Altocumulus clouds – Page 19

Climate kerfluffle reprised in southern hemisphere

With no rain in sight, and only modest temperature fluctuations ahead, some reading material is presented to you today with commentary today, a “soapbox day.”

Cloud photos from yesterday are at the bottom if you want to skip to that and avoid thinking about things because its too early in the morning to get riled up.

I will start with an opinion piece concerning climate change and climate science from Australia. It also mentions a recent event in the climo community concerning a Southern Hemisphere temperature reconstruction and the apparent rejection of what would have been an important paper by the peer-reviewed journal it was submitted to after crucial errors were found by an outsider/reviewer. The author of this opinion article also mentions “climategate” a chapter of science that had a profound effect on this writer. Now there are polemical aspects, not all of which this writer would agree with, still, its worth reading:

Speak Loudy and Carry a Busted Hockey Stick

The link to this article was circulated to our Atmos Sci Dept by one of my best friends, and really a science hero to me, Mark Albright, the former Washington State climatologist. Mark was a mild-mannered researcher lurking in the background at the U of WA for many years until he got upset over what he (later joined by two allies there) was to show were vastly exaggerated journal-published and media accounts of snowpack losses due to GW in his own backyard, in the Cascade Mountains of Washington and Oregon. Mark felt science had been corrupted by dogma, perhaps the pursuit of funding; he has not been the same since. Believe me, I know what he has been through.

A retired distinguished professor at the U of WA Atmospheric Sciences Department circulated a counter articleto the one that Mark circulated, also worth reading for the “other side.” It appears below, along with that professor’s note about the article Mark circulated. I felt this note by the professor should be included, too:

“Worth reading is this article by a Reagan/Bush Science board appointee. It demonstrates objective science versus the Australian article which is full of vituperation, accusations without substance, slander, and very little science.”
.
http://www.desmogblog.com/2012/11/15/why-climate-deniers-have-no-credibility-science-one-pie-chart

In the headline of this second article, the word “denier” is used in its title as a pejorative, mass label for those who question some of the global warming publicity stunts (assigning particular storms like Sandy to GW) down to results published in peer-reviewed journals, such as reports of exaggerated snowpack losses. Not good, and that headline tells you where that article is headed: criticism is not to be tolerated. But it also shows that the majority of science being published on climate change supports the finding that a warmer earth is ahead. But there is a reason for that; its being pushed by the monumental amounts of money being poured into that climate research domain.

There are many of us out there that do believe that funding is pushing the research on global warming in one direction in this job-poor era we’re now in, just as it did, and still does, in the cloud seeding domain: no one ever got a job saying cloud seeding doesn’t work. In my own career–yes, Mr. Cloud Maven person had a professional research one, and one spiced with controversy¹ over several decades–the opinion article from Australia rings true in many aspects about how science works and what influences a preponderance of “conclusions” that get published in journals.

In the climate funding domain, don’t look for more funds if you conclude a million dollar study by indicating that you didn’t find any sign of warming over the past 30 years, as is the actual case in the Pacific Northwest. NO ONE is going to touch that hot potato and serve a finding like that up to a climate journal. Its not gonna fly. It makes explaining global warming difficult. And as Homer Simpson advises, “If something’s hard to do, its not worth doing.”

But at the same time, a counter finding to global warming presents to those of us who try to be truly ideal, disinterested scientists, a fabulous opportunity to look into something that is not immediately explicable. As scientists, we should live for opportunities like this!

But will it happen, will some brave soul at the University of Washington or elsewhere delve into this counter trend and try to explain why its happened in a journal article? Its hoped so.

But those of us, still on the GW bandwagon, if grudgingly so due to the actions of some of our peers, know that regional effects of GW are dicey. Some areas will warm up more than others; cooling is possible if the jet stream ridges and troughs like to hang out in different positions than they do today. And of course, if we smog up the planet too much, all bets on warming up much are off since clouds act to cool the planet, and pollution makes clouds last longer, especially over the oceans where pollution can interfere with drizzle production, which helps dissolve shallow clouds, and pollution causes more sunlight to be reflected back into space. The cloud effects are being more carefully, precisely evaluated in our better computer models.

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It is ironic, too, that the second article, the one passed along by the professor, ends with the mention of plate tectonics “as the ruling paradigm of science” as it is.

But, some word about how that paradigm came about; it was a “long and winding road.”

Alfred Wegener, a meteorologist, first proposed the theory of continental drift/plate tectonics around the turn of the century. A nice account of this science chapter about origin of the theory of plate tectonics is found in the book, Betrayers of the Truth, by then NYT science writers, Nicholas Wade and William J. Broad.

Because Alfred Wegener was a meteorologist, however, and NOT a geographer, namely was an outsider to the official science community studying the continents and how they got that way, his ideas were laughed at, not taken seriously for more than 40 years! Only in the 1960s was the idea of plate tectonics accepted.

I mention this tectonic chapter of science because there is a similar chapter that reappears constantly now in the climate debates. Several of the strongest critics of GW results, critics that have delved deeply behind the scenes into published findings of climate change in a scientific manner, much as this writer did concerning cloud seeding experiments in the 1970s-1990s, are criticized for being “outside of the group”, just Alfred Wegner was in his day rather than those “in the group” considering and acting on whether the findings of outsiders are valid.

Fortunately, this is beginning to change because, guess what? Outsiders have found some pretty important stuff that HAD to be addressed in spite of the desires of some idealogues out there pretending to be objective, disinterested scientists. Science as a whole, still works.

A cloud note: Alfred Wegner is also known for proposing the idea that ice crystals in the presence of supercoooled water (a common event in the atmosphere) grow and fallout, leading to precipitation at the ground, known as the Wegner-Bergeron-Findeisen mechanism. Every 101 meteorology textbook points this out.

The last photo below is a demonstration of that effect; those sunset supercooled Altocumulus shedding a few ice crystals that grew within them.

Yesterday’s clouds

SONY DSC — 7:33 AM Cirrus fibratus radiatus. Sometimes perspective makes banding look like its converging or radiating. I estimated that this was not the case here.

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¹Some examples of the controversy the writer has been involved with:

“We don’t hate you but we don’t love you, either.”

This quote from a leading US cloud seeding scientist to the writer at an American Meteorological Society conference on cloud seeding and statistics after his cloud seeding experiments had been reanalyzed by the writer.

“I want you to leave my office and don’t come back. Just do your own thing.”

This quote from THE leading cloud seeding scientist of the day when I went to his country to see for myself the clouds he was describing in peer-reviewed journal articles, descriptions that I had doubts about. His descriptions were later shown to be far from reality.

And, from an outside observer, and well-known cloud researcher at the National Center for Atmos. Research in Boulder, a comment to the writer when he visited the University of Washington:

“I think the (cloud seeding) community sees you as a ‘gadfly’.”

From the Oxford Concise Dictionary, “gadfly”:

“A cattle-biting fly; an irritating, harassing person.”

Q. E. D.

Nice day, OK clouds

Here they are, left column:

The weather ahead

A huge buckle in the jet stream is forecast to form right off the West Coast in about a week, and its a pretty spectacular interruption in the pattern of a jet stream whizzing by far to the north of us that we have had now for sometime. Below is an example of ‘now” in the jet stream winds, and below that, a forecast panel (from IPS Meteostar) showing this striking change a week from now. There’s a big (“high amplitude”) trough in the eastern Pacific, a high amplitude ridge (hump in the jet stream toward the Pole) in the West and another big trough in the East.

Patterns like this are usually associated with extremes in temperatures; warmth in the West; cold in the East. It is certain when this pattern materializes in about a week, some high temperature records will fall somewhere in the West and some low temperature records will fall in the East. In the West, warm air is drawn far northward, aided by low pressure centers spinning around in the eastern Pacific, while in the East, cold air zooms down with high pressure centers from northern Canada.

Why bother talking about a forecast a week in advance?

Because it has a lot of “credibility” in our ensemble (spaghetti) plots. Here is last night’s “ensembles of spaghetti” plot produced by NOAA for one week in advance. Look below at these “ensemble members” the different blue lines, ones that are loaded with slight errors at the beginning of the model run, to see how strong the forecast a week ahead is.

Those bunched blue lines in the eastern Pacific (see arrow) inspired this whole spiel about the coming change because its a nice example of when the plots show something reliable in the way of a longer term forecast, and in this case, a forecast that also shows a big change in the weather patterns over thousands and thousands of miles, from eastern Pacific to the western Atlantic.

If you’re looking around this whole plot, you’ll see the lines are also very bunched in the extreme western Pacific and westward across Asia. Those blue lines are always bunched over there because there is little variance in the flow in that region; its locked into a pattern by the geography, unlike in the central and eastern Pacific and into the US where the jet stream is MUCH more variable. A simile: imagine a fire hose turned on at the hydrant, the part of the hose at the hydrant stays in place while the end of the hose flops wildly around. Its something like that; western Pacific to eastern Pacific.

Our weather?

Well, after all that gibberish, not much change will occur here; its everywhere but here! Seems we’re doomed to another dry seven to 10 days ahead with occasional periods of high clouds and great sunsets as weak disturbances from the sub-tropics pass by, ones that can only produce Cirrus clouds.

In case you missed it; these clouds and a trace of rain (!)

Once again we were treated to a spectacular sunset, another one in a long series of occasional sunset spectacles, ones that probably go back before the 1900s. We didin’t have color film in the 1800s, so we can’t be for sure if there were spectacular sunsets here except via artist’s renderings, of necessity, of course, analog ones comprised of subjective estimates of sunset colors being seen, not the real ones. I you would like to read about clouds in paintings over the centuries, go here and here. In this second link, you will find that Leonardo da Vinci was quite interested in Cumulonimbus downbursts gave painting them a shot. Its not that great, to be honest.

We meteorologists often sadly ruminate on the career of Leonardo, thinking that had he only turned his attention away from art, sculpting and the like, and instead turned to the problem of weather forecasting, how much farther ahead we would be today. A real shame. Maybe we wouldn’t be relying on spaghetti plots so much.

Also got a trace of rain here in Catalina–you could sure get that smell of rain as soon as you went outside this morning.

We also had some real interesting mottled-looking skies yesterday due to Altocumulus underneath a layer of Altostratus translucidus. Those underlying Altocumulus clouds were in a layer with a lot of instability (temperature dropped rapidly with height in it) and so there were many little spires (castellanus and floccus varieties). This happens because a little bit of warmth is added to the air when moisture condenses in it, and that bit of warmth was able to drift upward. As that happens the air around those little cells of updrafts settles downward gently to take the place of the rising air creating voids. So, you get clear air spaces between the little cloudlets. I think that’s what happened here.

Let see, what else is going on…. Most of that plume of moisture from the tropics is gone, and so only expect a few Cumulus today. Oh, yeah, big storm about to slam northern Cal and Oregon. Take a look at this map series from the Washington Huskies to get an idea of how its growing in size before hitting the coast.

No rain predicted here in past two model runs (last evening and last night, 06 Z) for the next 15 days, but we are quite sure that’s wrong. Will be looking for that end November early December rain to reappear because I have a subjective hunch it will. If it doesn’t reappear, I will likely pretend I never said anything about it, in keeping with long tradition in public weather forecasting.

BTW, and belaboring the point a bit, here’s an example of how errors in public forecasting SHOULD be handled; “right up front”, in this case, an anonymous Seattle forecaster addresses the terrible temperature forecast he made the previous day following day:

19 19 19_unknown_unknown

(It was a fun time….hope you get a smile out of it)

The End.

Some clouds; excessive excitement over model flip flops (web crawlers: not about shoes or girls wearing them) for late November

Here they are:

Today? More pretty clouds.

The weather way ahead, like on November 29th

Just after I was asserting from this typewriter that the big storm, the Great Wet Hope in late November, was surely bogus, out popped another wet forecast for AZ n the model run crunching global data from 11 AM AST yesterday. Here it is below, first panel. You MAY remember that the nice early rains that we had in November last year were associated with a similar pattern of an upper low center near San Diego.

What to think of this “outlier” forecast, one NOT supported in the ensemble of spaghetti plots (model runs where small errors are deliberately input to see how those runs change from the ones based on the actual data). There very little support for panel 1 in those “perturbed” runs, but there it was again, a big AZ rain!

Well, its still unlikely, but the chance of it actually happening are now much improved. Something out there is causing the model to come up with a good rain in AZ at the end of the month. I did not think I would see any rain again in AZ in any more model runs.

And, sure enough, the model run based on data just 6 h later than the one shown in the first panel, took it away again! See the second map below and look at the astonishing differences over Arizona and the Southwest overall!

I won’t show it, but the “perturbed with errors” model runs that we look for to discern credibility in the longer term forecasts like these, STILL does not support much of a chance for a rain to be realized on the 29th.

But, that second appearance of an “outlier” in another model run….hmmmmmmm. Will be watching for a return; you start to get a feeling that it might well be seen again.

As I finish this blog blurb, the 11 PM global data should have been crunched by now, and will look to see if there is yet another huge change (well, there are always large changes, but here, I’m talkin’ for us!) Will let you know in about 2 minutes…. Stand by, generating new web window now…..

Oh, my gosh! Its changed again (3rd panel) to a huge West Coast troughy situation, completely different than the run at 5 PM AST last evening with the big ridge over us (bulge to the north). I have to post this latest map, again for late on November 29th. The situation you see in the third panel leads to another big rain forecast in AZ, though a couple of days later, early December! This is so great! Compare the second and third maps.

Now, you can really start to put some credibility in the supposed “outlier” forecast and, as a discerning meteorologist, say to the spaghetti plots with their little deliberate errors, “Go to HELL! You’re missing something big out there with those puny errors you start with.”

Calming down now, well, you can’t cast the thought of warm dry weather (seond panel) for late November out yet, but something IS being missed out there, which makes this an exciting period–just to see what happens. Though an admitted precipofile, at least here in AZ, not so much in SEA, I am putting my mental marbles on the trough in the West depictions now. Just a hunch.

The End.

The rain before the storm

Our models have been showing a batch of scattered showers on Thursday for some time, a precursor to the Big Change day on Saturday. Skepticism prevailed at this keyboard since there didn’t seem to be much going on off’n Baja where this moisture was supposed to come from. Here is an upper level chart demonstrating that assertion: don’t see any contour circles out there do you? Just a wandering, single contour off Baja, not much going on compared to that behemoth trough blasting the Pac NW.

But, by golly, there IS a patch of clouds and moist air in that weak circulation off Baja that is going to be swept out of the eastern Pacific by the “broom” of the flow around that giant upper trough that moves toward us from the Pacific Northwest into the Great Basin area on Friday and Saturday, generating a powerful low center at the ground as it does. Some Cumulonimbus clouds have even formed off Baja in this weak tropical circulation, and here, that should mean some nice Altocumulus castellanus clouds tomorrow, likely with virga. Cirrus will also be around for a real visual treat. As we remind reader (s), get your cameras ready. Could be some spectacular scenes; sunrises and sunsets.

Here is a link to what is going on out there (from the Huskies, of course, the Washington ones.) Those white specs that appear and disappear off’n Baja are little Cumulonimbus clouds, showing that the middle levels of the air out there is very unstable. (Those are a type of Cumulonimbus that sit on top of boring Stratocumulus clouds, FYI)

What could be tremendous for us is that the Wildcat model (here), has off and on showers from this tropical surge for no less than 24 h! Amazing. I just now saw this from last night’s run.

Could it happen?

Well, this model is smarter than you and me, and so you figure there is going to be a lot of mid-level clouds and castellanus (spire-clouds) the size of small Cumulonimbus clouds as we see offshore now in the sat images. And with that, the likelihood of some thunder here and there. This preliminary action is getting to be so much greater than I possibly could have imagined; rain in the immediate offing, not waiting until Saturday!

One of the things that will happen tomorrow, too, with this little slug of moisture and clouds, is that the lower level humidity will be increased some as well; it won’t be just middle and high level clouds that increase. That will help juice up the air before the Big Trough gets to us, maybe helping that Saturday rain out just a bit. Ironically, this little thing ahead of the BT might well produce more rain in a thunderstorm than the BT with all of its drama, the strong SW winds on Friday, frontal passage and wind shift to the NW overnight or early in the morning, and such.

With BT, strong winds are guaranteed on Friday, it will really seem like the season has truly changed which is kind of cool. Rain still looks marginal from BT; could be just a few hundredths, though the “window” is still there for more than a quarter of an inch if everything is optimized (storm hangs on longer, jet stream is a little farther S than predicted, etc.)

The weather ahead

It does appear that we’re headed for a new wet regime after our long, warm dry spell since mid-September with persistent high pressure over us and the West Coast. Last night’s global data, crunched by our super model WRF-GFS, had rain on SEVERAL days after these two chances go by tomorrow and Saturday due to the passage of more troughs plunging in from the Pacific. The pattern we’ve had, warm in the West, cold in the East is fairly common one because the jet stream seems to like to do that, sometimes, as we have seen, for weeks at a time.

But now that pattern is disappearing and a new jet stream pattern is taking shape, one that will likely mean normal or above normal rains here over the next month or so as this new pattern gets locked in for awhile. With those once-in-a-while rains will be below normal temperatures.

A pattern like this, “cold in the West”, almost always means warm in the East, and so the really cold air those unfortunate folks affected by Sandy have been experiencing will soon be gone, a good thing.

Here’s an example of a trough predicted to be over us from last night’s global data on November 15th:

Nice, huh?

The End.

Gold above Golden Goose

Thought I would run down to Golden Goose Plaza here in Catalina to catch some sunset shots after I thought of this headline; “gold on gold” :{ Here are three shots from the GGP for your viewing pleasure:

Lesson time… The clouds in the first shot aren’t producing virga. Why? Not cold enough you would guess, AND, the liquid cloud drops in them very tiny. The smaller the drop, the more freezing is resisted in clouds, the larger the drops, and the lower the temperature, the more likely it is that ice will form.

When ice does form in a droplet cloud, the drops around the ice crystal evaporate and the vapor appears on the ice crystal, depositing on it as new molecules of ice. Under a microscope on a glass slide, the crystal magically gets larger while a liquid drop next to it gets smaller and disappears. This process occurs in clouds that are comprised of both liquid droplets and ice crystals and the crystals eventually fall out as precipitation. The folks who described this “mixed phase” process, and at one time thought to be the only one that produced rain at the ground, was Alfred Wegner¹, Tor Bergeron², and Walter Findeisen. We won’t mention “riming” an additive to that process today, which is the collection of instant freezing of drops by the falling ice crystals making them heavier…

This “mixed phase” (liquid and solid together) process is ALWAYS described in weather text books from elementary to graduate ones. It requires the presence of droplet clouds and the introduction of ice to get the ball rolling. Altocumulus clouds are always mostly comprised of droplets, and so virga coming out of them is ALWAYS due to the “mixed phase” precipitation process. Tell your friends.

Here’s some surprising facts about yesterday’s Altocumulus clouds, even to me.

How high were those clouds? Well, according to the TUS balloon sounding they were no less than about 27,000 feet above sea level, or about 24,000 feet above us here in Catalina, and along with that, they were extremely cold, with tops indicated to be about -30 C (-22 F). The thinner ones on the right side of these photos would have been only slightly warmer, and as you can plainly see, had no virga, no ice in them even at those low temperatures! Pretty remarkable. In thin clouds like those not producing ice, you can bet the droplets were very, very small, likely smaller than 10 microns in diameter, and that small size of droplets is associated with a resistance to freezing. Such clouds also tell you that there is a lack of what we call, “ice nuclei” up there, substances around which ice can form, usually soil particles.

In the clouds with virga off on the horizon (3rd photo), they are clearly deeper, meaning the drops were larger near the top of the clouds, AND likely a bit colder as well, both factors leading to prolific ice formation and heavy virga trails. Hope this makes some sense. Pretty skies, anyway.

The TUS sounding for last evening at 5 PM AST:

Today’s clouds and weather?

Some mid-level moisture is still around, and so more Altocumulus clouds, along with some Cirrus should move in during the day and evening hours with virga possible, since they’ll likely be cold again. The U of A mod also sees lower, but very shallow Cumulus clouds likely, ones too warm to rain via the “mixed phase” process that you now know about. So, rain chances are pretty dismal later today and tomorrow. Nothing in the longer term, two week view either. Man, this is a LONG dry stretch!

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¹Remember Wegner? The meteorologist that came up with the idea of plate tectonics around the turn of the century? But the geographers/geologists laughed at him for about 50 years until they saw that he was right. Why did they laugh at him? He was a weatherman, not a paleogeographer/geologist ( i. e., not a member of the club).

²Here’s a photo of Tor Bergeron from 1968 in case you wanted to see what he looked like. I don’t know who that is standing next to him…looks like someone who might have been influenced by Buddy Holly.

Low temperature records galore

Here a very nice site if you want to look at what weather records were being set around the country, with an example for the past few days below. The one below were set as a gigantic blob of cold air (high pressure region) plopped down into the US, one bigger and colder than usual for this early in October. There are a ton more low temperature records being set today. As you know, this cold air event was well predicted in the computer models many days in advance and was blabbed about here.

Does this exceptional cold air in early October presage a cold winter?

Well, to know for sure, sort of, we go to the Climate Prediction Center to get their best guessestimate, and then look at natural phenomena, used by folk long range weather predictors, like the height of ant cones, length of horse’s hair, etc. The CPC’s outlook, the best info around, beats Farmer’s Almanac by quite a bit, kind of like the way my former employer’s sports football team was beaten down by Nike Team One in Duckville, Oregon last Saturday evening, 52-21; wasn’t close. Let’s see what the CPC sees for the next few months:

Wow! This is not what I expected to see for October, November and December because of the current weather regime with all that record cold in the very areas where warmth was expected.

This CPC prediction suggests that the cold air now in the East is a fluke and a quite comfy, energy-conserving fall season should be observed where the low temperature records are falling today. This CPC longer range prediction would go with an El Nino-influenced winter, but so far, the overall pattern has not looked much like one. Of course, phenomena like the El Ninos/La Ninas, when they are strong, are the best hat racks to hang our climate prediction hats on these days. The El Nino we have now is pretty marginal, barely made the criteria for one; a crummy hat rack.

The above seasonal forecast by CPC was issued on September 20th and a new prediction will be issued shortly. Usually, though, they don’t “yo-yo” much, that is, change much from one month to the next in what is foreseen for the next three months; there’s some inertia involved.

BTW, and oddly, one of the severest winters in the East was associated with a very weak/marginal El Nino in 1976-77, a year also that included extreme drought along the entire West Coast through February.

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Folk weather predictions; ant cones (are they really better?)

Now lets look at ant cones and see what we can make out of those. Perhaps ants know something about the coming winter since they’ve been around for about 10 billion years¹. Maybe there was something in our summer temperatures and rains that “spoke to them” about the coming winter. Below, a typical ant cone of the size around now.

You know, I’m not getting a lot out of what these ants are trying to tell me about this coming winter, though, its very nice.

So, for the present, and with no strong climate signal anywhere, we have to assume that the early cold is a fluke, not an indicator of a whole winter.

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A little rain is but a few days ahead, Thursday. In the meantime there have been some nicely patterned Cirrus, Cirrocumulus, and Altocumulus streaming out of the very same system that moves over us Thursday evening.

There will be more of these photogenic clouds today and in the days ahead of the storm. Keep camera ready!

It will be fun to have more dramatic skies and some wind with a “storm” finally. Mods have another one a week or so later, too.

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¹I’m exaggerating here since the entire universe, one that began with a spec smaller than the head of a pin and yet had everything in it, is about that old.

Models converge; less is none

Oh, me. I guess its great to be big enough to congratulate a people smarter than your people. The Canadian model, a version of that used by the people of Europe, has seemingly won the battle of the Arizona rain question. Almost no rain in Arizona is now predicted through the end of September in the last several runs of the USA! model, which now has the last of hurricane Meriam dying a quiet death off Baja, her moist remnants staying in Mexico, not getting here. This was the “solution” the Canadian model had predicted for several days for the end of September in Arizona that made a prediction of rain here very dicey anyway if you read what I had been blabbing about.

BTW, along with abandoning our tropical rains, the USA WRF_GFS model has the “usual” heavy rains 10-15 days out. I laughed out loud when I saw these new predicted rains in today’s run from 5 AM AST data. I guess we can hope again.

Well, congratulations to my relatives in Canada for “winning” the battle of the models, but I will NEVER go there again! I loved those now bogus rain maps for Arizona that the USA! model produced for several days anyway; SO much rain! Going to save them, and mope around about what could have been because that’s who I am.

In the meantime, we had some nice cloud patterns yesterday morning, and I will grudgingly post those as though I am quite happy and feel normal after looking at the latest model runs:

The End.

Rained yesterday…

You probably don’t believe me, but at 2:08 PM, a few drops came down from this Cumulonimbus debris cloud, one that drifted off the Catalinas. Likely you were inside watching fubball or something instead of checking on a possible trace of rain. Oh, well. I understand. You had more important things to do than see if it was raining and note it in your weather log book. You are keeping one aren’t you?

The proof?

Here, on the “trace detector”, a 1985 Corolla four-door, hatchback mini-SUV, mileage like a Prius before ethanol, some drops. BTW, yours for $12,000, comes with University of Washington Husky “W” insignia, also shown here, because I worked for the University of Washington and was a loyal company employee, i. e., supported all the company sports teams. Its just who I am.

BTW#2, the Pima County ALERT raingauge at White Tail, near Palisades Ranger Station, just off Catalina Highway on the way to Mt Lemmon, had more than an inch of rain yesterday from our isolated Cumulonimbus clouds! It seems to register the highest rainfall time and again. It might be a fun Sunday drive to go there and see what all that rain has done. They must be over 10 inches for just August alone!

Today?

U of AZ mod (11 PM run) is predicting an uptick in thunderstorms this afternoon, then dry tomorrow. Hoping for one more dump…. You never know when the last one will be this time of year.

Some more visual ice cream, this morning’s pretty virga:

The End.

Yesterday’s “be-a-moths”; what’s ahead in August and early September

Nice sunset yesterday, one consisting of_______, _________, ________ clouds, ones that always give us one of those “glad to be here” in Catalina, CDP, feelings. I might give the answers tomorrow, but please try to name these clouds and maybe get that, “Its fun being a cloud-maven, junior” T-shirt you’ve always wanted. It has clouds all over it, maybe even ones you’ve seen and logged!

Only got a trace of rain here in Catalina, though there were a few “be-a-moth” (as we used to say as kids) Cumulonimbus clouds here and there yesterday. Check the U of AZ time lapse movie at about 2:30 PM yesterday for a giant. A couple of examples from around here below:

There were several reports of more than an inch yesterday in the ALERT raingauge network.

What’s ahead?

As we know, we are beginning the overall decline in chances of rain each day now; the summer rain season is winding down gradually. Doesn’t mean that in any particular year like this one that it will, BUT you have to give credibility to longer term models outputs that are on the dry side because we’re not dealing with an unbiased coin. The head on the quarter getting flipped for the choice of kicking or receiving in a football game is getting heavier; go for the tail since the heavy head might cause tails to come up more often.

Lately the model runs have had a complete break in the summer rain season around the 25th for a couple of days, then a slow return to wetter conditions alternating with breaks. Go here, to IPS MeteoStar, to see their rendering of the WRF-GFS outputs from last night’s global data, concentrating on the Arizona portion of these maps.

So, what are the chances THIS output, with a reasonable amount of “green” (meteorologists love to color areas of precipitation green; always have and always will) in Arizona at the end of August and the first day or two in September will have summer rains lingering on?

Go next to the NOAA spaghetti factory here. Examine the contours for the end of the month and the first of September…. And, there you have it! Eureka! The confidence level you’ve been looking for.

The End.