Scattered rain in AZ forecast next ten days!

Last night’s model runs continue to indicate a showery spell of no less than 10 days duration in the State of AZ.  IPS Meteostar, a private weather provider,  has repackaged the National Center for Environmental Prediction numerical model predictions here.  No one cannot be excited by this prospect in view of our droughty August.  What’s REALLY interesting, though likely in some error, is that a tropical storm moves up the Baja Coast , dies, but its remnant moves into AZ in 10 days (see model forecast below valid for September 14th).   As a forecaster type of person, as well as a cloud-maven kind of person, this would be like Christmas in September to have something like this happen where maybe an inch or two of rain spreads over parts of the State.  This is because we are supposed to be getting drier and drier as the summer rain season withers in September, and so this would be an anomaly.  I’ve always liked weather anomalies, and this might be a real good one.  However, as mentioned in prior writeups, these kinds of things come and go in the models, and so its best to think of it as like in a dream right now, but a pleasant one.

Some cloud shots below from yesterday.  It was SO NICE to see that first little Cumulus cloud pop up over the Catalina Mountains in the early afternoon!  While the depth of the Cumulonimbus clouds locally was limited by dry air and an inversion (temperature reversal aloft) and they could not produce strong rainshafts as a result, still in was nice to see ANYTHING dropping out of those clouds!  Here we were lucky enough to register 0.o2 inches, enough to cut the dust some on our gravelly neighborhood roads.

 

 

Toad’s night out; 0.93 inches

What a superb rain that was here in Cat land!  The early signs, which I pointed out to a friend well before it happened, fully developed, “behemothic” Cumulonimbus capillatus incus clouds before noon.    Take a look at some of the early “warning” developments.  I included a baby Cumulonimbus capillatus cloud just for the heck of it; it was so CUTE!  First, tall thin Cumulus reaching the ice-forming level before noon (fibrous portions technically making them Cbs), the baby Cb, and then a behemoth of a complex to the N of us.  This was SUCH a great opening for the day!   How anyone could not be excited by these sights unless you were indoors all day without windows, I don’t know.  Also, I get quite sad thinking about Catalina-ites that feel they must move to higher ground when the temperature rises in summer here.  Look what they missed!  Of course, they also missed the screeching toads last night, too, not a pleasant sound, but nice to think it was because they, too, were excited about all that rain that fell.   What helped our rain total, and the desert re-greening now in process, was the giant areas of more stratiform rain areas, debris clouds from the original thunderheads that normally here do not produce much or any rain.  In the Midwest, a cold front comes through with leading thunderstorms and a windhift, and then it rains for three hours afterwards from the trailing  “stratiform”, well, really Nimbostratus-like clouds (ones commonly seen in Seattle, for example, when steady rain is falling).  And we had a lot of that late yesterday afternoon that enhanced the rain totals from the downspout portions of the thunderstorms.   That steadier, moderate rain that went on for several hours added about as much here as did the initial dump.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Of course, Mr. Cloud Maven person got quite excited when solid bases began to appear overhead, requiring documentation as in this photo, his signature shot.

What was exceptional was the frequency here of cloud to ground lightning strikes, many close ones,  yesterday afternoon.   I had not seen so many strikes and the time between them could be measured, seconds I think. Even going out to the “trace detector” (an old car parked outside) seemed dangerous though it is only 50 feet away.  Cut down on photo ops, too, dammitall.

Its thought that a higher frequency of strikes might be due to greater updraft speeds than usual in the clouds overhead.  Typically, guessing here, they might be 10-20 kts in our thunderstorms, yesterday may have reached 30-40 kts.  Not much literature re this sort of thing in AZ thunderstorms.   BTW, the greatest measured updraft was about 80 kts, or close to 100 mph!  Yikes!  The plane that measured that, an “armored” T-28, was taken upward 5,000 feet before you could say skiddadle.

Thunder-rooskie

With a thunderstorm at 7 AM LST yesterday mainly toward Saddlebrooke, you may have thought, “What a thundery day this will be!  It will be like Cherrapunji during the Indian-Bangladesh monsoon season when it rains and thunders all day and inches of rain pile up!”

And of course, it wasn’t going to be like that at all, rather it was the famous deceptive weather “play” called, “thunder-rooskie”, whose first derivative was executed in a Nebraska in a fubball game in which the ball was not hiked by the Big Red offensive team, but was left on the turf for some lineman to pick up while all of the other players were too busy pushing each other around to notice the “egg” just lying there.   (Actually, the name of that trick play was “fumble-rooskie”, as students of the game will know.)  At least here in Catalina, we did get measurable rain in the morning, pretty refreshing, too, of 0.04 inches.  Lots more toward SB.

So wha-happened?  First, that mostly stratiform overcast helped keep temperatures down; only 91 F in Catalina yesterday.  100 F have sent volcanic explosions of Cumulonimbus clouds into the sky, but, except in a few isolated areas and on the White Mountains, that didn’t really happen.  Too damn cool.

Also, when you have a disturbance strong enough to produce rain and the rare morning thunderstorm, more often than not it is replaced during the daytime by dryer air asscoiated with an attendant couplet of descending air motion, and a little of that happened yesterday, too.  So, rain and thunder at dawn are often associated with disappointing afternoons here in Cat Land.  Naturally, I hoped for more, seeing those low cloud bases topping Samaniego Ridge, even during the afternoon.  But other than an occasional, and very brief tower, they did not even make it to the height where ice forms and rain falls out.

Here’s the rest of our muggy, but dry day:

 

Drops away!

As a photographer, you like to develop a niche.  My niche, of course, if you follow this site, is gray matter overhead, an amorphous, gray balls.  Now yesterday was a great day for adding something to my collection since a Cumulus base, one that was clearly headed for better things than just being a Cumlus cloud, developed almost straight overhead, giving me a great chance for another “signature shot.”  See below.  I don’t know of any other photographer that specializes in this kind of shot; kind of sad, really.

Once again, you’ll have to click on the image to get a proper size, and hold your monitor over your head.  People seem to enjoy doing this.  Make sure your plugs and connections to the monitor are long enough to do this maneuver.  Sometimes I forget to tell people this, and then they get mad when an external hard drive falls on the floor when performing this maneuver and it won’t work anymore.  Sorry.

Of course, I monitored this base and kept shooting ( you never know which one will be the best) it, and then, there came the strands of the first drops out the bottom, that fabulous moment so few photographers catch because it is VERY subtle.  Next photo, if you can detect it!

OK, this is probably too hard for you to see much in the second shot, though I can see something.

How about a bit later, when its obvious?

Pretty cool, huh?

I was really hoping for those giant drops, but the initial shaft was just a hair to the east, and so while it rained HARD, the main load was dumped toward Sutherland Wash to the east.  But, we did get 0.16 inches here. See next photos

What were seeing in this emergence of a fall streak is the overhead transition from a Cumulus congestus to a Cumulonimbus calvus to Cb capillatus.  Eventually only the “hair”, that is, the fibrous ice cloud is left up there.  The whole bottom two thirds of the cloud has rained out.  Since there were so many Cumulus clouds that went through this transition yesterday, we were left with a huge amount of what would be called, probably should stretch your tongue before trying to say this so you don’t injure it, “Altostratus cumulonimbogenitus.”  Here’s the great sunset shot showing mostly that mass of ice cloud up there (underlit by the ray of sun).  Enjoy once again!

 

 

 

 


 

Promising fizzle

 

If you looked outside to the south and upwind of Catalina later yesterday afternoon, after a disappointing day of Cumulus development over the Cat Mountains, you saw this behemoth of a top protrude out of a mass of cirriform clouds beyond Pusch Ridge.   Excitement begins.  Can it hold up long enough to reach us?  This complex of thunderstorms that trudged slowly toward us was around Green Valley at this time (4:29 PM).  It faded almost from the moment this photo was taken.  Go here to see the radar imagery of this from IPS Meteorstar.  Alas, all we got from it was sunset color by the time it got here 3 h later.   The colorful underlit bubbles of downward moving air are called “mammatus” if you care.

We continue to be on the edge of the main summer rain areas to the south, and so we will be lucky to get anything again today other than sunrise and sunset color today. “Dang”, as a friend would say.

 

11 (hundredths)

While we would have liked to have had our rain amplifier turned up to more than 11, as Nigel Tufnel might say, but we got this amount out of an unusual situation in which you often miss rain.  The cloud that did it formed virtually overhead and rained itself out without moving.  Best dump of the day was a bit S of this place toward Cat State Park.  But… let us not get greedy.   Our summer vegetation is looking stressed, and so yesterday’s odd situation of virtually no movement of rain/thunderstorm cells meant that a cloud had to build right over us to get any rain.  And that’s what happened when we got almost all of our 0.11 inches yesterday.  The first shot, looking straight up just before it began, with these eyes detecting some evidence of ice in the top of the cloud overhead and getting excited, since that would mean there would be a rainshaft soon.  In these kinds of overhead shots, as I have mentioned before, you will have to raise the monitor over your head to really get this first photo correctly.  Maybe count to 10 or 12 so it counts as some form of exercise.  Would be good for you, that’s for sure.

Went outside at this time to wait for the first drops, hoping I would see those silver dollar-sized ones that fall out first through the updraft1.   It took a few minutes, and I did not see those giants.  Still, the drops were big enough and numerous enough to produce 0.07 inches in about 5 minutes.  Nice.

With no wind “up top”, it was a bit odd to see that this cloud that had rained itself out, still virtually overhead 40 min later as a patch of Cirrus (spissatus cumulonimbogenitus) if you want something to choke on so early in the morning.  See the very upper left hand corner of the second shot:

In the meantime, Cumulus werer lining up and boiling upward just S of us, and eventually went on to produce much heavier rains on the west side of the Cat mountains and into Oro Valley.  Also nice.

Here’s that sequence to the S, beginning with a promising line of Cumulus bases:

 

 

 

 

Interesting, perhaps, historical note below, he sez, re raindrops

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1Mr. Cloud Maven person has the undistinguished, perhaps embarrassing note of sharing with his lead professor, the late Peter V. Hobbs,  the Guinness world record for measured raindrop size (see below).  So, Mr. Cloud Maven person knows something about where those giants (about 1 cm in diameter) fall out.  BTW, a bigger drop was recorded by researchers in Hawaii (Prof. Ken Beard, personal communication) AFTER some global publicity about our record went out.  But, Dr. Professor Ken Beard, did not publish his drop.  So, does a tree fall in the forest if you haven’t published anything about it?  I don’t think so.

BTW2, it was thought via experiments and theory, still prevalent in most textbooks, that rain drops larger than about 5 mm in diameter could not exist, so the finding of drops perhaps as large as a cm in diameter (10 mm, or close to half an inch) as we reported (Hobbs and Rangno, 2004:  Super-Large Raindrops, Geophys. Res. Letts.) was controversial.  I guess the clouds don’t read the textbooks.

Anyone for sprouts?

Man, I wanted some sprouts so BAD yesterday afternoon!  But, no, it looked like there weren’t going to be any.  The air seemed to be too dry near the tops of the small Cumulus clouds that populated our sky until 3:30 PM LST.  But then, voila, sprouts!  Little acorns grew into huge cauliflowers!  And then, voila#2, those sprouts reached the “glaciation level” and well beyond it, where the tops suddenly transformed into ice, meaning that there is hail/graupel and snow that will fall out of the bottom of those clouds and melt into RAIN!

While we didn’t get any here in Catalina yesterday, it was still a spectacular sky for us to enjoy.  Here are some examples, in case you missed them, which, if you are in Colorado, Montana, or New Hampshire, or somewhere like that, you CERTAINLY did and will want to see this.  First, a failed cloud.   Tried to sprout as best it could, but didn’t have what it takes.  Sky pretty discouraging at this point because it was 100 friggin’ degrees and the Cumulus clouds were acting like they had cold bottoms; they weren’t sprouting in response to the ovenly weather, to continue a theme.

But then,  when I wasn’t looking and had really kind of given up, voila#3, here was this “glaciated” tower (3rd photo)!  It was stunning!  I missed this because, as a man with feelings,  I was preoccupied with the vets “rassling” with our horse, trying to poke him with huge needles (photo included as a human interest diversion in case you’re already tired of seeing cloud pictures.)

Off we went, with more cloud sprouts and glaciation!  The Cumulonimbus “calvus” shown on the right (5th photo, the one after the horsey shot) with palo verde tree in foreground, virtually went “volcanic”; a huge cloud explosion ensued after this shot, 16 minutes later (4:44 PM LST).  You can really see this happen at the movies here, presented by the University of Arizona Department of Atmospheric Meteorology.  “Two thumbs up.”

And, of course, we had another memorable sunset to clog our already overloaded brains.

The End.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The “boys” are back in town; those Cumulonimbus ones

Who can forget “Thin Lizzzy”?   I guess everyone.    A reminder of their one hit below:

“Guess who just got back today?

Them wild-eyed boys that had been away

Haven’t changed, haven’t much to say
But man, I still think them cats are crazy”

After some English language deviations above, it was great to see for the past coupla days some of them fat Cumulonimbus clouds we been missing of late.  Lotta lightning, too, which was fun to see.  At this point, I would like to point out that some residents of Catalina habitually leave in summertime so’s that they don’t experience our storms, colorful sunrises, sunsets and warmth.  Such a pity, wouldn’t you say?  Some go off to the White Mountains to their second palaces and villas up there, but at least these weather refugees remain in our State where you could drive up to see them if you really wanted to.  Others go off to such far away weather refugee centers as….Colorado, Montana, New Hampshire (?, really inexplicable), etc., to escape our photogenic storms and sunsets.

Besides, they got smog back East, smog so bad you can barely see the blue sky overhead on a humid day, just the kind of day where interesting clouds might be around!  Its awful.  Here’s an example from a University of Washington field project in Virginia, the view from the ground and then on top during a research flight.  Ghastly!  Certainly this kind of thing extends all the way up to New Hampshire on humid days and you have to wait for a cold front (they get a lot of them up there) for the air to clear out.  Ugh!

Below is what we in Arizona see on a humid day; these from yesterday.  Of course, for some little climate babies, maybe the temperature is a little too high here for them (100 F yesterday).  I guess that is pretty high… But you can see 100 miles off in the distance as well!  Look at those (Code 4) rainshafts out there.  “Code 4”?  Nothing visible behind rainshaft.  This is so COOL!

You may have noticed a southwest wind picking up here in Catalina soon after this complex of rain and lightning appeared, and a bit of a ‘boob off to the southwest, marked by a dark line of dust just above the horizon.  That outflowing wind got here and gave a nice upward shove to the otherwise innocuous clouds over us.  Watch what happened to this moderate Cumulus cloud as the SW wind began to hit.  #4, rain begins to fall out, the best time to be underneath and experience the biggest drops or hail.

Well, it pretty  much missed us, only got 013 inches as this spread to the north some later.   But, it all helps.  Leafy desert vegetation looking stressed before the last two days of rain, now totaling 0.32 inches here in Cat land.

Lastly, since I have too many cloud photos here, a picture of a horse grazing on somebody’s weeds.   Hypothetically speaking, perhaps the owner is in New Hampshire (today’s location theme) and would want to know that her horse is being exercised even after I fell off the day before.

The End.

"Thar she blows"

The color of rain

In case you missed it last evening….   Don’t forget, too, that if you are standing in sunlight AND rain, that you are IN somebody’s rainbow.  In fact, whereever the sunlight is hitting the rain is somebody’s rainbow.  You can only see the one the laws of physics combined with drop sizes allow you to see.   So, in a sense, the rain you standing in is brilliantly colored; you just can’t see it.  Kind of cool, when you think about it.

Here’s the post mortem on yesterday.

First, morning Stratocumulus clouds topping Samaniego Ridge.  2) The occasional “sprout” of deeper Cumuli out of that mass.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But along with that, the Cumulus clouds elsewhere remained pretty flat (3), indicating there was something above the tops holding them back. That would be some sort of “stable” layer that would have to be overcome by more heating before any of these could surge upward farther and produce rain.  Below, taken at 2:15 PM yesterday afternoon.  With only occasional “sprouts” over the Catalinas that withered and died (4) instead of blowing up into thunderstorms, there was some reason for concern at this point.  In fact, NOTHING sprung up over the Catalina mountains.  Rain fell yesterday evening for a few hours, but we had to be “saved” from a dry day by a thundery mass, mostly the fading remnants of strong storms that marched westward from the White Mountains.  The last photo, (5) shows that “stratiform” cloud mass (with Cumulus underneath it) that brought the steady light rain and rainbows.  This photo was taken as the first drops began to fall.

Our rainfall was only 0.13 inches, but considering these masses often run out of rain before getting here, I was grateful for that.

0.04 inches is all

Well, it was reel good to get some rain, but we were SO close to a big dump!  Of course, the sophisticated reader will have noticed right off the air was larded with Floridian-style humidity yesterday morning.  And what was the other sign for great (large) clouds immediately in front of you?  Clouds topping Mt Sara Lemmon1 or even lower elevations of the Catalina mountains.   Here is a short of those early raggedy, small Cumulus clouds, in case you missed them and wanted to see them again:

What was interesting is that not much growth in any of the local clouds occurred through about noon, though they filled in the sky some.  I decided to go to a movie at noon, rather than face the disappointment of just shallow clouds all day yesterday;  I had opined to friends around dawn on a horseback ride that when you see clouds topping the Catalinas it is a near sure sign of large clouds and heavy showers around later in the day.  They might not land on you, but they will be there.

But nothing was happening through noon to indicate that it was going to happen.  But what a change in the sky when I got outside at 2:30-3 PM!  Huge Cumulonimbus clouds here and there, big, icy anvils everywhere, growing Cumulus all over, too.  I will never again go to a movie and miss a change like that.

Here in Catalina, we came SO close to a major late afternoon gully washer.  Check this sequence out.  Looks like regions of Catalina State Park got the core of this dump.  The dark, solid base of this cloud (a good indication of a good updraft above you) began to extend westward and over the south part of Catalina and our place!  I waited for the HUGE first drops to fall out, as they do under such bases like this. “Hit Me With Your Best Shot!”, I screamed at the cloud, recalling the words of Pat Benatar.  “Drench me, baby!”  I waited and waited, but it drifted away toward the S, towards Pusch Ridge, and that darker part never did drop rain.  Cargodera Canyon, NE corner of Cat State Park reported the most rain (reports), but only 0.16 inches.   That amount would not have even been close to the maximum amount dropped by the shower in the photographs below.  From the writer’s storm chasing days with his trusty raingauge, at least 0.5 inches fell.

BTW, if you are driving around seeking maximum rainfall amounts from the initial dumps like these because you are upset that they don’t get recorded by in-place gauges, and you feel YOU MUST GET OUT OF YOUR CAR to plant your raingauge, do so only immediately AFTER a lightning strike.   I shouldn’t even be writing this kind of thing since it drastically conflicts with NWS lightning rules, but that’s what I did when I storm chased in this area many years ago.  Silly boy, maybe lucky to be writing this today!  So, don’t even think of doing this really;  mount your gauge on top of your car!  It’ll look great there.

With the Floridian air mass still in place, another day of sights like the ones below are guaranteed.  Maybe today Catalina will get its share of the liquid bounty!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1As a heterosexual male, I like to point out that Mt. Lemmon is one of the rare feminine mountains, not the usual male mountain, as a nod to women everywhere.