extremely strong band of rain, now lying across SE Cal and the Colorado River Valley where dry locations like Blythe are getting more than an inch over the past 24 h. Same for northern Baja where some places are approaching 2-3 inches, great for them. You can see how the rain is piling up in those locations here. In sum, this is a fabulous storm for northern Mexico and the SW US, whether WE get our 0.915 inches, as foretold here, or not! Rejoice in the joy of others. Looking for an arcus cloud fronting the main rainband, too, that low hanging cloud in a line that tells you a windshift is coming. Still expecting, hoping, for thunder today to add to the wind and rain drama.
Also, the present cloud cover, as the trough ejects toward us, will deepen up and rain will form upwind and around here as that happens, so it won’t JUST be the eastward movement of the existing band. This means you might be surprised by rain if you’re outside hiking and think the band itself is hours away. Expecting rain to be in the area by mid-morning, certainly not later than noon, with the main blast (fronted by something akin to an arcus cloud) later in the day. OK, just checked the U of AZ mod run from 11 PM AST, and that is what it is saying as well! Wow.
Finally, if you care, yesterday’s clouds:
6:45 AM. Your sunrise color, thanks to a line of broken Cirrus spissatus. Jet stream Cirrus streak, as a matter of fact, moving along at about 110 mph.9:47 AM. Ruffle of Sc topped Mt. Lemmon, while strange clouds formed just upwind of them. These kinds of shapes suggest an inversion where the air resists further upward movement and a smoothing occurs at the top similar to a lenticular cloud. Photo taken at the Golder Ranch Dr. cattleguard. which really doesn’t work that well, as the neighbors below here will tell you.The 5 AM, March 1st, balloon sounding for TUS.9:53 AM. Looks like a crab with four pinchers. How funny.12:23 PM. Shredding tops of small Cumulus like this indicate that the air is very dry just above their tops, and the shreds racing off to the right, indicate how fast the wind increased as you went upward.2:58 PM. Something is changing here. Notice how the tops are bulging and not immediately being torn into shreds. The air was likely moistening above cloud tops, and the inversion holding the tops back, weakening as our storm gets a little closer.4:19 PM. A line of still larger Cumulus had formed to the west, indicating more moistening and “de-stabilization” of the air. However, the upper low was not advancing toward us any longer and no further development occurred as stagnated, ratcheting up its rainband over eastern Cal and western AZ. The TUS balloon sounding suggested tops were getting close to the normal ice-forming level here, -10 C, the slight inversion on the morning sounding at 13,000 feet above sea level, and the one likely to have caused those smooth morning clouds, was gone.6:07 PM. Just before sunset from near Oracle where we took mom for her BD. The heavier Cumulus clouds faded with the sun. They will arise today!
Below, just some pretty patterns observed later in the day. Click to see larger versions.
3:28 PM. Cirrocumulus began to appear.3:36 PM. Twisted, tortured Cirrus (fibratus?).3:50 PM. Another view of Cirrocumulus. Though these clouds are still composed of liquid droplets, the 5 PM TUS sounding suggests they were at about -30 C in temperature. It happens.4:00 PM. An incredibly complex array of Cirrocumulus overhead. Due to perspective, its about the only view that you can really see how complex the patterns are.4:20 PM. Some iridescence for you.6:00 PM. At Oracle, AZ.6:22 PM. Finally, from the “Not-taken-while-driving-since-that-would-be-crazy-though-it-looks-like-it-was” collection, this oddity. Looks like an high temperature aircraft contrail (aka, “APIP”) in the lower center. And the trail seems to shoot up into the cloud Altocumulus cloud layer (or down out of it). Have never seen that kind of aircraft track before since it looks so steep! “High temperature” here means that it formed at temperatures above about -35 C.
Whew, the end.
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1Not!!!!!! I thought this was a good read about this deplorable new stage of “climate thought enforcement” now in progress. It was brought to my attention by climate folk hero, friend, and big troublemaker, Mark Albright. Wow, maybe Mark will be investigated, too! Maybe I should excise his name….
2I remember, too, how cute she was when she worked my lab/office at the University of Washington in the mid-1980s, and thought about asking her out, to detract from a serious commentary here. She was a Penn State grad student, not a U of WA employee; still, to ask her out would have been untoward. A human commentary like this, one about feelings and things, help boost blog attendance.
If you thought those high clouds were moving faster than usual, you were right. The winds were about 120 mph at that level, about 28,000 feet above sea level, and just over 150 mph a few thousand feet above that level.
You may have noticed two things, if you are good, that there were repeated formations of delicate Cirrocumulus clouds, likely starting as liquid drops, but quickly transitioned into Cirrus. Sometimes, it was just flocculent Cirrus the whole way to us from the west.
The second thing that you may have noticed was that there was always an upwind clearing zone that remained stationary until late afternoon when it finally passed overhead. Yesterday’s high clouds formed at that back edge.
How can you tell that the upwind edge of that sheet of clouds was initially composed of liquid droplets, but then froze naturally within a minute or three as it jetted downstream?
Perform an experiment to demonstrate the two phases.
In this case we will have an ice producing aircraft fly through both regions, the droplet region, and also the region where no droplets exist because they have frozen and are growing larger and larger as ice crystals.
What will be the predictable result of two ice-producing aircraft flying through these two different phases?
In the liquid cloud region, an ice canal will develop as the appearance of ice in a droplet cloud results in the evaporation of liquid droplets, the molecules of vapor from the evaporating droplets provide “food” for fattening ice crystals, where “deposition” takes place. Under a microscope you would see the crystals getting larger, growing extensions; you would not be able to see the molecules producing that, of course.
The result of our experiment, something you likely will never see again in my lifetime:
3:36 PM. Letting the font size demonstrate the excitement I was feeling, that excitement filling the whole sky! Maybe the temperature in this inadvertent experiment would be stupefyingly low, like -40 C (-40 F), in which case I might get a publication of my photos. Another great aspect was that this canal was streaking toward me (us)! It just could not have been a better situation. And I would add, in retirement mind you, to my CV and I don’t even have a grant! It was going to be a great day!3:40 PM. See photo.3:47 PM. Normal contrail in ice cloud continues to evolve as ice canal gets closer.3:49 PM. The aircraft contrail that was emitted in all ice clouds. Still are all ice, though you may say they look awfully tufted like they could have droplets. They’re glaciated, all ice. Go with me on this. I’m the cloud maven.Helping hand points out ice canal. By this time the clouds around that ice canal had also transitioned to ice.Also at 3:47 PM, a zoomed view of ice canal. You can see the little ice fibers in that clearing, the ones than caused the evaporation of the droplets around the initial ice formation. Likely at this point that the surrounding cloud, though rather “flocculent” looking was also now ice.3:52 PM. As usually happens with aircraft produced ice, the tiny, overabundant crystals are pristine, perfectly shaped hexagonal solid columns or hexagonal plates, and that perfect shape usually results in strong optical phenomena at the point where a sun dog or 22 degree halo is observed due to the refraction of sunlight in those crystals. You only had seconds to see this, those clouds were moving SO FAST, and I missed the brightest point.
3:53 PM. One final look at our receding ice canal, gradually being filled in by natural Cirrus.
Was holding breath, thinking about that CV enhancement, waiting for the TUS sounding, which was already in the air when these last few photos were taken, and, more importantly, it was going up near where the clouds were forming, so the moist level intercepted and its temperature would be pretty accurate for this shots. Now, if its -40 C, oh man, we got a pub! -36 C, maybe. Temperature greater than about -35 C? No pub, well, except here, which is something. That’s because liquid drops at temperatures between -30 and -35 C have been reported by remote sensing and aircraft repeatedly. Nature abhors forming an ice crystal in clouds without going through the liquid phase first.
Within a couple of hours the TUS sounding was in, and here it is:
The TUS balloon sounding launched about 3:30 PM, rise rate about 1,000 feet a minute. Shows Cirrocu layer was “only” about -33 C (-27 F). Boohoo.
I wasn’t going to get a journal pub. I thought about that guy that thought he was going to win the Nobel Prize…..and I know now how he felt.
Now about those pretty patterns, by Simon and Garfunkel. Enjoy.
Jet core at 18,000 feet now passing overhead and DRIZZLE or very light rain from warm processes now (4:15 AM) evident on the Catalina Mountains. The passage of that jet core at that level (500 millibars) seems to be an almost black-white measurable rain or no rain discriminator in the Southwest US, so as that happens right now, chances of some measurable rain are good. Still not expected to be more than 0.25 inches, but will now at least be 0.01!
The low clouds are pretty shallow now, and, if they rain, shallow clouds with tops warmer than -5 C (23 F) have to be pretty clean for that to happen. Clean clouds is got bigger droplets, ones that reach the Hocking-Jonas threshold of between 30-40 microns in size and can collide and stick together forming still much larger drops that collect more and more tiny cloud droplets, kind of a chain reaction, as Nobel Laureate in chemistry Irving Langmuir described it back in 1948 after he got interested in clouds and rainmaking.
However, the “collision with coalescence process will be short-lived as cloud tops go up to well below freezing level this morning, and real rain falls (as is happening now (7:18 AM) down in TUS and to our NW.
Measurable rain should be just on the doorstep, and it will have to develop in upwind clouds as they approach us and the air begins to rise as it goes uphill from the lower deserts and encounters the Catalinas’ there isn’t much in the way of radar echoes upwind of us now.
The development of rain in clouds as they approach us in marginal rain situations like this one is not terribly unusual. Sometimes, as a friend pointed out, new echoes in deepening clouds can appear over and over again near where I-10 runs to the SW and W of us in a purely orographic situation.
This is what CMP is hoping for, and the result of that might be a tenth of an inch or more.
Here it is. You may need an optical enhancement tool to see the radar echo speck nearest Catalina, and its not the one nearest the arrowhead below, but continue in that direction:
Satellite and radar imagery for midnight last night. Notice cloud blob and radar echoes over and near Catalina, Arizona. I really thought there’d be some drops here as this went over!
You can also check on all the rain that fell overnight in the region here, courtesy of Pima County ALERT rain gauges. BTW, they aren’t capable of reporting traces, so if you see bunches of zeroes, it doesn’t mean some drops didn’t fall somewhere in the network.
Non-verification of this rain can also be found via our fine TUS NWS “storm total” view, 10:30 PM to 4:30 AM this morning:
Regional radar-derived storm total from “rainy cloud blob.” Arrow almost reaches Catalina; didn’t want to cover up a pixel of rain, if there. THAT radar did not pick up the rain I feel must have fallen, so we have quite a conundrum. If you would like to see for yourself how much rain fell last night, go here. Will be looking for drop images in the dust as soon as it gets light, too!
In the meantime, all those rainy cloud blobs to our NW right now (first image) look like they will be able to just make it to Catalinaland after all.
In our last chapter, it looked like the strong cold front would move through tomorrow as just a dry cold one, but now the chances of having a little rain (a wet cold one) have been zooming up. The models have readjusted their thinking and now that critical ingredient, the core of the jet stream (at 500 mb) passing over us ahead of the trough core itself is being predicted.
And with that configuration as the front goes by Catalina, and believe me you’ll know by the 10-15 degree temperature drop, a tiny amount of rain might fall. Also, look for a pronounced lowering of cloud bases to the W-N of Catalina as it gets close, something in the way of an “arcus cloud”, marking the leading edge of the windshift to the N. Could be nice and dramatic looking tomorrow. Those cloud base lowerings are pretty common with fronts here.
How much rain?
Oh, possibilities range between 0 (a complete bust is still possible) to only about 0.25 inches, tops in the “best” of circumstances. But, this keyboard would like to see ANYTHING measurable; that would bring happiness.
There are some more rain blobs showing up in regular intervals in the days ahead for you to think about, as rendered by IPS MeteoStar. Arrows have been added to show you where you are, if you are in SE Arizona:
Valid tomorrow morning at 11 AM AST. Colored areas denote regions where the model has calculated precipitation during the preceding 6 h.
In the storm below, which is pretty much going to happen now, the range of amounts as seen from here, at least 0.15 inches, top, 0.50 inches, best guess, therefore, 0.33 inches (from averaging the two.)
Val at 11 PM, March 1st. Colored areas are those in which the model has calculated that precip has fallen during the prior 6 h.
There’s great uncertainly in whether this last storm will actually occur, so range of amounts are zero to 1 inch. :} See reasons for uncertainty below, besides being too far in advance or our models to be reliable anyway.
Valid Friday, March 5th, at 5 PM AST. Colored regions NOW denote areas of precipitation that have fallen during the prior TWELVE hours. (Mod resolution degrades after about 192 h, and so a coarser view of precip areas is used.)
While a significant storm on the 1st is virtually assured according to spaghetti, this last major event in the panel above is doubtful. See below, in another lesson on consuming weather spaghetti:
Ensemble spaghetti valid for the same time as the panel above, 5 PM AST Friday, March 5th. Not much support for a storm, low confidence is indicated by the LACK of bunching red and blue lines, unlike those off the East Coast, and over there east of Asia. So, while a great storm is predicted in last evening’s model run, prepare for sadness and disappointment as a hedge.
Yesterday’s fine clouds
7:10 AM. A couple of shafts of big virga. Likely a drop or two reached the ground. Could have been caused by aircraft penetrations, or, taller Altocumulus castellanus-like turrets that reached lower temperatures, produced more ice. They look suspiciously like an aircraft artifact due to their very small size.7:41 AM. Nice stack of lenticular pancakes in the lee of the Catalinas. You can see some great lenticular occurrences in the U of AZ Time Laps movie for yesterday. There are also a lot other fascinating things that go on in yesterday’s clouds, too.8:05 AM. Clearly natural virga approaches Catalina. Looked for a drop as it went over, but saw none.8:22 AM. Pancakes downstream from Ms. Mt. Lemmon.8:44 AM. Fairy dusters in bloom!9:07 AM. Doggies, Emma, and little Banjo, sample and inspect water STILL running in the Sutherland Wash!1:46 PM. After a brief sunny period, banks of Altocumulus invade the sky.2:46 PM. Altocumulus opacus clouds continue to fill in, darken.5:40 PM. Muliple layers of clouds stream ahead of sprinkle-producing cloud blob just upwind at this time. Note how the Altocumulus opacus clouds disappeared, leaving lenticular like formations, with a thin ice cloud (Cirrostratus) above.
The End, though I COULD go on and on and on, and then on some more. Its who I am….
First you had the rarely seen “Aircraft Produced Ice Particles” (APIPs, or “High Temperature Aircraft Contrails” (HTACs) in supercooled Altocumulus in the afternoon. Contrails were being produced in clouds that were “only” -20 C to -30 C (-4 to -22 F) and aircraft contrails were thought to be impossible at those temperatures, but rather, only at much lower ones, below -40 C (-40 F) or so.
Then, just after sunset, the heavy layer of Altocumulus produced a sun pillar! I was out in Saddlebrooke having dinner with friends after sunset, so had to leave dinner for about ten minutes, but I was so excited for you that I had to see it for myself, too. Since it would have been obscenely rude to tell my dinner friends the true reason why I left, when I got back after many minutes I told them I had to pee, and that seemed to go over pretty well I thought1.
Below, a coupla shots of that sun pillar I got while “peeing” on your behalf:
5:33 PM Gently falling pristine2 hexagonal plate ice crystals, falling face down from mostly supercooled Altocumulus clouds, produce a sun pillar. This site says that sun pillars are typically seen with Cirrostratus clouds and I have not photographed ONE due to Cirrostratus clouds myself, but rather ones like this falling from……yes, that’s right, Altocumulus clouds having just a bit of ice in them. How funny is that?
5:33 PM. Closer look as it fades. Note the small liquid water mammatus bubbles upper right. Mammatus in liquid clouds is also pretty rare since they are downward moving puffs of air and droplets evaporate much faster than do ice crystals. Mammatus is nearly always restricted to ice clouds for this reason. Was also wondering if my oversize salad and hamburger had been served yet.
Let us look at our sounding and see if we can see how cold those Altocumulus clouds were:
Tucson sounding launched from our U of AZ around 3:30 PM yesterday. The arrows denote the likely heights and temperatures of the Altocumulus we saw, somewhere around -20 C (-4 F) or -30 C (-22 F) for both. Hard to tell which layer was the one the aircraft were flying in, but the colder the supercooled cloud the denser the ice trail. So…..since they were dense yesterday, CM is going with the one at -30 C. Yes, that’s right, liquid droplet clouds can exist at -30 C, full reasons not known, but indicates a lack of ice-forming particles up there. But, it can also happen at the ground, too, in fogs.
Here are some of the magical, rare scenes from aircraft making ice canals in those very cold supercooled Altocumulus clouds:
2:25 PM. Ice canal over Boot Barn down there on Oracle somewhere.2:29 PM. Contrail castellanus (that row above the pole)? Had never seen anything quite like this before. Going crazy over sky phenomena now. Word Press, as here, is corrupting some of these images; can’t fix it so far.2:50 PM.
3:51 PM. Just above corrupted part of this file–I’ve given up trying to fix it in WP, is an aircraft streaking through this Cirrocumulus/Altocumulus deck, and an ice trail will form. How can you tell that that aircraft is IN the cloud and not above it? Look for different movement between the contrail and the cloud. If they are moving together, its usually the case that the aircraft was in the cloud. The aircraft is in the cloud at left.3:51 PM Close up. Very excited that a trail would develop. You almost never see the aircraft leaving the trail like this; you see the trail after the aircraft is long gone.
Skipping to the chase, as hard as that is to do, this trail really lit up as it got to the 22 degree point from the sun, where mock suns and such happen, producing a rainbow of colors due to iridescence, a rainbow producing by very tiny ice crystals in this case, of the order of a few microns in size.
3:55 PM. Started to glow a little orange here.
3:55 PM. Close up of the feature event. Was turning brighter colors as the seconds went byStill 3:55 PM. Going from orange to blueish.STLL 3:55 PM. Color fades into white as this icy contrail in the Altocumulus raced eastward. More WP corruption here, too. Think I’ll quit! Just too much time to do this to have this kind of crap happen! Sorry, having little baby tantrum now.
Guess about today’s clouds
Maybe a few Cirrus, patch or two of Cirrocumulus, and likely lenticular clouds, particularly off to the north.
The End
The big storm everyone’s talking about?
Oh, yeah, baby, its still comin’, begins on Wednesday, New Year’s Eve in the afternoon, continues for about 24 h off and on.
Bracketing possible precip totals: still 0.25 inches on the bottom (10% chance of less), 1.50 inches on the top (10% chance of more). Average of those two often brings the best estimate, which would be about 0.87 inches, somewhere in there. You know, when you deal with wobbly cut off lows, you just can’t be real confident in how much rain they’ll bring. However, it looks like the north part of the State will get the brunt in snow, which will be great for the water situation.
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1It would be fun to hear what your excuses were as a “CMJ”–Cloud Maven Junior, if you were in a similar predicament last evening and HAD to see that rare sun pillar, rather than meet new people at dinner who wouldn’t be able to understand you anyway because you are compulsed like that; leave a great dinner to go outside in cold air to take cloud photos.
Well, nobody really understands a CM.
I remember in grammar school and Junior High in Reseda, CA, when kids teased me on clear days , saying, “Hey, Artie! Is it gonna rain today?” Then they would laugh at me for being a CM before I even answered the question, knowing all the while what the answer was going to be. Still, out of civility, I would answer them: “No, we’re having Santa Ana conditions now and it can’t rain for at least five days”, but they would still be laughing in the midst of my explanation about why it wasn’t going to rain. Kind of a sad scene when you think about it, that is, how mean kids can be to kids who are different. Later, when I became a pretty good athlete, they liked me, which shows how important athletics is over knowing stuff, and helping you “fit in.”
2 “Pristine” means that can’t be gunked up by having collected cloud droplets on their faces because then the optics, like sun pillars, mock suns, that kind of thing can’t happen if the crystals are messed up with droplets on them or a lot of extra hexagonal arms sticking out of them, as in bullet rosette ice crystals.
Friends, arriving this afternoon from Seattle for a sunny and warm couple of vacation days, will find that Catalina weather today is exactly like the weather they left in Seattle; poor Tommy and Patty.
Clouds will fill in as the day goes on, becoming pretty cloudy at times, especially in the afternoon hours. They will starting to ice up, too, and you know what that means; they’ll produce virga and light showers in the area, with breezes and a high of only in the low 50s.
Be sure to record the first sighting of ice in clouds today. Will be a nice test for you, and a great ob in your cloud diary.
Still expecting a pretty major storm next week.
Got 0.12 inches in the gauge last evening.
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In the meantime, meet members of the former Cloud and Aerosol Research Group at the University of Washington, Professor Peter V. Hobbs, director.
Tom, who arrives today from Seattle, was our group’s software engineer at the University of Washington. He was kind of recluse we learned after he was hired. Liked to have a lot of high vegetation around his desk in our lab where me and a grad student worked. However, unlike a prior software engineer, who was also brilliant like Tom, Tom really never fell asleep at his desk that we know of.
“Jungle Tom”, our brilliant software engineer in the Cloud and Aerosol Research Group at the University of Washington. I hope you can find him.
Our first software engineer was Doug, shown meditating below.He was great! Worked long hours that often took their toll in the daytime.
But, not to demean “Doug” whatsoever, who truly WAS brilliant, and his software helped enormously to grease the wheel of our group’s aircraft data analyses, and who also made a lot of money when he joined the then fledgeling Microsoft in the early 1980s, took his job especially seriously, He liked to let people know how seriously, and exactly how much he loved working with computers. And he dressed to show it.
Software engineer, “Doug” arriving at work one day.
Cloud and Aerosol Researcher, “Stan”, monitoring cloud particle data on a flight over the Washington coastal waters.
It was a fact, that as I got embedded into perhaps the best Atmospheric Science Department in the world, I also learned that science draws “unusual”, maybe even quirky folk, and “meditating” while on the job, perhaps “awaking” with new, substantive realizations of relationships, or ways of presenting data, was pretty common, not just with Doug:
Graduate student, Stan, monitoring flight data in a cold front over the Washington coastal waters.Cloud and Aerosol Research Group flight engineer, “Jack, ” responsible for seeing that the instruments were functioning properly..
But there were other quirky characteristics that turned up, like “Germophobe John”, shown below, who actually shared my lab room for many years:
Germosphobe “John” at work. After awhile, of course, you don’t notice these quirks, although the rustling of plastic all the time was annoying when he working.Aerosol expert “Dean” we’ll call him, who worked down the hall was an asymmetric dresser, and took great pride in that. It was also a way that he got people to talk to him when they came over to point out that his clothes weren’t buttoned correctly. Dean was a leader in the sartorial rebellion of the day.
Then there was that one guy who worked as part of the flight crew who specialized in looking like John Denver, and liked to come in to work in the morning and report that someone on the bus he rode thought he was John Denver. Seemed to get a lot of satisfaction out of that, which in retrospect is kind of sad when you think about it.
One of the CARG team members who took pride in being mistaken for John Denver. We in our Group remember how sad he was when John Denver died in a home-built plane crash.
Me? I was pretty normal, really not too much affected by the various quirky people around me. From those halcyon days, a selfie:
The author, Arthur, in the early 1980s. I suppose the double pair of glasses was somewhat unusual, but other than that, I was fine. I suppose I was mad about some stuff in the domain of cloud seeding, maybe a little of that showing here.
There was some thought, however, that any quirkiness that was exhibited in our personnel might have been due to the various cancer-causing chemicals we worked with, one of which was Formvar, used to capture images of ice crystals that would hit the liquid Formvar on movie film rotating in the arm of a probe that stuck out of a pod, or a glass slide that stuck out a hole on a stick in the plane. In both cases, the crystal would hit the liquid Formvar, which would dry VERY fast, and then the impression of the crystal would be left in the plastic Formvar.
Below, “Diana”, and “Brad”, a brilliant grad student, at least before he started working with Formvar, examine a jar of the smelly stuff.
“Diana” and “Brad” , flight crew members, examine a jars of Formvar and maybe trichloroethylene used in conjunction with collecting ice crystal images while in flight.
Yesterday’s clouds
7:37 AM. Hope you saw this anomaly. The linearity suggests this line of mammatus was ice generated by an aircraft.
9:23 AM. Altostratus with puffs of new cloud forming on the upstream edge. What would those separate tufts be called. I don’t know for sure, maybe, Cirrus floccus or castellanus. Sure looks like Cirrus uncinus before it turns gray toward the east.
11:06 AM. Moisture below the level of the earlier cloud begins to arrive, showing up first as a lenticular cloud in the lee of the Catalinas.
1:01 PM. Before long, clouds at different levels began to appear. Here, two layers of Altocumulus the main one above a lenticular one.
3:53 PM. This was about an hour before virga and falling snow began to obscure the tops of Samaniego Ridge and Mt. Ms. Lemmon. Here the streaks, crespuscular rays, are NOT caused by precip, but rather dust
Some additional scenes from a 4 h yesterday into the Sam Ridge foothills:
Stuck here, might reached a limit, can’t seem to add photos, and there are too many already.
The first of a couple of patches of rain over the next 36 h are passing through now, R at this second, 4:40:32 AM, and 0.09 inches of rain so far. Nice.
And with the last troughy coming across tomorrow during the day, with another chance of light rain then, too. Looks like we’ll easily go over 2 inches for the month of December (1.94 inches now), the first above normal in rainfall winter month since November a year ago.
Yesterday’s clouds and flowers
Not as widespread or dense as expected in the afternoon, but prettier, which helps counteract error. Let us begin our review of clouds with some paper flowers; there are still some blooms out there! Amazing.
8:25 AM. Seen on a dog walk under overcast Altostratus. Desert marigolds still going strong.8:38 AM. Classic Altostratus, some virga apparent below darkest part. Saguaro cactus is extruding slowly from the ground on the right. Need time lapse to really see it do anything.11:17 AM. Deeper clouds have moved away and now comes lower, shallow Altocumulus clouds some spewing virga. Photo annotated for Mark Albright, University of Washington research meteorologist who lives in Continental Ranch, and thus in the Tucson morning smog tide.
3:27 PM. One of the prettiest scenes of the afternoon, this array of Altocumulus.
3:27 PM also. Only the extra special Mark IV cloud maven personage would have caught this aircraft ice trail, originally within those lower Altocumulus clouds, much too warm for normal contrails. This is probably around 30 min old.
5:12 PM. Sunset in leading bank of clouds that led to the light rain this morning.
The weather way ahead
Threat of a larvae killing cold wave later this month fading; looks like that cold air will end up in the eastern US now, and no further precip after the series this week. Darn.