About real clouds, weather, cloud seeding and science autobio life stories by WMO consolation prize-winning meteorologist, Art Rangno
BTW, a little more than 4.5 inches has fallen on Mt. Lemmon in the past 24 h. 0.99 inches fell here in Sutherland Heights. Maybe the Sutherland Wash will be running this morning. That would be nice to see.
More rains ahead in the next few days. Mushrooms coming…
The End.
Morning thunder, evening thunder; 0.84 inches of rain, 1-2 inches in the mountains, with some of the most dramatic skies and shocking cloud changes ever seen (by me). “But, hey, enough of ‘me’, lets get on with the ‘shockumentary'”, as Rob Reiner might say.
Scene 1: Its morning. A horsey ride has been planned with an important, published friend. You’re thinking, “It will be good to be seen with someone important.” No one’s paying attention to weather. The weather is cloudy, quite nice really, but nothing threatening can be seen.
Scene 2. Heading out.
Scene 3. On the trails.
Scene 4. Ooops
Scene 5. Dramatic skies and a few close strikes.
The storm passed dropping 0.22 inches. And, compounding error, as we know, when potent upper air disturbances bring morning thunder and rain, its pretty much always the case that the rest of the day will be dry as a subsiding couplet of air follows a rising one, the the strongly rising couplet of air that forced our morning clouds and storm.
So, was kind of looking ahead to a disappointing rest of the day , but was thankful for the unusual morning storm.
But it wasn’t over by a long ways was it?
The End, finally!
Have had little time lately, some problems, too, loading photos in WP, so that’s why. Looks like the next best chance for rain is Friday into Saturday. But you already know that from all the TEEVEE weather you watch.
The End.
“Just Another Day“, btw, one of the many great songs by Oingo Boingo, if you’ve ever heard of them. We’re not just about clouds here. Trying to broaden your pop cultural knowledge with distractions like this.
Yesterday was remarkable in how exact it was to the day before in clouds, but ultimately disappoiting.1 There was supposed to be more cloud action, shafting around, that kind of thing, but there wasn’t. It was virtually identical in every way, including having only two clouds that got high and cold enough to have ice in them. I am sure you recorded them in your cloud diary, and this will be a little tedious as a result, but….what the HECK.
Here is your cloud day for yesterday, focusing on the detection of ice in clouds:
Today is another day. More hope for a shower late today or tomorrow, models say, then likely another dry spell as the summer rain season ebbs again for awhile until that possible super hurricane Dolores drags some moisture up this way. (Dolores, now just a tropical storm, was just born off southern Mexico near the coast. Will be interesting to see just how strong she gets.
The End
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1Some fans like to see misspelled words here. Amyone see that criminal who was sentenced to “life in person” as described in the AZ Star? That was pretty grate.
Won something of a cloud lottery yesterday. A trace of rain might have fallen only on ME…as a single rain-producing cloud went over my house. I felt pretty special. Here’s the story in photos:
Looks like an active photogenic one with dense rainshafts around. Lots of excitement for weather guys like me. Hope we get shafted reel good here.
In unrelated matters, an extraordinarily strong hurricane still set to develop off Mexico in the next few days. If nothing else, surf will be up along the coast of Mexico and southern Cal. Will let you know when the winds in it have reached 140 mph or more.
The End
0.07 inches here in Sutherland Heights yesterday afternoon. Much more SW-NW of us, as the photos below show.
I now direct your attention to the forecast maps below, produced by the WRF-GFS model last evening’s global data, courtesy of IPS MeteoStar, the usual. The aforementioned extremely strong hurricane foretold in the models 24 hours ago, has acheived in this latest run, mythical strength, possibly a Category 6 or 7 (which don’t yet exist).
We presume the model went berserk, so its kind of fun to imagine how intense, how low the pressure in the center of such a goofy predicted hurricane could possibly be in the panels below.
First, the jaw-dropping -to-weather-nerds like the current writer, predicted height of 540 decameters height of the 500 millibar pressure level! For the pressure of 500 millibars in the atmosphere to be reached at a level that LOW in warm tropical air means that the sea level pressure must be astoundingly LOW to begin with. In warm air, the pressure doesn’t change as rapidly going up as it does in dense cold air.
I don’t believe, in viewing many weather maps with hurricanes that a height that low has ever occurred at 500 millibars. Thus, the pressure at sea level, for whatever reason, must be incredible in this predicted hurricane SW of Cabo. Surf will be up!
The record measured low pressure at sea level is 870 mb in one of the super typhoons (Typhoon Tip) in the Pacific some years ago where winds were estimated at about 200 mph. It is thought that recent devastating Super Typhoon Haiyan, 2013, had a lower pressure, 858 mb, or the equivalent of the density of air at 5,000 feet elevation was thought to have occurred at sea level!
OK, enough fun with a crazy model prediction, though this hurricane will be extremely strong, and the models are still bringing its pathetic, but wet, remnant into California a couple of days later. Many July rain records, though they are not much to begin with, will be broken if this remnant does make it to Cal.
What we really hope for is some aircraft reconnaissance reports during the life of this strong hurricane instead of satellite-derived estimates of strength (though the latter are quite good).
We still look quite wet during this period, too.
The End.
We received 0.08 inches here in “The Heights” for a third day with measurable rain in May already. 0.12 inches fell at the Bridge on Golder Ranch Dr. , while Saddlebrooke got up to a quarter of an inch (as estimated by CMP) in a tiny streak of clouds that erupted into shallow Cumulonimbus clouds, anvils and all yesterday afternoon between 4:30 and 5:30 PM. It was pretty much all over by 6:00 PM, those shower clouds passing off toward Mammoth.
No rain was reported at mountain sites, to give you an idea of how localized that was, localized practically to Basha’s Market parking lot, Sutherland Heights’ Equestrian Trail Road, and Saddlebrooke’s Acacia Drive, to exaggerate some.
The astounding aspect of a tiny line of showers that suddenly erupted over and a little downwind of Catalina was that it was EXACTLY predicted in the University of Arizona’s 5 AM AST model run yesterday morning, one whose results are available by mid-morning! So, there would have been a few hours notice of possible rain here in Catalina.
There is no rain predicted in that model run anywhere else except in extreme NW Arizona, just that tiny ribbon of rain right over us, and the U of AZ “Beowulf Cluster” weather calculator got it right.
However, unless you were in the right spot, you might not have even known that it rained, the shower streak was so narrow.
Below, the astoundingly accurate predictions for 3, 4, and 5 PM for that model run from yesterday morning. No rain whatsoever is shown at 3 PM, as you will see.
To be “fair”, NO RAIN was predicted anywhere NEAR Catalina by that same model crunching the data from 5 PM AST the evening before our little rain event, leading CMP to be a little asleep at the wheel yesterday morning, no blog.
Some cloud shots before and as this predicted (or unpredicted, as the case may be) rain began to happen. Of course, if you want to go to the movies and see this, go here, from the U of AZ: Yesterday’s cloud movie
Below, sat view of this cloud streamer with radar, from IPS MeteoStar. The image below is at the same time as the last photo above:
Here some more cloud stuff from the sounding launched at the U of AZ around 3:30 PM AST.
Here’s a diagram of when ice forms in the type of clouds we mostly have in Arizona, “continental” ones with high droplet concentrations, and when ice should form in them. As you can see, ice should form in them soon after the top temperature gets colder than 10 C WHEN the base temperature is about what it was yesterday.
“CMP” is not mentioning it at all, but yesterday was another kind of mucked up sky, not a Catalina postcard sky, with lots of aerosols making the sky a whitish-blue, the lower aerosol stuff again from Mexico, but there was also a layer far above the cloud tops, likely a long-range transport event from thousands of miles away.
This higher haze layer still seems to be around if you look toward the horizons right now (5:59 AM).
We’ll be between two jet streams today, kind of a jet stream sandwich, and the stronger one is now approaching from the northwest with that mega upper low over Cal. That means no rain today, subsidence rules, though we’ll have small, non-ice producing Cumulus, and likely some Altocumulus lenticulars, maybe a Cirrocumulus patch here and there. Should be a pretty nice day for cloud photos, haze aside.
The best chance for rain is still after midnight tonight into mid-day tomorrow as the core of the stronger jet stream goes just about over us. Still thinking a tenth of an inch will occur here, though mod run from the U of AZ at 5 PM completely dry. A little snow likely on Ms. Mt. Lemmon, too!
The End, FINALLY! Brain empty.
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1From “A New Look at the Israeli Cloud Seeding Experiments.”
After last evening’s surprisingly heavy rain, we have now met our average for May for Catalina, having received 0.47 inches of rain over the past 24 h, some 0.36 inches during some house-shaking thunderclaps last evening.
Below are the 24 h local totals, ending at 4 AM today from the Pima County ALERT gauges rolling archive , these totals pretty much capturing all of our beautiful storm:
Gauge Location
ID#
—- —- —- —- —- —- —————– ———————
Catalina Area
1010 0.63 Golder Ranch Horseshoe Bend Rd in Saddlebrooke
1020 0.83 Oracle Ranger Station approximately 0.5 mi SW of Oracle
1040 0.55 Dodge Tank Edwin Rd 1.3 mi E of Lago Del Oro Parkway
1050 0.75 Cherry Spring approximately 1.5 mi W of Charouleau Gap
1060 0.79 Pig Spring approximately 1.1 mi NE of Charouleau Gap
1070 0.39 Cargodera Canyon NE corner of Catalina State Park
1080 0.63 CDO @ Rancho Solano CDO Wash NE of Saddlebrooke
1100 0.35 CDO @ Golder Rd CSO Wash at Golder Ranch Dr
Santa Catalina Mountains
1030 1.18 Oracle Ridge Oracle Ridge, 1.5 mi N of Rice Peak
1090 0.35 Mt. Lemmon Mount Lemmon
1110 1.34 CDO @ Coronado Camp CDO Wash 0.3 mi S of Coronado, 1130 0.83 Samaniego Peak Samaniego Peak on Samaniego Ridge
1140 0.79 Dan Saddle Dan Saddle on Oracle Ridge
2150 0.24 White Tail Catalina Hwy 0.8 mi W of Palisade RS
2280 0.24 Green Mountain Green Mountain
2290 0.12 Marshall Gulch Sabino Creek 0.6 mi SSE of Marshall Gulch
For more rainfall info, go here and here. And here to the USGS, too, not to mention the NWS rainfall tables. Too bad they can’t all be in one gigantic table!
A little cold morning rain, and even snow on The Lemmon, is looking likely for Saturday morning. Presently, the core of the jet stream at 500 millibars or around 18,000 feet associated with a mighty upper cold low that sits on Arizona on Saturday is forecast to be south of us (as was yesterday’s jet), a pretty black and white discriminator for cool season (Oct-May) rain here.
However, if that jet core around the low does not circumscribe TUS, you can forget rain. From IPS MeteoStar, this rendering of the upper level configuration for Saturday morning, showing that it WILL circumscribe TUS:
In the meantime, “troughiness” today, tomorrow and Thursday, with secondary jet stream to south of us, will give us some more photogenic high-based Cumulus, maybe with some with virga in the afternoons. Today, as our upper low says goodbye, subsiding air is supposed to keep clouds from attaining tops high and cold enough to form ice. So, no rain today.
There were some great scenes yesterday, summer-like ones, odd for May here, with massive rainshafts as the cloud bases lowered, reflected a huge jump in surface dewpoints to summer-like values in the mid-50s. Cloud bases yesterday morning, riding the tops of Samaniego Ridge, were near 7 C, compared with -5 C the afternoon before.
This warming of cloud bases greases the precipitation “wheel” since clouds with warm bases are be able to rain easier than ones with cold bases (say, near or at below freezing temperatures). Droplet sizes have to be larger at any given level above cloud base compared to the clouds of the day before since more moisture is forming in those updrafts at the higher base temperature. And, oddly, the larger the droplets, the higher the temperature at which ice can begin forming in clouds. And when ice forms, snow, then rain, come out the bottom.
To go on too long on this in covering all rain possibilities for yesterday, a base temperature of 7 C here is on the edge of being able to produce droplets big enough so that some begin colliding with one another and sticking together so that drizzle, then raindrops can form, a couple to a few thousand feet above cloud base, and those sizes of drops can really accelerate the formation of ice and then rain out the bottom. Are there any readers left? I doubt it.
Let us go even deeper…. It was hazy, smoky looking yesterday most of the morning, even when some good thunderstorms formed. So what? Well, smoke is bad for storms. Remember when it was reported by Warner and and the U of Arizona’s own Sean Twomey (1967) that sugarcane burning made it stop raining downwind from those fires in Australia? That effect has been verified in satellite measurements by cloud seeding nemesis, Danny Rosenfeld2 of the HUJ in Science a few years ago.
Well, too much smoke can choke droplet sizes down and inhibit the formation of rain by collisions, and delay the formation of ice. And so we had that counter effect of smoke from somewhere, maybe LA this time since it was in the boundary layer, not aloft like that smoke layer from Asia was a couple of weeks ago.
So, cloud microstructurally-spekaing, it was an especially interesting day, one, if he were cloud maven person, wishes he would have had an aircraft to sample them.
But let us look now and see what all the fuss is about:
The End
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2Rosenfeld a “nemesis?” See the references and discussion below for kind of an interesting science story aside….
Rangno, A. L., and P. V. Hobbs, 1997a: Reply to Rosenfeld. J. Appl. Meteor., 36, 272-276, and…..
Rangno, A. L., and P. V. Hobbs, 1997b: Comprehensive Reply to Rosenfeld, Cloud and Aerosol Research Group, Department of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Washington, 25pp.
With the publication of voluminous (en toto) commentaries/critiques in 1997 by a few of our peers, but mainly by Danny Rosenfeld of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, that concerned our 1995 paper reanalyzing the Israeli randomized experiments, yours truly and Peter V. Hobbs, had attained, according the the Technical Editor of the Journal, the status of having become the most criticized meteorologists in the history of weather–well, in the history of the Amer. Meteor. Soc. journals, anyway! How fun is that? Its fun.
Our findings, that the two benchmark Israeli randomized cloud seeding experiments conducted in the 1960s and 1970s were largely misperceptions of cloud seeding effects due to storm biases on seeded days, were independently verified in peer-reviewed publications by researchers at Tel Aviv University some many years later.
Operational cloud seeding has ended in Israel in favor of more fruitful avenues for obtaining the water they so badly need.
Well, it could have been more I suppose; some areas of central and northern Arizona have gotten between a half an inch and an inch of rain overnight. Nevertheless, it was great that a passing thunderstorms (“TSTMS” in weather texting) happened here in Sutherland Heights overnight, fabulous, really. Dropped 0.28 inches on Mt. Lemmon, btw.
More scattered showers, and maybe a thunderstorm or two, should develop today. Keep cameras well-oiled for some great cloud scenes.
The End
Well, let us define “cool”….that is, cool for Catalina in May; that is #2, below normal temperatures.
What led to this thought?
I was gasping when I saw this from last night’s NOAA spaghetti factory, as you will as well, and decided I would have to say something about it.
Pretty unbelievable.
What does it mean for Catalinans: a personal view?
Oh, big windy episodes from time to time during the month, good chance for above normal rain for Catalina, and probably most interesting, the late spring ovenly weather that we like to brag about how we get through wherein so many of our Catalinans and “Tucsonians” flee to the high country, or to Michigan, is held at bay by recurring puddles of cold air up top.
That’s my prediction for May, which has already been ludicrously posted in a prior post many days ago. We might look back at May some day to see how this incredibly unprofessional forecast for a whole month based on one spaghetti run worked out.
If you want professionalism in medium range weather forecasting, then get the hell off this site now! Maybe you’re the kind of person that would rather see a forecast from the NOAA Climate Prediction Center for Catalina and environs. If so, you don’t belong here.
But lets see what they say, anyway for May, then for the whole of mid-April through July…..to add that bit of uncharacteristic professionalism to this site. See maps below:
Looks like they’re pretty clueless about what the temperature’s going to be like here for May–“EC” means equal chances for below normal OR above normal. So, they could be right no matter WHAT happens! But not me. I think Cal is goona be wrong, too; below normal, not above normal temps. Its great when you can just type things like that!
The Big Boys don’t really know what’s going to happen with the May rain here, either, since we are also in an “EC” area. But boy, look at the May rain foretold for the Plains! Looks like a great place to spend May! OKC, maybe. WCWS begins at the end of May, amateurism at its best.
But, at the same time, for the whole of mid-April through the end of July, the Big Boys at the CPC are expecting the drought in areas of the central southern Plains States to persist or intensify–see dark brown areas below.
It will be interesting, being serious for the moment, to see how these predictions, seemingly in some conflict, work out. Note that in the longer view below, Catalina is in an area where drought “persists or intensifies”, even through JULY! Egad.
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Yeah, I saw that report that America’s kids don’t know much about geography, so we’re just checking here to see how bad it really is by suggesting that the Equator goes over the Hawaian Islands (hahaha). But, maybe, they’re really the Galapagos Islands… Am I being too subtle? Sam Cook once pointed out about himself, “Don’t know much about geography”…in his song, “What a wonderful world it would be“. it was a movement that apparently caught on.