7:46 AM. Stratocumulus lenticularis castellanus (has spires), an oxymoronic cloud. You would call this Stratocumulus because its low enough to top Ms. Mt. Lemmon. While some turrets can be seen, others are causing shadows. Have never really seen something quite like this and I look a LOT.10:35 AM. Stratocumulus lenticularis on the Catalinas. The moist air is resisting like mad being lifted over the Catalinas. Oddly, once condensation occurs a bit of heat is released and on the left you see that it was enough heat to allow a Cumulus turret to rise out of the smooth cloud. This is pretty darn rare site, seeing such smoothness AND Cumulus rising out of the same deck.3:46 PM. Cumulus humilis, no ice, except in those Cirrus clouds on the right.5:28 PM. Sun dog, or mock sun, also “parhelia” in natural Cirrus and in a contrail. The parhelia is likely brighter in the contrail since the simple hexagonal (six-sided) plate-like ice crystals that cause parhelias are smaller and more numerous in the early stages of a contrail.
6:09 PM. Cirrus spissatus.
Today’s clouds
Much like two days ago. Higher based Stratocumulus/Altocumulus with patches of heavy virga and sprinkles around.
Back edge of the cloud mass times in around 2-4 PM. Might be a little early for a great sunset, but just in case, have camera ready.
Looking farther ahead….
Still mainly dry through the next two weeks, though close call on the 7th, a situation that appears much like today, That close rain call NOW appears in both the Canadian and US WRF-GFS models (yesterday they were vastly different). So, with that, a chance of a few hundredths here after nightfall on the 6th into the morning of the 7th.
Spaghetti, in a dismal series of plots, also shows little hope for rain here through the 20th. So, even with mistakes in the initial analyses, deliberate ones to see how different the forecast maps turn out, we still can’t exit our drought! Oh, me. Poor wildflowers.
The End (did you see the giant mammatus/testicularis to the north this morning? If not, here it is:
Too dark for the best sight, our 14-year old flat-coated retriever mix dog, at first seeming to be walking slowly up the dirt driveway in back of the house with another dog. I could just make out two outlines. I wondered whose dog had gotten out and was in our backyard? Moving closer, I see that our dog is walking side-by-side up the dirt driveway, not with another dog, but with a javelina, like they’re buddies! Then two more javelinas came out of the brush to join the slow walk uphill forming a peccary herd containing a dog! After about 10 yards of this group slowly ascending the driveway toward me, the javelinas turned off into the brush. Too dark for photos; dang.
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Next, its raining in Tucson and I am eastbound on Prince Avenue about to turn left on to Oracle. I was feeling good that its raining downtown, and it was not just here in Catalina that rain had fallen. A car swerves across a lane in front of me to turn left on Oracle, and it turns out to be the best car ever evaluated by Consumer Reports! Its the all electric Tesla Model S!
I am not a car buff, but this was a very great sighting for anyone knowing much about the direction cars are taking! Its made by a tiny company in Fremont, California. No gas used of course, its not a hybrid; you have to find a charging station. But those stations are increasing pretty fast. You can go about 200 miles or so on a charge.
Anyway, if you have $90,000 or so, I think you should buy one right away. No, really. It would be worth it to be an “early adopter” and drive the market forward so that the price descends rapidly.
Yesterday morning in the rain, on Prince Avenue, a Tesla pulls in front of me! And, like me, they’re from Washington! From the “Not-taken-while-driving” collection; this photo entitled, “Tesla in the Tucson Rain,” yours for $11,000 due to rain falling in Tucson simultaneously with a Tesla Model S sighting, an extremely rare combination of sights that your friends will envy.
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Sports AND clouds….
The Seattle Seahawks are in the Superbowl today. The city where I worked is going bonkers over this because besides the team, they really like some of the players, like Russell Wilson whose really too small to be an NFL QB, and hasn’t been in jail ever. The entire city has come together, including liberals and conservatives to root on the Seahawks! Reminds one of the afterglow of the first Gulf War when Arab cars were sporting American flags!
Cells in the rain
7:50 AM. This well-defined rainsahft indicates a buildup in the tops above. These were the kinds of cells that moved over Catalina during the early morning hours. Likely would have looked like soft Cumulonimbus clouds if on top in an aircraft.
9:43 AM. Reflected light from the rain drops lingering on this blue palo verde gave it something of a lighted Christmas tree look.10:44 AM. As the sun launches convective currents and Cumulus clouds on a breezy day, and with some resistance to cloud top heights due to a stable layer, lines of clouds form, something we call a “cloud street.” This one came all the way from the Tucson Mountains to the SSW of us to just about over Catalina. When showers start to fall from clouds lined up like this (because the tops have gotten high enough to form ice), the downdrafts in those showers usually dissipate the line and it becomes pretty chaotic and broken up into cells, as happened over downtown Tucson later that morning.
5:26 PM. By late afternoon there were some fabulous lighting scenes under the Stratocumulus clouds on the Catalinas, here looking NE toward Charouleau Gap.
The weather ahead…
Looks like a minor rain in the works for Monday into Tuesday evening. Probably will begin in the mid-day hours and probably will only produce a few hundredths to a tenths is all here in Catalina. There’ll be more snow in the mountains, so that will be good to keep some of the creeks running.
The following storm, the one that looked substantial, has been diminishing in the model runs of the past day or so. Dang. The Enviro Can mod has given up completely on rain here in this trough that moves in on Thursday and Friday, the 7th and 8th. Then, voila, the US one began to follow suit, though showing a less bountiful rain, but at least still has some beginning Friday the 7th and then has it dribbling into Saturday, the 8th (this from the 11 PM AST global run from last night). Looking more like maybe a quarter inch of rain here in that one, but very dicey now in view of those Canadian calculations. Sometimes their model does better than ours.
Still looking like a LONG, warm dry spell after next Saturday….
5:17 PM. Cu fractus and humilis with edge of the approaching rain band clouds starting to obscure the sun through a dust haze on the horizon.5:18 PM. Close up of setting sun amid dust. Yellow sun means larger aerosol particles likely due to dust. Tiny aerosol particles, due to smoke, lead to a reddish sun. Here there are likely dust and some smoke particles intermingled. A purely dust haze, absent smoke particles, produces a sun whose color is little altered at low elevations (see below).May 2012. Example of a sunset only impacted by dust, little or no smoke. Dust generally has particles larger than one micron in diameter, much larger than the wavelengths of light from the sun, and so those particles don’t interfere with it much; don’t scatter out the incoming shorter wavelengths as smoke would, and this lack of scattering keeps the sun looking pretty whitish. Pretty hard these days not to have some very fine smoke particles up there.
The storm: what about it?
Its here, such as it is. Stations upwind of Catalina and in the approaching rain band have been reporting about a quarter to one third of an inch this early morning in light to moderate rain. Seems that’s the most likely total here now, though our best model, from the U of AZ, has been indicating over half an inch in Catalina, and about a half an inch in Tucson. The rain may last only a few hours, but given our normal intensities, a quarter of an inch can pile up in a hurry (an hour) in these rain bands. Moderate rain is falling right now, 5:19 AM! Yay! Com’on rain!
Update: 0.15 inches in the first half hour here in Sutherland Heights Excellent.
BTW, this loop of rain areas every hour from the U of AZ shows that we here in Catalina will have the center of the upper level low pass directly over us! We’ll be in the spin. Pretty cool. You MIGHT even be able to see, in the distance, showers moving in different directions if you watch closely late in the day when it passes by.
The weather way ahead
The latest run of the wrf-gfs model, our best, and based on global data at 11 PM AST last night, has no precip here after today over the next 15 days, through January 4th.
Reason to be depressed?
Nope. This is where those crazy spaghetti (“Lorenz”) plots come in. They’re still indicating in their overall “messing around” that troughs here are a strong possibility near the end of December and early January. The ACTUAL model runs will vary from run to run tremendously in this regard, some showing nuttin’, then maybe the next one, having a big, cold trough near us. Stay tuned, “details at 11…”, aka, “later”.
Lettin’ the past few weather blogcasts about a good chance of snow here in Catalina during the Christmas season ride the old stagecoach into town. Doesn’t seem to be any need to change it… In the meantime this.
A science story for you, while we kill time waiting for some snow
You’ve probably read about snow in Jerusalem and elsewhere in the Middle East. I saw it snow in Jerusalem when I there for 11 winter weeks, January through the middle of March, 1986, on a self-funded cloud investigation. Its not terribly uncommon to see snow in Jerusalem, believe it or not.
I was single in 1986, so I could do stuff like that, quit my job at the University of Washington for awhile (2 years), with no need to ask a spouse, “Honey, do you mind if I quit my job today and spend the equivalent of $40,000 going to Israel to look at clouds for a couple of months, and then spend a year without income working on a publication about ’em?”
Not gonna happen.
I had just sold a house in Durango, Colorado, so had some money to waste; I could be a “gentleman scientist” as in the old days of science before WWII and Vanevar Bush and the onset of big government funding for science, and maybe what some would call the beginning of “careerist” science, that followed WWII and the beginning of the Cold War to propel us forward.
So off I went in early January 1986 to see the clouds of Israel.
Jerusalem was often a city in the clouds during storms; it was so COLD and windy during them, unbelievably so considering what we think of there from Bible stories. I was outside a lot, experiencing the weather and rain, and on one occasion I remember I couldn’t pull the shutter on my old Rolleicord medium format camera, my fingers were so cold.
The three wisemen/magi came in the winter, didn’t they? They don’t seem to have enough clothes on in the Nativity scenes that I have seen, given what the weather can do in the winter there. Below, Jerusalem in the clouds, with 20-30 mph wind, at about 40 F:
Part of the new construction of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Might have been a hospital wing. Note leaning cypress or juniper trees.
January 12, 1986. Looking down King David Blvd, Jerusalem, during a storm.January 21st, 1986: sunset over the Med, from the beach fronting Tel Aviv.
I really loved it in Israel. The Israel national weather service (IMS, Y. L. Tokatly, Director) was great to me, letting me have a little research area in their offices after I just showed up on their doorstep, unannounced. Later, in a display of incredible scientific idealism, when the Director learned that the key scientist and I had a falling out about the clouds of Israel after my second week there, he allowed me to continue to use their historical records and my little space in their offices, terming what happened between that researcher and myself, as “merely a scientific dispute.”
Oh, my; where has that pure idealism fled to in the global warming wars?
But I loved the clouds there in Israel the most as they rolled in off the Mediterranean, borne on the cold winds of continental Europe, then boiled upward from flat little guys that they started out as by the warm waters of the Mediterranean into big Cumulus and Cumulonimbus clouds, the latter often spewing lightning, by the time those clouds and cold air got to Israel. It is a gigantic lake-effect situation there in the Mediterranean, the kind that is produced by the warmer waters of the Great Lakes as Arctic air traverses it, such as the storm buried folks in New York recently. Over over the Mediterranean, the air has a chance to really warm up after leaving Europe due to its low to mid 60s late fall and wintertime water temperature.
January 15, 1986. Cumulonimbus calvus marches ashore north of Tel Aviv.February 9, 1986. Skies open up near Nahariya, along the extreme northern Israeli coast near the Lebonese border.January 12, 1986. A moment of “cloud ice” epiphany as the first storm in daylight hours occurred during my visit. I knew with the first two hours of this storm that my hunch about those clouds was right. BTW, showers like these can roll into Israel, and into Lebanon for that matter, for days on end, termed “rainy spells” in that region. Cold air troughs aloft like to “nest” in that region in the wintertime, enhancing the clouds there, and stimulating the “Cypress Low” pressure area at the surface in the eastern Med.
The short of this is, and I COULD write a book, “go long”, was that I questioned, from afar mind you, after I plotted balloon sounding of temperature and moisture from Lebanon and Israel when it was raining, whether the clouds being described by a leading scientist in Israel were correct. In fact, from these plots, I was rather sure they weren’t. But it would, as I knew, be real heresy to conclude that in those days.
Of course, questioning findings goes on all the time in science. Its what makes it better.
A short paper was submitted to the J. of Applied Meteorology in 1983 reporting this discrepancy, and some other problems. It was rejected by three of four reviewers, one being the leading scientist mentioned above. I really was of the opinion I would “get in.” so was disappointed, but not undaunted in the least! Should have taken more than ONE day, July 4th, 1983, to write it, coming into the University of Washington at 6:30 AM, I was so excited to get it off!
I knew what those balloon soundings were telling me, and so after the paper was rejected, it began to occur to me to GO to Israel and see the clouds for myself. After all, by this time (1983) I had been punching clouds with cloud measuring instruments at the University of Washington for about seven years, and had a good idea of what was in them just from their visual (external) appearances. And I was starting to build a list of papers on reanalyzing and commenting on cloud seeding experiments, getting some notice.
So I reasoned that even if I just looked at the clouds of Israel, I would know whether the many journal and conference reports about those Israeli clouds were in error.
Error? What would that be, you ask? Some background, if anyone is still reading.
The clouds being described in Israel by researchers there, ones operating a cloud seeding program, were supposed to get real thick and cold before they rained. That meant the clouds weren’t very efficient and could to be seeded with a substance called silver iodide (AgI) to make it rain sooner, before they got so thick and cold. The AgI would introduce ice, needed to start the rain process going, at higher temperatures than the natural clouds rained at, thus seeded clouds would rain before having to be so thick and cold.
This meant that more would rain when seeded compared to not seeded clouds because not just the taller ones in Israel would rain. More clouds raining would, of course, add hours of rain to storms on seeded days, it was posited, and the researchers evaluating their second randomized experiment reported those very results: seeding, on randomly drawn days, had increased the hours of rain compared to randomly drawn control days. And these increases in rain on the seeded days were statistically significant, as they had been in a first randomized experiment.
So, in not ONE but two randomized cloud seeding experiments in Israel, statistically significant results had been obtained on seeded days, and the scientists reporting these results also had what appeared to be a solid cloud foundation for having obtained more rain by seeding; the natural clouds just had to be too thick to rain, but they fixed that by seeding with AgI. It all made sense.
It doesn’t get better than this for scientific proof, the so-called “gold standard” of science; statistically significant results in two randomized experiments and a solid physical reason why it happened. Due to these attributes, these experiments in Israel were accepted as “proof” of seeding effects by our highest scientific panels, such as the National Academy of Sciences, and every expert in the cloud seeding domain. For a time…..
Representative of this status is a 1982 article in Science magazine; “Cloud seeding: One success in 35 years” That success was the two Israeli experiments en toto.
From the outside, my trip to Israel in 1986 to investigate the clouds would have seemed ludicrous. Why bother; too many peer-reviewed publications documenting the attributes of those clouds, and also in a number of conference papers as well.
Could they all be wrong?
Yep1.
The End, more or less.
Below, an “action shot”:
Yours truly atop the Riviera Hotel, Tel Aviv, January 1986, readying for clouds and storms to blow in from the Med.
——————————————-some final commentary that sort got out of hand after more coffee———–
1The short ending. That answer is not in question anymore. Did that leading researcher allow me to go to either of his two radars to see how thick the clouds were when they were raining?
Nope.
So my publication on those clouds (1988, Quarterly Journal of the Royal Met. Society) had to make inferences about cloud top temperatures based on primitive balloon sounding data. But the results in that paper, that shallow clouds were raining and had MUCH higher cloud top temperatures than had been reported to that time, were confirmed by independent researchers, the best kind, using aircraft and modern instrumentation a few years later.
Spiking fubball now! (Can’t seem to lose that sense of irreverence, even when serious.)
Some final, “human” notes about this chapter of science:
This same leading researcher, in 1972 (published in 1974 in Weather and Climate Modification, Wilmot Hess, Ed, Wiley-Interscience) wrote what may be the BEST, most circumspect review of his experiments, as his second experiment was underway! It is recommended reading for anyone in this field.
So, “something” happened later on when he got his radars to monitor cloud tops and likely learned there was a problem. And you can imagine, I was his nightmare, a smart-ass with a building publication record critical of cloud seeding coming to Israel to question his cloud reports. Ideally, no problem. As scientists “ideally” we want to be the first to know that our results are in error. We care only about truth. (Right.) Ufortunately, our humanity sometimes gets in the way.
The leader of the Israeli experiments died only a year after my visit at the age of 54, aware at that time (1987) that the paper on clouds of Israel was going to be published in the QJ (Prof. Peter Hobbs, the Director of my group, had communicated this news to him after we got word from the QJ that year.) So….we can speculate.
But our meetings were cordial at all times; he was a great story teller, and there was no shouting, even when he firmly asked me to leave his office and never come back (2nd visit when I was telling him about my “findings”, which included a mention of drizzle, something his clouds were never supposed to do).
In fact, I felt bad for him, and still do, knowing the position I was putting him in, how this might end when other researchers began asking more questions about his cloud reports and eventually they would have to be overturned. At one point, on top of the old Hebrew University of Jerusalem, during our first very cordial meeting, I said, “Maybe we can co-author something if I find anything.” Coming from a “newby” like me, I am sure, as cordial as he was, he would have liked to have pushed me off the roof.
Some day I will post the whole technical thing on this experiment, and another one that was its mirror image in the Colorado Rockies. That future post (Cloud Seeding and the Journal Barriers to Faulty Claims: Closing the Gaps) will be piled high with references But this is already too much for now.
“Cards” in title referring to computer models, not some kind of goofy fortune telling thing, though, in fact, the models can be kind of goofy, too.
Also by talking about the exciting weather ahead here in Catalina (how many inches will it pile up?), I wanted to deflect attention from error. No rain here in Catland yesterday, as thought likely a couple of days ago (thanks to Enviro Can’s GEM model), though a couple of light showers and even a thunderstorm were close by. There was even a lightning strike from the cell shown below according to the National Lightning Detection Network, one that’s off limits for the tax payers who paid for it. (Must go through private weather providers or work at a university to see the NLDN directly, quite an outrage, as was the case in the early years of Doppler radar data.)
4 PM AST. Radar and satellite IR image from IPS MeteoStar. Arrow points to Cumulonimbus cloud that briefly erupted to the SE of us.
First of all, the long foretold and then bailed on Altocumulus castellanus (and floccus) showed up yesterday morning:
11:09 AM. Altocumulus floccus and castellanus. Floccus has a ragged base; cas a flat base, not that it matters that much. From the taken- while-not-driving collection though it looks like it. Professional course, do not attempt.
2:59 PM. Later in the afternoon, scattered Cumulus clouds were aplenty under some remaining Altocumulus, but did not attain the ice-forming level, with a couple of exceptions, which of course, I will have to show.
3:44 PM. Small and moderate Cumulus (humilis and mediocris) over the Catalinas. Can you find the remnant puff of ice from the highest turret formerly in this grouping? That ice puff up there tells you that one of these rained on someone earlier. Hope you logged it in your clouds and weather diary…
Same photo as above except with annotation and s… like that. I don’t cuss but it sounded funny to write that, detracting just that bit from erudition; stepping out of character for humor. I laughed anyway. Maybe this blog is just for me anyway. That’s what my brother says.
4:40 PM. Dramatic scenes like this on the Catalinas closed out our dry day.
5:19 PM. Fading clouds and drier air move in from the southwest. All threat of rain is gone, but not of a great sunset.
What’s that about white stuff?
Here’s the latest 500 millybar map (flow around 18,000 feet above sea level):
Valid at 5 AM AST, Friday, December 20th, rendered by IPS MeteoStar. Those bowl games in the SW are going to be SO COLD! Poor guys.
Big U-turn in jet stream shown over AZ and all the way to Canada! On the east side of the U-turn are clouds and precipitation and sh… like that. (hahahaha, to continue an out of character theme for a second for humorous purposes…) In the middle of the U-turn are the lowest freezing levels, on this map, low enough in AZ for snow here has either already occurred, or is on the doorstep or already here. On the backside of the U-turn, where the wind is blowing out of the north, the air is mostly subsiding, drying out, clearing off, allowing huge amounts of infrared heat to escape from the earth’s surface into space.
Here’s something else… See how much stronger the wind at this level is over CA, OR, and WA than in the eastern part of the U-turn? That means the U-turn itself is going to push farther S as time goes on, a mechanical thing. This would be a VERY cold episode for us, hard freeze variety, when the clouds and precip clear off.
While the amount of precip here has varied as the exact configuration and placement of the jet has varied in model run to model run, the OVERALL pattern of very cold air getting here has remained in place. Be ready!
Note, too, in the map above that the strongest winds at this level are WELL south of us, and so its already preciped here. Now I will look and see when the precip starts with this gargantuan trough and record cold (in part of the West) pattern first takes hold: OK, looks like the night of the 19th-20th, starting out as rain, changing to snow as storm ends, IMO.
Terribly cold weather will impact the whole West, and punish the northern Rockies and Plains States again. You’ll be reading/hearing about this one during the through the runup to Christmas, so similar to the blast of cold air that broke so many low temperature records last week. Will be tough on travelers. Not so happy about that prospect.
BTW, just to make a point about those crazy NOAA spaghetti factory plots: they have been pointing confidently, as readers of this blog will know, for more than ten days or so, to another pretty extreme weather event here and throughout the West, and that’s where they come in as an important tool for weather forecasters, when a strong signal shows up. Normally, weather forecasts go pretty bad after five days to a week. But “Lorenz”-spaghetti plots can help us see through the fog of middle range forecasting sometimes. That’s why you look at them everyday to see what’s up beyond the first five days or so.
BTW#2, all of this crashing down of the jet stream suddenly into the West after our nice spell of weather, is due to that jumbo storm that erupts in the western Pacific, builds a high pressure ridge ahead of it, and then that causes the mild-mannered jet crossing the coast in British Columbia to go into a southward, buckling rage, dragging record cold air behind it as it does so from northern Canada. That key gigantic eruption in the western Pacific has also been predicted with confidence day after day.
Really going overboard today, got up too early I can see that…. Below, the first the “la-dee-dah” spaghetti plot valid just two days from now:
See how the illustrative contours are piling into BC and northern Washington State? Over us and the WHOLE West, is a big fat ridge. No problems. Toasty weather, here too, for December. Note also, how small the errors are that are deliberately introduced at the beginning of the model test (or “ensemble” runs)! They hardly make any difference in a 48 h forecast (the lines run on top of each other). The giant low in the western Pac has not yet erupted, so there’s not much amplitude to the jet stream, its just pretty much west to east flow, la dee dah.
But look below at the waviness (amplitude) of the flow in the Pacific AFTER the giant low erupts, forming a big ridge downstream!
Valid at 5 PM AST, Thursday, December 18th; pattern caving in. Wrote all over this, got too excited about what’s ahead.
Whew! Quitting here, got a little over worked today about the weather way ahead. Too long to proof, too…. But HELL, its the internet; don’t have to be a great writer to be on the internet2!
The End, except for historical culture footnote below.
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1Part of the “British invasion”. If you’re a kid, have your parents explain to you that it was not a military thing to reclaim America except in terms of music. Pop music here wasn’t good enough (Beatles were better than the Beach Boys I guess) in the mid-1960s, and so they came, and they came and they came from that little island nation with their weird hair styles and great hooks and dominated the air waves. Pretty soon, everybody had weird hair styles.
Gauge 15 1 3 6 24 Name Location ID# minutes hour hours hours hours —- —- —- —- —- —- —————– ——————— Catalina Area 1010 0.00 0.04 0.08 0.08 0.43 Golder Ranch Horseshoe Bend Road in Saddlebrooke 1020 0.00 0.00 0.04 0.08 0.43 Oracle Ranger Stati approximately 0.5 mile southwest of Oracle 1040 0.04 0.08 0.12 0.12 0.47 Dodge Tank Edwin Road 1.3 miles east of Lago Del Oro Parkway 1050 0.04 0.04 0.08 0.08 0.47 Cherry Spring approximately 1.5 miles west of Charouleau Gap 1060 0.00 0.04 0.08 0.16 0.71 Pig Spring approximately 1.1 miles northeast of Charouleau Gap 1070 0.00 0.00 0.08 0.08 0.35 Cargodera Canyon northeast corner of Catalina State Park 1080 0.00 0.04 0.08 0.12 0.51 CDO @ Rancho Solano Cañada Del Oro Wash northeast of Saddlebrooke 1100 0.00 0.04 0.04 0.08 0.28 CDO @ Golder Rd Cañada Del Oro Wash at Golder Ranch Road
Santa Catalina Mountains 1030 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.04 0.20 Oracle Ridge Oracle Ridge, approximately 1.5 miles north of Rice Peak 1090 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 Mt. Lemmon Mount Lemmon 1110 0.00 0.04 0.12 0.24 0.71 CDO @ Coronado Camp Cañada Del Oro Wash 0.3 miles south of Coronado Camp 1130 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.04 Samaniego Peak Samaniego Peak on Samaniego Ridge 1140 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.04 0.24 Dan Saddle Dan Saddle on Oracle Ridge 2150 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.04 White Tail Catalina Highway 0.8 miles west of Palisade Ranger Station 2280 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.31 Green Mountain Green Mountain 2290 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.24 Marshall Gulch Sabino Creek 0.6 miles south southeast of Marshall Gulch
As you can see, a couple of stations in the Catalina Mountains were virtually missed by the storm (ZERO total, for example, at Ms. Mt. Lemmon) or it snowed on those low total precip gauges and the snow has not melted and is sitting in the gauge’s funnel. Select choice number 2. Mountains just becoming visible; looks like snow down to 6,000 foot level.
Didn’t see any precip/virga before dark yesterday, started raining just before 10 PM, nicely, and continued through midnight when it quit. However, the main event, lasting about 6-8 h is supposed to start happening about now, but rain mostly lighting up in TUS. That means we should see some clearing around mid-day, but leaving enough low clouds stacking up around the Catalinas for some nice quilted sun and shadows on those mountains, one of our prettiest sights I think, along with our now snow-capped mountains.
FROPA, or “frontal passage” in weather text speak, occurred late yesterday afternoon. I wonder if you noticed the wind shift and dropping temperatures? However, was a very shallow depth of wind that shifted, and temperature took about 3 h to drop 10 F, (58 F to 48 F) not exactly as sharp a FROPA as was anticipated from this microphone yesterday. Also, a bit unusual, the rain band was displaced far behind the wind shift that occurred around 4:30 PM.
Yesterday’s clouds
I thought yesterday was quite an interesting day for you. Lots of cloud types to log in your weather and cloud diary. Let us begin our retrospective with Sunrise on the Equestrian:
7:05 AM.7:17 AM. Splayed Cirrus display, racing at you at over 100 mph.7:52 AM. Orographic Stratocumulus top the Catalinas, a very good sign that the incoming front will produce rain. Indicates reasonable lower level humidity already in place.9:34 AM. Small Cumulus form over the Oro, Cirrus above. So pretty a sight, I thought.12:17 PM. Micro-snowstorm (Cirrus uncinus) passes past the Catalinas. You can see this cloud from the U of A here in their time lapse movie.12:58 PM. Seattle-style Stratocumulus overcast. Got a little homesick there for a minute.
3:38 PM. Atop horsey Jake now, looking for signs, knowing that front is getting closer. Here those darker, lower line of clouds were atop the windshift that was about to occur, marking the leading edge of the front. This colder air has lifted and chilled the moist air from the southwest to help create that lower base, the sure sign of a wind shift. Looking north toward Saddlebrooke from near The Chutes on the 50-year trail .
toward
4:27 PM. Cloud bases lower significantly as the cooler air rushed in. But look, no precip in spite of the heavy cloud cover. What’s up with that? No ice present in them; cloud tops still too warm in even FROPA area1.Also at 4:27 PM, looking toward weak sun producing the lighting break on the Catalinas. Note haziness, likely due to dust.
Your next storm: due in Sunday morning. Likely just something around a tenth of an inch. Nothing showing up beyond that, but lots of mod fluctuations re storms. I suspect the one that showed up a few days ago for the 20th or so will arise again in some future run. Just a gut feeling since there’s no evidence in the spaghetti plots yet to support that hunch.
The End.
———————————————— 1The TUS balloon sounding yesterday afternoon about the time of the next to last photo. Shows tops WERE warmer than -10 C, in case you didn’t believe me because the clouds looked so dark yesterday afternoon. They were pretty dark because there was a higher ice cloud overcast (Altostratus) and when droplet concentrations are high, clouds are darker on the bottom. We usually have pretty high droplet concentrations here in old Arizony.
Note that the temperature of the air (blue) lines slope upward to the right.
An unusual sight yesterday: bulging dawn Cumulus fronted by fog. These Cumulus (not spawned by ground currents) suggest instability aloft, a rapid decline in temperatures with increasing height, which allows the buoyancy of “warmish air” in-cloud surrounded by cooler air to go up, whilst fog1 suggests the opposite; cold, damp, heavy air that can’t go anywhere but down, slip sliding away as it did yesterday because its topped by warmer air, a atmospheric “glass ceiling”. Ground fog like this is colder air that you can see.
7:21 AM. Looking NW from Equestrian Trail Road across Oro Valley. 7:19 AM. Odd multiple layers of ground fog (lowest) and Stratus clouds (“clouds” because they’re not on the ground) with shreds of Cumulus fractus above Samaniego Ridge. 7:07 AM. As above, suggesting a very fine layering of moist air with little temperature caps.
Here in Catalinaland, this kind of layering of cold air, as most of you know, is endemic on clear nights. Those who drive down across the CDO wash from Sutherland Heights or along Lago del Oro from the surrounding higher terrain know. Because of the stupefying amounts of rain in the past three days, the air is damp enough at ground level to form fog and you can see whose colder at night than you are IF you are above it. Also, anyone who walks their dog in the morning passed innocuous looking gullies, is aware of how cold air flows downhill and collects in low places.
The lack of density of this fog indicated that it formed in real clean air, air that didn’t have a lot of junk in it (which would also contain a lot of CCN, cloud condensation nuclei. Pretty hard to get fogs like we had in Bakersfield, CA.
Once things warmed up some, and with Arctic like air up top, Cumulus arose, a couple of which sprouted icy tops and shafts, namely, became small Cumulonimbus clouds, tops around 20-25 kft. Along with these clouds, there was a treasure of sunny highlights and shadows moving across the Catalinas. Here you go:
10:49 AM. Small Cumulus humilis, mediocris begin forming as temperature “warms up” to 50 F (egad).
11:13 AM. There’s water (glinting) on them rocks! One of the prettiest sights we get to see on the Catalinas after some rain. Not enough water was dumped on the mountains during our drought-denting storm to get water into the CDO Wash locally, but the Sutherland Wash developed a trickle. Just too much dry ground up there for much runoff with the relatively steady rains that we had.
12:10 PM. Small Cumulonimbus clouds erupt just north of Saddlebrooke. Thought I heard thunder from this complex later. 2:50 PM. While small Cbs developed to the north, the Cat Mountains were only able to produce Cumulus congestus (“heavy Cu”). Didn’t see any ice; neither did you, or there’s something wrong. But, if you go here (U of AZ time lapse), you WILL see some forming in the downstream portions of clouds over the Catalinas. Sometimes not seeing ice is because the tops are blowing off away from you before they show it, especially when there isn’t a lot.3:48 PM. Last gasp Cu congestus. Will highest turret form ice?3:49 PM. Ice starting to show!3:53 PM. Droplet cloud completely gone. No question now, nice ice plume. You want to target aircraft into densest portions of this ghostly veil of ice; will correlate with densest portions of liquid cloud. Not enough ice for a shaft below the cloud, but someone felt a few drops below it!
Below, one of the attributes of our partly cloudy days and low near-winter sun angle; pretty lighting:
5:19 PM.5:06 PM.3:54 PM.
The weather way ahead, first week in December.
Pile of cold air to drive into West Coast and Rockies during the first week in December. Snow even possible here, the air is that cold, but mainly the cold air will likely lead to the first cold spell where temps drop significantly below freezing. The worst days look like the 5th and 6th right now, after the threat of rain and or snow pass. So, if you have an evap cooler, you’ll definitely want to have it drained before then if you haven’t already taken care of it (like me).
Rain threat at the end of the month/first day or so in December is fading some in mods, but I refuse to give up on it!
The End.
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1Fog is “gof” spelled backwards, BTW. Has a lot of meanings and I avoided the obvious juvenile approach (today), “Think I’ll go goffing today” which I wouldn’t say anyway because I don’t play gof.
“Better” means wetter, of course. You don’t read this blog to read about DROUGHT! You read it to read about rain and moistness; clouds, too. Let’s leave drought for the other guys…
Here is the latest model permutation from the Canadians, one that successively, and successfully, I might add, jacks up the amount of rain for AZ as the real deal gets closer on the November 21-23rd. Take a lot at these two depictions from Canada for the 22-23rd (sorry about the small size; the Canadians are shy about their model outputs and don’t like to post large gifs or jpegs; also remote areas of Canada mostly have dial up so big files are a problem I’m guessing):
Valid at 5 AM Saturday, November 23rd. Note streamer of heaviest rain in central AZ, The colored regions are for those areas in which rain is forecast by the model for the prior 12 h.Valid at 5 PM, Friday, 22 November. Note streamer of heaviest rain in eastern AZ, and over our area with lots more ahead!
The colored regions are for those areas in which rain is forecast by the model for the prior 12 h.
Note round low near San Diego in the first panel, upper left:
“Round lows out of the flow; no one knows where they want to go.”
This old weather forecasting limerick I just now made up sums this situation well. Round lows sit, spin, wobble and jerk around for awhile, and so they shovel rain and clouds over the same areas for one or two days, sometimes longer.
So, instead of a nice sharp frontal band passing by within a few hours and then its over, as happens most of the time here, bands rev up and keep spinning around the wobbling low, often hitting the same areas and the rain/snow keeps piling up. Remember the giant cutoff low in December 1967, and the MOUNTAINS of snow it produced back then in northern and central Arizona, stranding hundreds? Well, this ones not THAT big, but its big deal anyway with lots of water in it, and not so cold as the one in 1967 when “album rock” was emerging.
So, this could put a real dent in our October-November rainfall deficit throughout Arizona, a real “worth billions of dollars storm” to agriculture! I am pumped, as are you!
Great storm, too, if you’re planning on getting those spring wildflower seeds in the ground; do it just before the storm arrives and you’ll likely get a colorful return in the spring this year.
What are the chances of measurable rain here in Catalina? Oh, right now, I’d say anywhere between 100 and 200 percent. Now the NWS is NOT going to give you those kinds of percentages I might add. You only get them here.
Amounts?
Let’s go for it. I say the minimum (10% chance of LESS) is 0.40 inches, maximum (10% or less chance of more), is 1.50 inches (big top side due to stationary aspects of storm, likely thunderstorms in area). Median of these, which might be the best estimate for Catlanders (those domiciled in Catalina): 0.95 inches, all falling between the morning of the 22nd through the morning of the 24th, likely in pulses. Goodbye dust!
But in those central AZ mountains, with flow more or less perpendicular to them from the south, their best rain producing wind direction, 1-4 inches is very likely. Yay for rain and snow, maybe some TSTMS, too, comin’ right up.
Didn’t mention the US mods but they are “on board” for a major rain event in AZ. Canadian one saw it happening first, so am sticking with it.
Still another pretty good rain chance as the month closes, but a far colder situation than the one coming up.
Yesterday’s clouds
Small ones, Cumulus humilis, no ice, but pretty anyway. Also, a little smidgeon of Cirrocumulus late, with Cirrus, too, invading from the SW, and a pleasant sunset.
5:11 PM. Cirrocumulus blossomed overhead as a moist layer way up top encroached. No ice indicated.2:46 PM. Cumulus humilis dot afternoon skies. No ice indicated.5:32 PM. Cirrus clouds provide target for fading sunlight.
A couple of Pima County gauges reported measurable rain yesterday or overnight, but that was about it. But it was a fabulous cloud day yesterday. Heavier spotty rains, one USGS station indicating over an inch, fell in the central and northern mountains, which is good.
Below, a rehash of yesterday’s great variety of clouds.
7:48 AM. Altocumulus lenticularis clouds beyond the mountains to the SE of Catalina. Lenticular clouds indicate a stable layer of air, one resisting being pushed up, the opposite of what the slender Cu below indicated. So, an usual sky for us yesterday morning.8 AM. Towering Cumulus atop Ms. Lemmon indicated how unstable the air was just above mountain top level. Underexposed for dramatic silouhette look. The smooth top on the right would be Stratocumulus lenticularis, again an odd juxtaposition.
10:37 AM. Then you had your Altostratus mammatus/testicularis.3:08 PM. Your Cumulus mediocris topping the Catalinas with a few Altocumulus above; nice shadows and sun quilting.
3:09 PM. And you had your “weak” Cumulonimbus capillatus clouds to the north.
4:19 PM. Here’s a better shot of the Altocumulus perlucidus (here) top side.
4:33 PM. Nice example of glaciating smaller Cumulus remnant north over Saddlebrook. Likely some sprinkles reached the ground under that ice plume. As you know, takes ice to get rain in AZ.4:34 PM. More sunlight and shadow drama due to Stratocumulus and Ac perlucidus above. Was indoors socializing so didn’t see sunset. Hope it was a good one. I am beside myself thinking about how happy you were seeing all these kinds of clouds in one day!
The weather ahead
Models beginning to act quite well now. A little rain is foretold for Catalina and environs on the 21st of November, but Enviro Can make that storm look more significant and slower to move in, on the 22nd. Still two mods, both having some precip? Its all good. First, for your viewing pleasure and because it portends more rain, from Canada, this:
Valid for 5 PM, November 21st. Low and lots of rain shown banging into Cal. Would be here about 24 h later, or on the 22nd.
Also valid for 5 PM AST, November 21st, this depiction of the flow at 500 mb.
An aside: the Canadian model tends to have a westward bias, that is, a storm is foretold to be farther west a few days out than it turns out to be, something I’ve learned since becoming a forecaster yesterday (hahaha, just kidding, if anyone’s reading this far). So you have to figure the Enviro Can depiction of a trough off Frisco, Cal, is really going to be inland that bit. The US mod output shown above, has this same trough going more overland before it gets to us than the Canadian one, and so there’s less cloud water in it by the time it gets here. Root for the Canadian “solution”!
Farther down the road….more illusory water on the hot highway?
And, of course, a heavier rain is once again over Catalina and vicinity as November closes. This model really likes Catalina and SE AZ! Check it out:
We have a monthly rain total that’s not zero! But will there be more this month? Stay tuned until November 30th! (Nothing imminent.) In the meantime, a very pretty blue sky day today pocked with residual Cumulus clouds, maybe some virga. There’ll be nice cloud shadows and sun on the Catalinas again today.
In the meantime, here are the Pima Country reports for last evening’s rain. The heaviest amount seems to be at our end of the Catalinas at Pig Spring, with 0.39 inches. Nice.
Yesterday’s clouds and why
Not exactly the way they were supposed to go, the ice cloud shield WAS on the horizon to the NW at mid-day but didn’t advance over us, but rather fizzled out. That’s OK. What was left of it enhanced a spectacular sunset through the rain.
The Cumulus clouds were the stars of yesterday, doing something in the way that the old rock band, Jethro Tull used to do. The members of JT would come out on stage as roadies, fiddle around with equipment for awhile, then suddenly turn around and began playing! Oh, who can forget Jethro Tull and that Aqualung album that roiled the rock waters back in 1971 by interrupting heavy, driving rock with acoustic interludes and flute playing (!!! )? What were they thinking?
Well, our Cumulus clouds pulled a fast one, too, after hanging around, fiddling around not doing much, then blammo, here comes the ice around 4:30 PM, followed by an eruption into an honest-to-goodness Cumulonimbus cloud with a strong rain shaft, sending forks of lightning to the ground, and pea to grape-sized hail bouncing off the roof with winds gusting to over 30 mph. This spectacular happenstance was triggered by a surge of much cooler air in conjunction with the lifting of air associated with our approaching trough just above those Cumulus tops yesterday afternoon. That steepened the lapse rate; spring-loading those Cumulus clouds as it were, allowing tops to rise and still be that bit warmer than the surrounding air and stay buoyant as they rose. Here are a couple of TUS balloon soundings rendered by the Cowboys of the U of WY:
While cloud fattening and ice was expected late in the day with sprinkles and light showers, the U of AZ mod run based on 5 AM AST data was spectacular yesterday morning in foretelling this larger eruption as that cold air moved over us. But were grape-sized hail stones and LIGHTNING expected? Not only “no”, but “HELL no”.
Here’s your day, reprised below, of which the MOST IMPORTANT part was the first detection of ice, very tough yesterday, but a precursor to the rain that began to fall a few minutes later. You can also reprise your day here thanks to the U of A time lapse films. Watch what happens around 5 PM, if you can read the tiny font in the lower left hand corner.
Here is the pictorial of your cloud day below:
12:06 PM. Flatness.3:49 PM. Clouds fattening, no ice visible anywhere yet. Nice cloud street generated upwind of Pusch Ridge, floating over Catalina. Shows wind direction at cloud level is from that direction.4:01 PM. Nice cloud shadows and sun highlights moving along the Cat Mountains, too.4:34 PM. Something’s definitely happening now. Note turret protruding on the left. Clouds evolving into larger masses to the south, the cloud street having broken up. And, those massing clouds are upwind of us. Still, no ice evident.4:35 PM. Ice! I can’t believe it. Its going to rain! Can you find it? This is REALLY tough. 4:37 PM. Close up of ice. A higher top was breaking off to the NE and was converting to ice.
5:07 PM. By this time, ice had formed in cloud clusters all around Catalina, and this beauty erupted upwind.5:22 PM. About to strike with hail, lightning, wind and rain.5:35 PM. While the rain and hail weren’t done yet, it gave this colorful scene reminiscent of summer sunset color except that the sun would be setting WAY over there on the right out of view.5:40 PM. Second thunderstorm with hail in formation upwind of Catalina.
