Cumulus clouds – Page 25

Bulimic Cumulus clouds, filled with portent, disappoint

Why would such skinny, towering clouds be filled with thundery, gushing portent? Its really hard for a cloud to be tall and skinny. Why? Because too much dry air comes in as it rises, both from the tops and sides, and if that air is dry, it can’t go far without evaporating. Too, the drop in temperature with height has to be larger than normal for clouds like yesterday’s to shoot up to well beyond the level where ice can form (glaciate). But they did off and on all day. Mt. Lemmon functioned as a smokestack for Cumulus and even skinny Cumulonimbus, clouds all during the late morning and into late afternoon. There was some thunder here as ONE got big enough to rain that bit toward Charoleau Gap. So, you do get to record a TSTM (thunderstorm) in your log book. No rain fell here.

If you missed those bulimic clouds, here’s yesterday’s movie from the U of AZ. If you watch that time lapse, you will see some of the tallest turrets shooting up awfully fast; I thought they were rising about fast, at times, anyway, as any turrets I have seen in these movies, a marker for how rapidly the air cooled with height yesterday.

Also, here are a few shots of those skinny clouds from this angle here Catalinaland.

OK, quiting visual cloud displays here. You’ve seen enough disappointing clouds, ones that did not live up to their potential like so many of us.

You would have thought massive clusters of Cumulonimbus clouds were about to roll in, spawned over the Rincon Mountains or from the high terrain near Pie Town, NM, rolling westward to pummel the townlet of Catalina again. Some of our more gigantic area storms have been preceded by morning “long tall sallys” like these.

But no.

Looking at today:

The boys in the weather club, like Bob and Mike, were talkin’ good storms today based on their very great and decades-long experience. I, too, am riding the Bob-Mike wave.

Way out ahead; major rain joy, maybe…

I am more excited about the longer term view, one in which when it gets here, will remember what I said with enthusiasm now. Remember our logo, one just like the big TEEVEE stations have:

“RIght or wrong, you heard it here FIRST! Live!”

What “first”?

Tropical storm remnant has been probably unreliably, but hopefully, forecast to come into southern Arizona in 192 h or so. Could be worse; what if it was a forecast that was 360 h from now?

Here it is, courtesy of those folks at IPS Meteostar who have rendered the 00 Z (think Olympics Time Zone) time maps for us. Here’s the low, shown on the first map, on Baja coast. The next map shows that the ENTIRE remnant has moved into AZ! Could be great.

What gives this storm a better chance of getting here than some? The upper level steering is set up to draw tropical storms northward should they drift too far northwest, like a bug getting caught in a spider web; the spider then hauling the bug to its hiding place. Gee, I never thought I would write about spiders here, but there it is; it just kind of popped out.

But, you ask, how do we KNOW, have any CLUE, that the steering, as by an upper level trough, is going to be properly placed to draw tropical storms northward so that they get caught up like a bug in a spider web which after being caught in the web, the spider comes down and takes it back to its hiding place. I really liked that metaphor. We are like that place where the spider is hiding!

Of course, you say, we go to the NOAA spaghetti factory and try to discern how likely it is that a trough will be along the West Coast, positioned to draw storms up thisaway.

The last image is a spaghetti plot of trough contours using what be called, “the bad balloon” approach. Hard to imagine, but the starting points for the model is deliberately altered a bit just to see how wild a few of the contours get. The wilder they get, the less reliable a longer term forecast is.

20120809002012080800_NAM_GFS_SFC_SLP_THK_PRECIP_WINDS_192 — Valid for August 15 at 5 PM AST. Note all the green, denoting rain that fell in the preceeding 6 h.

NOAA “spaghetti plot” valid for the SAME time as the first map, 5 PM AST, August 15th. Shows that a trough along the West Coast is virtually assured. But the “devil”, the storm here, is in the details. While it is a necessary condition, it is not sufficient, since the flow might not exactly draw a tropical storm right to ME. Oops, “us.”

Tracey day

Two maybe three sprinkles occurred in the early afternoon between 1:30 and 2:40 PM for a total accumulation of “trace.” The first from our very own Catalina cloud street off Ms. Lemon. Here it is in mid-afternoon when it was was still right over us, but the clouds in it not tall enough, as earlier, to have something in them that causes precipitation to fall out. (What is it? Hint: Think of the Beatles’ anthem about something that is, “all you need¹.”)

Bubble Cu drifts away, later becoming a “quarter pounder”… Watch the sequence below.

So, what did we get out of this sequence?

Even small clouds, really modest ones at the start, can boil upward and produce a useful amount of rain, albeit in a short-lived life. Between the time it began to rain from this cloud and the end of it from this little cloud was barely more than six minutes, maybe ten. But don’t overlook them; they can still get you wet.

And with that happy ending, let me leave you with this happy ending to our day; yesterday’s sunset Cumulonimbus cloud, and the thought of more of them today! (The weather service says so…here.)

¹ice

“Feint” rainbow

For a few minutes yesterday afternoon, it looked like some unexpected rain was trucking over the Cat Mountains from the east-northeast late yesterday afternoon. No one could blame you for getting your hopes up and misleading your neighborhood by saying it might rain in half an hour. Those clouds rolling in from the Catalinas (shown below) were great sights for soaring eyes, ones that look to the skies all the time for rain.

But within the hour, the clouds had broken up, and the shower they produced was reflected by a faint rainbow. Rainbows to the east and northeast are often precursors of rain and wind moving into Catalina. Here is the sad remnants of those albeit weak, Cumulonimbus clouds with their feint rainbow, one that was not followed by one drop of rain here.

A big patch of Cirrus kept the temperature down some during the first half of the day, and so our Cumulus were behind in development compared to areas around us. Here is that bad Cirrus spissatus in case you missed it, that which hung over us so long.

It was quite visible even in the visible satellite image all morning. When it shows up there, you can bet that the Cirrus in that image is thick enough to produce shading and mess up the development of Cumulus under and around it, particularly on marginal rain days like yesterday.

Much Cirrus is virtually invisible in visible satellite imagery; get it? You can see it from the ground (i.e., its visible), those thin wisps of Cirrus, but try to find it in a visible satellite image! This whole line of reasoning and befuddled exposition here reminds me of that Science knee-slapper of a few years ago; that article entitled, “Where are the invisible galaxies?”

Today?

Raining lightly now at 5:25 AM! Yay. A night stalker mass of rain is moving into TUS now as I write. They don’t usually like the daytime and fade as the sun rises in the sky. Sprinkles, very light rain showers (and as always pointed out here, quite emphatically I might add, “sprinkles is not DRIZZLE, dammitall”, to be a little colloquial there!).

Let’s hope this heavy cloud cover we have now (5:30 AM), which you could call, Altocumulus opacus and castellanus due to its height above the ground (its at about 11-12,000 feet above the ground and has turrets here and there). But, to get a little pedalogical you could label it in your log book as Stratocumulus, perhaps with the appendage, castellanus, since turrets are present–those are what’s causing the sprinkles/light showers.

Sunset was nice….

U of AZ mod shows this is our best day for a significant rain, some of that this morning, and some arises later with those afternoon and evening giants we get around here. Hoping so. Tomorrow is supposed to be drier.

The End.

Long distance Cumulonimbus top; cloud review for yesterday, and, big day tomorrow?

The only good Cumulonimbus (Cb) clouds seem to be occurring north of Golder Ranch Drive, about a 100 miles north. which of course, astronomically speaking is actually quite close. Yesterday, with no intervening clouds, it was another chance to see how far can you see the top of a Cb, then use the NWS radar to place it. The Cb top, with an arrow pointing to it in the first photo, is followed by a zoomed shot. The radar indicates that lone, very tall cell was about 10 miles SE of Kingman, or more than 150 miles away! It was common in South Dakota, working with radar in Mitchell and Parkston, to see Cb tops and anvils on the horizon that the radar was unable to see, partly because the radar beam is pointed slightly upward to minimize “ground clutter” as seen in the radar image below around PHX.

annotated 0001E6 — 7:20 PM NWS radar mosaic rendered by the U of AZ.

Review of yesterday; another quiet day (Ed. Note: Getting tired of quiet days)

Yesterday was almost exactly like the day before, with a brief period of glaciating cloud in the same spot beyond the Charoleau Gap from Catalina as the day before. Here are a few representative shots of yesterday.

Can you pick out the icy top in that one little glaciating Cb? Its a little harder to detect this time compared with yesterday.

I feel uncomfortable labeling this little mush of cloud a “Cumulonimbus”, maybe “Cb calvus”, because the fibrous nature of the ice is not yet obvious.

Still it has the attributes of a Cumulonimbus, glaciating top, precip out the bottom, though we can’t see it here. It will produce a radar echo like the little Cb the day before. What we really need, to editorialize some, are categories for these situations like “Cumulonimbus humilis”, “Cumulonimbus mediocris” so that we know that we have miniature versions of those clouds.

We do have, though I avoid it, a category of “Cumulus congestus praecipitatio”, because visual examples, as shown in the last (1987) World Meteorological Atlas, cannot be differentiated from Cumulonimbus clouds, at least, not by me!

The weather ahead

“Quiet time” is coming to an end, not today so much, the computers say, but tomorrow, oh my, could be huge!

Check it out here, courtesy of our U of AZ weather program and their massive Beowulf Cluster of computers.

The End

Another big day; scattered amounts around us of more than THREE inches again; we only got 0.18 inches!

Trying to be excited for those around us who got all that rain yesterday while we received a paltry 0.18 inches here in the upper reaches of Catalina. Still it was another good little rain for our local desert.

The 24 h rolling archive from Pima County rainfall gages is here. Most seen here? 2.01 inches at Finger Rock and Skyline, Tucson. You’ll see that storm in the movies.

Also, check the more comprehensive U of AZ rainfall network here. In fact, you might as well join up, too. It would get you out of your rut. Think how exciting it would be to go out in the morning and see how much rain fell in your gage in the previous 24 hours! Maybe someday you might win the “rain lottery” and have the biggest amount anywhere in the State! The most reported so far this morning is a deluge of 3.17 inches over by Picture Rocks again. Good grief, have they been getting hammered.

What a July this is turning out to be!

Here we are in Catalina, its late afternoon, it has just rained again, the temperature is a chilly 70 F, dewpoint 68 F (almost saturated), with Stratus fractus just above eyeball level lining the hillsides! Its an amazing scene for an afternoon in Catalina and vicinity in July. And so DARK! Here is that odd scene from yesterday afternoon:

Relive yesterday, as though you were in the city of Tucson shopping possibly, here in this movie, courtesy of the U of AZ Weather Department. The movie is rated “R”, for violence since the sky goes WILD in the afternoon, winds going every which way.

Also, in this time lapse you will get a sense of how rapidly moist air is flowing across us from the east to east-southeast. This movie, comprised of still shots taken every 10 s shows movement, like the day before, that is phenomenal for summer, more like a winter scene when winds are normally strong. There are even Altocumulus lenticular clouds (almond shaped ones) hovering over and just downwind of the Cat Mountains! Amazing.

But check the CHAOS in the mid and later afternoon. Unbelievable. Areas toward the Catalina foothills, during this chaos, got another 1-2 inches again yesterday.

In contrast, let us now look at the very same day in a time lapse film in Seattle, Washington, where Mr. Cloud-Maven person spent 32 years, most with the U of Washington Huskies Weather Department. Here it is. I sum up the totality of that movie for July 29th below:

Bor-ring!

Those Seattle skies, for the most part, were like eating plain, cooked oatmeal everyday, all day.

Below, the start of our exciting day, the middle, and the end has already been shown above. Lots of nice rain shafts SUDDENLY collapsing down out of clouds. A sequence of the big northwest Tucson storm early in the afternoon that moved off toward Marana is included as part of the middle. That shaft really fell out fast, and how you could detect the icey tops BEFORE the shaft appeared. I try to point out how you might have been able to do that in this sequence, and thus, and quite importantly, impress your friends and gain status and some kind of weather sage.

Today?

Just looked at the latest AZ mod output, as you can here (forgot to past link until now, 8:08 AM). Colored splotches are where it is supposed to have rained that HOUR. That model has a much less active day today, but much more active tomorrow. Cumulonimbus clouds in sight today? Oh, yeah! But, none are SUPPOSED to get us today. But these mods are always slightly inaccurate, so keep watching this afternoon. Should be another photogenic day, if nothing else.

Every which way but here

Of course, alluding today in the title to the great western movie with John Wayne…

Every which way you looked yesterday afternoon, there was a great rainshaft. 1.85 inches fell in one hour at Picture Rocks Community Center yesterday afternoon, 2.01 inches total. Several stations around the county had another 1-2 inches yesterday. You can see the Pima County rain lineup here. Seems the great amount in the Catalinas was about half an inch in a gage at Samaniego Peak. Probably twice that between gages up there in the hot spots, where the best columns of rain fell. Also, it would be good to examine our U of A rainfall network today, too, for some jumbo totals. Values are being added during the morning hours as a rule.

Catalina? Well, a measly 0.05 inches fell here after 7 AM until this morning from side-swiping Cumulonimbus clouds, though Sutherland Heights did receive a more respectable 0.28 inches–just measured it. . So, if you were outside yesterday, you saw heavy shafts of rain all around, but none developed over us (the best kind), or moved in here.

But, then, 1.85 inches in an hour, probably most in a shorter time than that, might be “counter-productive”; might make Catalina into a news story, and not a good one… So, I’d better watch what I wish for.

Here are some views of yesterday’s “clouds and columns” of rain yesterday. And, as has been the case, the day started with heavy layer clouds, Stratocumulus and Altocumulus, and a nice, but very brief sunrise “bloom” shown below:

Once these clouds thinned by late morning, Cumulus began to surge upward over the Catalina’s, and reflected an usually strong east-southeast wind just above mountain top levels by trailing over Catalina from Mt. Lemmón. These reached the ice-forming level (read, began to produce rain at the ground) in a series of showers and thunderstorms by 11:30 AM (2nd photo).

Looked, too, like another tube (funnel cloud) at 3:48 PM yesterday off in the direction of Marana, but I’ve posted so many of late I thought I would just post it at the bottom of these more interesting photos.

Moisture continues to revolve into Arizona from the southeast and so it would appear a similar day is in store for us. Oh, goody.

“Do meteorologists suppress thunderstorms?”-Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 2005

In view of the serious consequences of missed rainfall in an Arizona summer, and being a meteorologist, I felt it was important to address a longstanding question among fellow meteorologists, to clear the air, as it were, about what my role might have been in the deflection of massive storms that appeared to be coming to Catalina, but then dissipated mysteriously. Perhaps this investigation will shed light on the three recent consecutive missed days with no major rains in Catalina while major rains fell very nearby.

There have been some rumors and innuendoes.

Perhaps if a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can affect the weather (eventually) in Texas (from “chaos theory” where itty bitty things can mess everything up), perhaps my excessive running around in the yard taking photographs of giant clouds could have had an effect, changing the airflow in some counterproductive way.

In pursuit of truth, I am providing my three readers with some intellectual, philosophical material to consider today; this research published in a respectable peer-reviewed journal, the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (aka, Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., or just “Bull.”, for short). This article is in the same philosophical domain as that article in Physics Today (I think it was) many years ago: “Can watching the Mets play baseball (on television) affect the outcome of the game?¹”

Please contemplate this article below today, and then look into your own heart about how YOU yourself might have been deflecting storms. Maybe there aren’t any studies out there answering that question yet, and so we don’t know do we? But…..

Do Meteorologists Suppress Thunderstorms?

No.

While a quite technical, comprehensive article in which meteorologists in 28 cities around the US were examined for their effect on storms. If you don’t believe MY answer, the gist of this article is on p353:

“According to our data and methods, a meteorologist’s hometown is no more likely to be a weather hole or hot spot than is any random place around the conterminous United States.”

I guess that settles that…or does it?

(X-Files, Twilight Zone, etc., music here (11 11_Extraordinary Claims 1)².

The weather ahead

The Canadian model has us on the edge of rain for another two-three days, then the summer rain season resumes. Similarly, the WRF-GFS model run from the U of WA has rain moving back into our area this Saturday afternoon. Maybe I’ll run around the house a couple of times. move some air around, and see if I can speed this return up some….

Anomalous cloud sighting

Now this was truly strange, I thought, in view of the totally flat, Cumulus “pancake-us” clouds. Off in the far horizon to the SW, was this ONE towering Cumulus! Not sure I have seen such a cloud anomaly, and not really sure why THAT one stuck up so much. You’d have to guess that the moisture and temperature profile down that way was quite abit different that what we had here, but then, you would normally have seen many more clouds like that off on the horizon. Strange indeed, to me. There it is.

______________________________________________________________________________

¹Haven’t been able to find that classic, but will eventually.

²Credit: The National Science Foundation for funding Bill Nye the Science Guy programs, and to the Walt Disney Studios for creating those wonderful liittle ditties at the end of each show.

“Curve ball” of a Cumulonimbus strikes out Catalina again

It looked like it was coming straight down the middle. I didn’t see any rotation on it. It was coming toward ME… and to Catalina. We were going to get “shafted”, rain shafted that is, at last!

I started taking video, shooting numerous still shots of the mammoth-behemoth, churning, tropical-like, boiling-roiling Cumulonimbus cloud rolling in from the southwest toward Catalina, lightning sparking every minute or two at one point. Pileus veils appeared and disappeared as the tops shot upward through moist layers. What is a pileus? Hint: Its not Latin for somebody who flies an airplane. But, continuing about airplanes….

If only I had a plane, I dreamed, to go inside them, fully explore and experience them in a quantitative way, those voluptuous turrets! To penetrate their depths with instrumentation like we would used to do in the olden days at the University of Washington, recording the hail/graupel bursts on the pilot’s window, ones where it was like someone had thrown rice at the window, the huge amounts of supercooled liquid water piling up on the airframe, the plane trembling, rocking in turbulence, turbulence whose effects could only be mitigated by Marezine, the lightning strikes on the fuselage, the white knuckled, almost euphoric, glad-to-be-alive feeling afterward.

Yes, those were the good old days.

While our dogs were cowering, made restless by the approaching thunder, I dusted off my rain gage collector, looked inside it, as you all should do, for telltale signs of recent bird visitations, droppings that might hinder the rush of water into the inner collector, or even block it all together. Once having cleaned it off, I sprayed the outer collector with WD-40 so that the drops would roll quickly into the inner collector without the least resisitance, allowing the tipping bucket of the Davis Vantage Pro II Extra Deluxe Mark IV rain gage and weather station system to report rain as rapidly as possible.

This was going to be a great rain, it would make up for the prior two day’s of disappointments and sadness, really. BTW, its quite normal for meteorologists to feel like they live in a “hole” where the best rains hardly ever hit.

In case you didn’t call in sick yesterday as was suggested here so that you could see the those majestic Cumulonimbus clouds roll in, and in paritcular, missed this one below that literally rumbled toward Catalina from the direction of Twin Peaks, here is a sequence of shots taken at 12:53 PM, 1 PM, 1:07 PM, and 1:28 PM. Rain seemed imminent.

Of course, it fizzled out. Three strikes! Three days in a row of near misses!

This one got SO CLOSE! And as you see below, there were flanking bases even as it neared, absolutely necessary for continued life of the storm. Without those flanking clouds, a Cumulonimbus can have a shockingly short life span, maybe 20-30 minutes of rain to the ground.

As you can see below, those dark bases sans rain shafts (flanking dark cloud bases) were a good sign that the approaching storm was going to continue propagating into Catalina with gusto, and gusts as well, as the flanking clouds piled up into new Cumulonimbus clouds, riding on top of the outflow winds of the rainshaft.

But no, the flanking clouds disappeared in minutes, leaving only the sad stratiform remains of that once proud Cumulonimbus. Below, 2:57 PM, one of the saddest cloud sights of all, Altostratus cumulonimbogenitus, orphaned from their parent Cumulonimbus cloud, set adrift, and adrift, without being fed from below, well, they die. Light, ever so light, rain was falling when this photos was taken.

Eventually the steady, very light rain added it up to 0.02 inches. I felt like I was back in Seattle because the way that rain was falling yesterday afternoon, was EXACTLY like the rain that Mr. Cloud-maven person experienced year in and year out in Seattle, Washington. Yep, that’s how it rains in SEA most of the time and you experienced that right here in Catalina yesterday afternoon.

The day ended with a remarkable clearing of all the low clouds, not a Cumulus could be seen from horizon to horizon. But we did have “pretty Cirrus” (spissatus) clouds, also orphaned from Cumulonimbus, to make a nice sunset.

Today, after the early morning rainbow, one that I didn’t get a photo of?

Gee, the dewpoints are still high, we have a surprising amount of mid-level clouds this morning, some with turrets and showers, yet the U of A weather model suggests no rain later today based on what it sees. Hmmmm. Its usually correct in these matters, though I hope some surprise is waiting for us late this afternoon anyway.

The End.

Kind of upset I missed getting a shot of that unusual morning rainbow because the camera had no SD card again, so I think instead, out of spite, I will put in a recent photo of some kind of beetle.

Grazed and confused

Man, its tough to get rain here sometimes. Not sure why we seem to be in a death zone for Cumulonimbus clouds lately. Yesterday, a really great shower plodded toward Catalina and only to fade on the east side, and propagate off to the west and over the Tortolita Mountains (veered down the sideline, in football speak). I guess we should feel lucky that, due to the lightly raining “stratiform” (blanket cloud) residual cloud from this strong storm, we got 0.02 inches here last evening. Coulda been worse, of course. (BTW, if you’re an old rocker and want to hear, “Dazed and Confused”, to which I allude to in the title, go here.)

Here’s the photo record in thumbnails, which I thought was interesting enough because this moderate-sized shower really exploded into something large as it approached from near the Tucson Mountains. You can also go here to get the full version as seen from the top of the Wildcat Dept of Atmos. Meteoro.

4:54 PM. Nice and cute; its even heading this way, but way too far away to make it, given the short lifetimes of small Cumulonimbus clouds.	5:04 PM. Huh? Its STILL coming, and seems to be developing a new “crop”; those flanking, non-raining clouds that might grow to take the place of the raining one. Oh, it’ll never make it. Too small.	5:36 PM. Its not small anymore! Holy Smokes! And look at those “fountain-of-youth-required-for-new-life-new dump for Cumulonimbus flanking clouds! This could be great dump here!
6:04 PM. Here, the side of the storm approaching Catalina. The flanking lower cloud deck has disappearing and only light to moderate rain is upwind now. Without re-inforcements from below, that approaching rain will only get lighter and lighter as it approaches. Dang.	6:11 PM. Awesome, but somehow “wrong”, falling over there. An almost black flanking cloud, piled high on top, was forced there by the outflow winds from the original storm as it dropped its first heavy load in Oro Valley. Because those winds aren’t symmetrical blowing out from the rainshaft, it happened that the strongest winds and uplift over them went over there. Dang#2	7:07 PM. Its raining lightly here now, coded “R–” or “RW–” in your log book. The cloud would be termed, Altostratus cumulonimbogenitus (namely, debris cloud, trash clouds from our glorious Cbs).

To finish off with something more positive, this sunrise photo taken just now while a few drops of rain were falling.

The Weather Ahead.

Drying trend starts on Wednesday, the 25th and lasts a couple of days. The Enviro Canada model saw this coming some days ago, the US WRF-GFS not so much, but they agree now.

The clouds and Cbs return on the 29th with July finishing strong in activity.

In the meantime, another great day ahead, one with large Cumulonimbus clouds and scenes like the past few days are on tap.

More, later.

It is later.

Here is the U of A model output for today, hour by hour. Lots of activity seen for us in Catland beginning after 12 Noon with numerous showers developing by then, but nothing for tomorrow and the next day.

Maybe you should call in sick today, and enjoy the sky all day.

The End.

Stuck in the middle; only 0.03 inches in Catalina from Kansas skies

“Shafts to the left of me, shafts to the right of me, but here I am, stuck in the middle with you.” (Yeah, and without any rain.) Who can’t forget Stealers Wheel? Most everybody I guess.

Here is an example of a “middle”, an empty region between rainshafts in this case. You don’t want to be there. Boring, as in “baby I’m bored”, for emphasis. But that’s what we “Catalonians” got yesterday, the middle.

As the three of you who follow this blog know, I don’t usually concentrate photographing the “middle” or “tweeners” as some baseball-cloudcentric fans might call these kinds of scenes; I like to show the shaft. I NEVER get tired of shafts, or, in fact, being “shafted” by rainshafts.

Never will.

I did think, in taking this first shot, that the dark base ahead of the “middle” would drop its load on me. I had already prepared a story in my mind with a “happy” flash flood ending. I readied my camera, got the tripod out.

But, no. It missed me and my gage, slipping off to the right, or to west from the spot above, dumping its load on north Oro Valley and Saddlebrooke. I can’t wait to see how much rain the rainloggers over there report this morning compared to my crummy 0.03 inches. Oh, well. There was generally about 0.4 to an inch in the Catalinas. Hooray! More green, more water!

Commercial break:

In trying to make the best of a situation that was fast becoming a disappointment, I noticed some birds floating around in the updraft of the dark base as it came almost overhead. Suddenly, I realized, as I started to carry out my niche of photographing cloud bottoms, that a cloud bottom photo with some kind of bird in it, who knows what, probably using the updraft into this cloud base to ride on, a kind of “bird surfing” would likely appeal to the “bird set”, Audubonners and the like, etc., thus expanding my commercial base beyond just the cloud bottom crowd. It was a quite a striking, moneyful thought.

BTW, these birds are doing what cloud seeding aircraft do, circle in the updraft below cloud bases and release nuclei, sometimes “hygroscopic” nuclei, ones that form drops, and sometimes “ice nuclei”, ones that form ice crystals. See, at last I got some education in! You got schooled! Didn’t see that one coming did you?

I’ll address whether cloud seeding works in a rant some day…

Below, the resulting symbiotic photo, now named, “Base and Birds, or the more accessible, “Surfing Birds.” It will cost you one dollar to download it….hahahah, sort of. “Hey”, let us not forget the words of the great Danny Elfman, Oingo Boingo: “There’s nothing wrong with capitalism…don’t try to make me feel guilty…”)

—-end of commercial break

BTW, the discerning cloud bottomer will notice that this base has some inconsistencies, is not quite solid, suggesting its not due to a large continuous updraft area; only part of it is. This was a clue that there could be a disappointment.

Kansas skies?Oh yeah, there were some itty bitty tubes on the front side of that jack hammer of a storm that rolled into Oro Valley from Tucson yesterday around 1:50 PM. Take a look below. Second time in a week have seen a “tube”. Getting very tubular around here. Check out the U of A time lapse movie for a real fright night day as that big boy goes by. “Totally awesome!”

Some nice lightning around, too. Here are a couple of those shots to end things off with.

Finally, a nice sunset peering through a hole in an Altostratus cumulonimbogenitus opacus overcast that ended our day–english translation, thick debris clouds leftover from our many thunderstorms yesterday.