Cirrocumulus clouds – Page 5

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.

Miriam’s sunset

At least former hurricane Miriam gave us a nice sunset of mostly layer ice clouds (Cirrostratus; Altostratus (where thicker). Note portion of halo, upper center, above pointy-top cedar tree on the horizon. Looks a broken streak of droplet clouds (Cirrocumulus) just below that bit of halo.

Today’s overcast of Altocumulus and Stratocumulus, also associated with Miriam, develops some light rain to the south of us now. Wasn’t supposed to get here (from U of AZ model yesterday), but, there it is, SLOWLY heading this way. Will it make it? Don’t think so. If it does, it won’t be much, a trace? Dang.

Next rain here, sometime in October…. None now shown for the next 15 days. Maybe summer stats later today or tomorrow. (Correction, updated at 1:05 PM local based on the US WRF-GFS model run at 5 AM:

the almost “usual” rain has shown up, 324 h from now, that is, Thursday afternoon, October 11th. Below is the precip for the 12 h ending at 5 PM that day. Also, as “usual”, don’t count on it, but its not impossible either. There a tiny heavier rain blob over Catalina or so.

Didn’t get to a rain stat presentation yet due to being absorbed by former company team’s activities in SEA last evening where, at the conclusion of the match, there was a display of sport’s anarchy. The attendees of this event, in some kind of euphoric riot, lost control of themselves, climbed out of their seats and advanced onto the floor of the stadium where only the athletes and their entourages are supposed to be.

Two curious friends were at that game, my friend Nate, who got a big check (250 K$!) from Al Gore at the Whitehouse a few years ago due to being a science star, and my other friend Keith, who made a LOT of money photographing the explosion of Mt. St. Helen’s in 1980 because he was where he shouldn’t have been went it went off. Keith then quit the Ph. D. program in the geophysics grad school at the U of WA and started a company, Remote Measurements, due to all the money he made from that poster of the explosion.

Nate and Keith now share season tickets now to the Husky football games, as Nate and I once did, which I think proves something about fans of college fubball.

What does it prove?

Maybe its that you can like college fubball and still get a big check from Al Gore (who later went on from being Vice-president to a star in the movies).

Or, it just proves that you don’t have to be THAT bright to be a success in science (hahahahah-its just long, hard hours, not brillance, that counts).

And, it may prove that college fubball fans are sometimes not be who we think they are. Feeling defensive here about being so absorbed last evening, so let us not forget that the writer was thanked by the People of Earth with a small monetary prize, a “scroll”, AND…a trophy (!) for his and Peter Hobbs’ body of work in the domain of weather modification, all these goodies being presented in Capetown, SA, in 2006. So, there, IQ feels better now.

As a joke on that that latter thought, my friend and grad school officemate, Ricky, from Harvard U. no less, and I used to throw a football around at lunchtime on the lawn in front of the 7-story department of Atmos. Sci. Building at the U of WA. Before we went out the door to play catch, I warned Ricky that his perceived IQ would drop by 30 points when people look down and see him tossing a football, and, forget dating any of the women in the Department… :} Just kidding!

The End.

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:

SONY DSC — 6:29 AM.Probably Cirrocumulus is the best name for this though it is all ice here and the dappled pattern won’t last as the ice spreads out. A little patch of Altocumulus is on the left.

The End.

Pattern clouds, a few afternoon drops here, a lot over there, and a nice sunset

Pattern clouds: Cirrocumulus undulatus in odd, parallel lines. I had not seen parallel lines like this before. Fragments of Altocumulus are also present.

Though only a few drops hit the ground here in Catalina, the day ended with a pretty sunset. This marked the third day in a row where large Cumuluonimbus clouds cells at least an inch of rain in southern Arizona, but we got missed, something that also happened several times in early August.

Some of the moisture doing this is from old, former tropical storm, Elena, particularly the moist plume that resulted in yesterday’s pretty pattern clouds shown in the first photo. Check the moist plume (whitish stream) from her here.

Looking ahead…..

While Elena was a bit of a disappointment as far as producing rain here in Catalina, her lower level moist plume too far to the west, a sibling storm is arising off Mexico, one that the models (hah!) as they did before, have calculated will cause a renewal of our summer rain season; showers are foretold for several days beginning around the 3rd as that storm trudges up the west coast of Mexico toward Baja. You can see the storm and the showers here in this rendering of the WRF-GFS model by IPS MeteoStar. Remember those green areas on these maps are those in which rain is foretold to have fallen in the previous 6 h (later in the run, in the prior 12 h). There is a LOT of green over SE Arizona after the showers begin to occur by the afternoon of the 3rd.

As is commonly heard these days from people concerned about drought, “think green”!

More nice clouds

Another nice day of high heat and high, patterned clouds. at times. Here are a few shots of the latter, beginning with another flaming sunrise shot. The U of AZ time lapse movie for yesterday is really informative. The clouds shown in the second shot go by just after 6 AM, soon after the movie begins and you can really see the ice/snow falling out of those guys.

They’re not zero, but the chances of rain twixt now and the end of the month are pretty small. However, a tremendous surge of humid air is indicated as the month closes from the remnant of a tropical storm-hurricane along the Mexican Gulf of Mexico coast. Of course, that’s so far out it can’t be TOO reliable, but its something that would bring substantial rains. Here’s what it looks like in green (moist air) and brown (dry air) from IPS Meteostar. All that “green” air to the east of us is heading our way.

Spectacular cloud day yesterday

Probably most people didn’t notice much yesterday, but at times, especially in the mid-afternoon it was spectacular up there due to delicate little patterns within Cirrus and Cirrocumulus clouds. Some examples below.

5. The after life of those Cc and Ac clouds was Cirrus! 6. Oddity: extremely thin Cirrocumulus with holes. The Tucson rawinsonde sounding indicated that these initially liquid droplet clouds (Cirrocumulus and Altocumulus) were at 26,000 feet (at the 330 millibar level) above Catalina at -30 C (-22 F) . So, being that high, its no wonder those delicate Cirrocumulus clouds (Cc) became fuzzy masses of ice. Long ago it was noticed that nature liked to produce a droplet cloud before it froze to become ice, even at these low temperatures. Only around -35 to -40 C does ice form directly without going through the water phase, though liquid drops have been reported at -44 C! To watch some of this transition happen before your very eyes, go to the University of AZ time-lapse and, about 1:02 from the finish (about 15:35 PM if you can read the time on this movie!) before the end of the movie, a really nice patch of Cc appears on the left, but by the time its about to exit the field of view, it has magically transformed into a thin patch of ice cloud. This little patch of Cc in the movie is likely the same one I shot at 15:32 PM in photo number 4. Just ahead, our upper air anticyclonic summer regime And with that big mound of hot air over the Southwest US, the first onset of summer rains are now indicated in the models twelve days from now, around June 25th. Too far in advance to bother showing, but am very hopeful of an earlier onset of the summer rain season, and we hope, a LONG, juicy one! In the meantime, we will be in a trough for a few days, but, as tantalizing as that is, the models still see insufficient moisture for rain in AZ when the trough peaks over us this weekend. However, rain is shown in Sonora near the AZ border this weekend so its not impossible that a few Cumulus might get overly enthusiastic and bust those model predictions of complete dryness this weekend in the mountains. If rain did unexpectedly develop over the weekend from our little trough, it would probably fall from very high-based Cumulonimbus clouds producing mostly virga. The End.

More flaming Cirrus; Dark Ages of climate science upon us?

More flaming cirrus this morning, perhaps reminding us of the ascension of the temperature later this morning. In some photographic razzle dazzle, two photos have BOTH clouds and THE MOON! The IR sat image loop makes it appear that we may have these kinds of clouds for at least a couple of days. Below, I also am having a climate issues tantrum due to an unfolding story at Oregon State University.

Below some of the interesting patterns seen in yesterday’s Altocumulus/Cirrocumulus clouds. Most of the Cirrus had long departed by this time.

Dark Ages of science?

Here are two links below to a disturbing science story that is just unfolding in Oregon:

Watts up with That?

Ice Cap

A senior chemistry instructor was fired without notice APPARENTLY because he did not follow the global warming line. He was a skeptic, posted stuff about his views, and spoke on talk shows in the Oregon area. The exact details of this firing are not yet known.

Unfortunately the average temperature in the Pacific Northwest has been falling over the past 10-30 years, particularly very lately (see dip at the end of the record), and this has given rise to some skepticism about the effects of global warming since the temperatures are supposed to be INCREASING, not DECREASING. And ESPECIALLY “lately” with all that extra CO2 that’s been pumped into the air in the past 10 years.

Here is a sample temperature plot posted by J. D’Aleo at Ice Cap yesterday.

Now, the ORDINARY person might understand why some skeptics might pop up in view of these data. What is going on? But instead of reacting in the ideal way, “Wow, this is interesting data! I will have some of my grad students look into this for their Masters or Ph. D. dissertations”, it is ignored, it is pretended as though it doesn’t exist, but riles people when it is brought up by those outside their organization/discipline, as has happened here.

Those social scientists who study science and how it works will yawn at such “non-idealistic” science behavior. They have been telling us for decades that we are a bastion of White Male Culture, and that no science worker can really be objective in his or her work, be disinterested, only care about “truth” and not where the chips fall, but will always be intrinsically influenced, biased by that culture, even those female workers.

Of course, we folk who actually practice science get mad about those kinds of allegations, conclusions; I do anyway. Those of you who follow this page know that I parody that inability to be “disinterested” by only showing those model runs with the most rain in southern Arizona, because that’s what I want to have happen.

But here again, in the case of Oregon State University, those sociologists who study sceince have been proved correct. Dissenting opinion is not really allowed, particularly by an “outsider” to the climate science social-science cult, even when it is based on contrary evidence that clearly needs explaining.

OK, the Oregon State guy that was fired was not a meteorologist/climatologist. Maybe we should muzzle anyone who speaks outside of his/her trained domain, like Linus Pauling the Nobel Laureate in chemistry who then thought he could cure cancer with vitamin C.

Or Alfred Wegner, the METEOROLOGIST who first proposed the theory of continental drift around the turn of the 20th century but was laughed at by the geologists/geographers of his day. He would have had the last laugh, had he still been alive when they finally accepted his tenet.

The OSU “firee” wasn’t a tenured faculty member, either, and so he wasn’t protected by the golden shield of academia, that shield that once attained allows lifetime employment far beyond productive years. Perhaps when these lesser persons (research staff, instructors) at a university speak out on something that causes us some discomfort, provide a dissenting opinion on something, they SHOULD be fired immediately!

Yes, that’s it! No dissent!

Think how great things would be if there was no dissent on anything in the scientific realm! Whatever the majority thought, that would be the end of the story. No reporters asking difficult questions, kind of like things are now, , no reporting of any digression in opinions; there would only be the official line.

Think how happy we’d be not having to THINK or be disturbed by contrary thoughts!

Of course, not thinking is appealing, but, its not right.

Dissenting opinions/findings, if they are WRONG, have a way of disappearing quietly. Remember the NPR story back in the 1980s about the Newman Motor, the motor that produced more energy than it consumed? NPR gave it a lot of credibility back then, but, of course (!), it was bogus.

That’s OK. Mr. Newman tried real hard to get something for nothing, and failed.

Remember, too, “Cold Fusion”, the promise of endless power generation at room temperature, as reported by Stanley Pons and Martin Fleishmann of the University of Utah? Hey, they gave it a good shot, but that, like the Newman Motor, its gone, too.

Crackpot ideas have a way of disappearing. Let the dissenters have their say. IF the earth’s temperature rockets upward in the immediate future, they, like Henry Newman, Pons and Fleishmann, will quickly disappear. But don’t fire them!

So, to take action as the Oregon State University did, in my mind is shameful, and is the worst kind of anti-science I have seen lately. Shame on you, Oregon State!

The End

Spinning on down from Glasgow to Rocky Point, a low

This is pretty interesting; don’t see this happen too often where a lobe of low breaks off and spins from Montana, back toward the south-southwest to pretty much over Rocky Point, MX, as you will see in this past 48 h water vapor loop. In a water vapor loop, you pretty much see all that the movement that is taking place in the atmosphere and here you can begin to understand why it takes biggest computers on earth to model it. Here’s a close up from IPS Meteostar.

Note, too, those white puffs exploding in west Texas as our little low spins thisaway. Those are massive thunderstorms that our low has and will be triggering in west Texas and eastern New Mexico over the next few days. This is great to see that happening due to the drought those poor folks have been experiencing over the past couple of years. This little low, as tiny as it is, will make a huge dent in those conditions in some areas. It really would be great to be there in some little town, like the well-named town of “Plains”, TX, and see how happy the folks are getting as the rains hit. It would be like the end of a Hallmark movie where everyone is quite happy about how things have turned out.

Here are two shots showing what its like now in Plains-Floydada, TX, area, First, you can see that the earth is quite flat there.

DSCN1514 — Note green along highway. It has been raining off and on in these areas for the past month, so things are perking up. There were occasional bursts of wildflowers, too.

DSCN1525 — These aren't horses. What are they?

But while Texans are getting happier and happier (and I hope they don’t complain about flooding because that would be just plain WRONG), what’s in it for us?

Well, the quality of moisture is less here toward the center of the low, maybe about 1/3 as much in the air over us as in Texas. So, what does that mean we will see? Maybe a few Altocumulus in streaks, maybe finely patterned Cirrocumulus, and then as afternoon comes on, some Cumulus with high bases because its so dang dry. I better predict some Cirrus cuz I see some now! Also, I think I will forecast that the low temperature this morning will be about 62 F here in Catalina because that’s what it is now. Maybe some ice optics, too, now in progress! Continuing, these clouds, too, mean some great opportunities for sunrise/sunset color and ice optics now that I see one (parhelia).

But with those high bases goes low temperatures, likely well below freezing, and you know what that means. The tops are likely to be colder than -10 C to -15 C, 14 F- to 5 F), an ice-forming threshold hereabouts for small, high based Cumulus. With the formation of ice, VIRGA, snowflakes and ice crystals come out the bottom. You can see this by the hazy look around the clouds where it is evaporating–ice takes longer to evaporate.

In the higher terrain, the virga will melt into rain and reach the ground, and the clouds will likely get tall enough to produce lightning, but not here today, but to the north of us at least early in the afternoon and evening. Our best chance of rain with thunderstorms in southeast AZ will be tomorrow as the moisture gradually increases over us from the backflow around the north of the low. The low is forecast to pass to the south of us tomorrow and Thursday. You can see all this happening in our local U of AZ weather model here. (Note the local time is in the upper left hand corner. You will see the precip is only forecast to occur in the afternoon and evenings with this system.

So, finally, some weather excitement in the offing!

Pretty skies, but no castellanus (again)

Apparently the castellanus formations went over during the nighttime hours when we couldn’t see them…

But it was a fabulous day again of interesting high and middle cloud flecks anyway. Below, a reprise of yesterday’s clouds starting with that delicate patch of Cirrus passing over the Catalina Mountains with its tiny fibers of Cirrus uncinus embedded in it. I have also included two sinister crossing contrails. Who knows what evil lurks there? Perhaps they’re marking a target of some kind, or filling out a questionnaire with crosses instead of check marks. Oh, well.

Later, as the sheet clouds of various Cirrus, Cirrostratus, and even Altostratus with virga cleared off, we got into some scattered lenticulars, some of to the distant north, and with our usual friend downwind of the Catalinas, shown in the last two shots. It was able to hang on for several hours, right past sunset.

Again, for the whole day’s cloud excitement, a great place to go is to our very own U of AZ Wildcat time lapse movie. In the late afternoon of this movie, you can see some great Altocumulus lenticularis clouds hovering over and downwind of the Catalina Mountains, occasionally shooting upwind as the air moistens in the humped up airflow, and you can get a sense of how little the air is pushed up in lenticular clouds from this movie.

(Once again the caption function has quit in WP before I got to some of these. My apologies.)

The weather ahead

Gee, “dusty cold snap” is beginning to look more like “muddy waters” as the later model runs dip the jet stream farther and farther south over us on the 14th and 15th. Check this forecast of the precip hereabouts from the U of WA’s WRF-GFS model run from last night, showing a bit of rain HERE Saturday morning (colored areas of map). Sure hope so. Terribly cold air with this, too, for mid-April. Likely some low temperature records will be set in the State somewhere for this time of year with this.

The End.

Castellanus anyone?

Lots of nice Cirrus clouds yesterday, but no Altocumulus castellanus later in the day yesterday as it was asserted there would be. Only a flake or two of Altocumulus “uncastellanus”, (flat-as-you-can-get lenticular) clouds off in the distance (see bottom of page). BTW, I obsess over being right. I thought you’d want to know that about me since you come here every day and I am part of your life now. So, I made up the word “uncastellanus” because it sounds like in some way I might have been right about yesterday if you are reading quickly.

BTW#2, as per usual tendencies, the bottom of the moist layer where the Cirrus clouds were yesterday did slide down toward us during the day, from about 24 kft above the ground at 5 AM and -34 C to 21.5 kft and -27 C at 5 PM, the latter still pretty cold for clouds comprised of droplets, but they were there.

Below are a few “character of the sky” photos from yesterday. If you want the whole day, go here to the U of A time lapse. In this movie for yesterday are a few spectacular Cirrus castellanus clouds just after 11 AM AST. You’d swear they were real Cumulus clouds at first, but then you see them moving along at the same speed as the Cirrus clouds, glaciated with fall streaks beginning to come out as they go by.

You’ll also see in this movie, a lot a wind shear, changes in wind direction and or speed, with height, quite at lot visible early on. It will be easy to see how those trails of ice crystals get skewed away from the parent cloud producing these sometimes incoherent patterns when viewed from below.

Expecting castellanus TODAY, dammitall!

I think you can kind of sense my ferocity here about getting things right… A LOT of weatherpersons are like this, so its not just me.

As a potent trough blasts into Cal today, AZ will be in the rising motion part of that trough. So what happens? The air temperatures aloft begin to fall as the subsiding air pattern over us lessens and moves off to the east. With that tendency for subsiding air gone, some layers of the atmosphere will develop larger drops in temperature (lapse rate) as you go higher, a situation ripe for castellanus clouds, ones that look like miniature clouds that have been on a growth hormone. Those clouds (Ac cas) are probably my most favorite clouds, itty-bitty towering Cumulus clouds and so I do have a tendency over predict them based on a desire to see them. You can see what the TUS sounding is supposed to do here from the U of A model run. You’ll see the temperature falling just that bit over us late in the day. Well, it will be interesting to see what really happens!

Lots of other kinds of clouds are likely, too, such as a patch of Cirrocumulus, more Cirrus, and a lenticular here and there as the winds continue to increase over us. Gee, with the air coming from so far to the south, maybe even a scruff or two of small Cumulus clouds may show up, too, though Mr. Model doesn’t think so! Quite a cloud day possible.

Due to the high altitude the Altocumulus are likely to be at today, above 15, 000 feet above the ground, they’ll likely be cold enough (tops colder than -10 C, 14 F) to produce ice crystals and snowflakes, which we will see as virga coming out. Again, a fabulous sunset is possible because of the presence of more than one cloud layer.

Still only a dusty cold snap in the offing as the main upper trough bashes Cal Thursday and Friday before settling in over AZ on Saturday and Sunday.