This loop. Its got Catalina rain in it. Can you tell when from the jet on these maps? It would be so great if you could. Might get another star on that CMJ Deluxe Mark IV Hail HelmetTM you put on when its about to graupel or hail, only $4 plus $150 for postage and handling. (Helmet cam and ruler for reporting size, extra.)
I have relatives visiting and I don’t feel, in good conscience, I should spend too much time visiting with others…well, “visiting with others”; its actually more or less with “me, myself and I”, as we used to say, chortling away at some silly thing I’ve said to myself like what I just said up there. Must give attention elsewhere.
Bye.
PS: Generally clouds are boring, but I have reached the saturation point with Altostratus! Go away!
I would like you to clear your mind and stare at this map at this site for 10 minutes. After which time I will ask you to do things you might not otherwise do, like buy a weather station for the back yard and have it report to the Weather Underground (not to the radical left wing group spawned during the late 1960s, but to the OTHER Weather-centric Underground, though it is true that they both originated at the University of Michigan and what is that about?)………buy that “I ‘heart’ spaghetti” (weather “spaghetti”, of course) T-shirt for $4 plus $75 for postage and handling, and some other things as I think of them.
I’ve thought of some things… For example, while under this “spell”, like maybe take more cloud pictures, take a course in cloud photography, fill in your weather diary more completely than you have been, you know, that kind of thing, nothing really untoward at all. I am pretty sure you won’t have to worry about ending up some kind of weather automaton or human weather robot until I snap my fingers after viewing that map up there (linking to it yet again just to make sure you saw it). Maybe we should constitute a human subjects review committee before I post today….just in case.
In the meantime, look for some nice Cirrus today. Some of it should be visible by daybreak. That Cirrus is all that’s left of some front that banged into the coast yesterday. This scruff of Cirrus in the satellite imagery is moving so fast it appears it will go by completely before being capable of giving us a colorful sunset. It’ll be a close call. Oh, well.
The weather way ahead–lookin’ good, that is, bad
Finally, the less reliable 06 CUT-GMT-Z time model run (the one that crunches some global data at 11 PM AST) has some green pixies here. As rendered by IPS MeteoStar here are two shots of a rain that occurs the night of the 29th-30th of March, yes, THIS month. Wow. The model outputs at 06 Z and 18 Z are not considered as reliable as those at 12 and 00 CUT (Central Universal Time, as we have named what used to be Zulu, or Greenwich Mean Time, but does the rest of the Universe know what time we think it is? “I don’t think so”, an editorial). Some graphics of the possible precipitation event:
Valid for 11 PM AST, March 29th. Colored regions show areas where the model thinks it has rained/snowed over the prior 12 h.
Valid at 5 AM AST,March 30th. There’s hope!The upper level configuration for 11 AM AST March 29th, just about the time the rain moves in here. Very nice.
Of course, its mandatory to see if this forecast has ANY support whatsoever in the NOAA “ensembles of spaghetti”, and here is a plot for the 29th of March. It’s coming, that trough, it will be here. Yay! However, will it be strong enough to bring rain? I think so, but, then, I would always think that because an inherent bias that I feel duty bound to report. BTW, wouldn’t you like to be wearing a T-shirt like this for $4 plus $75 for postage and handling???
Ending crassly, CM
Valid for 5 PM March 29th, a Friday. Could be exciting that day.
6:44 PM. Some Cirrus spissatus (thicker blobs) floated over late yesterday. When its unusually warm, Cirrus are often unusually high altitude such as yesterday’s.
Still no rain in the two week model “headlights”…and believe me I look for it.
A science story
While we’re waiting for “weather”, I thought I would partially bore you with another science story.
I am supposed to be dead by now, well, within 5-10 years after 2003 due to the development of a rare disease called pseudomyxoma peritonei, resulting from a tumor called, mucinous cystadenoma. Actually, I feel so good today at 71 years of age, doing more weight at the gymnasium than I ever have in the past 16 years on some machines, I tell friends that it must be a pre-death “bloom.”
But back in August of 2003, I left work with an incredible gut pain and ended up in the ER at the University of Washington’s hospital, never having finished that afternoon cup of coffee. After a day or so of monitoring, the doc there, Mika Sinanen, “went in” with his team. It wasn’t presenting as a classic appendicitis. He found a tumor exiting the appendix. He had never seen this before, and didn’t know what it was.
Later, while in his office, the pathologist came back with the report on it. It was a “mucinous cystadenoma”, not cancerous. But SInanen wasn’t as excited as I thought he should be that it wasn’t cancer. He told me to meet with the University Hospital’s surgical oncologist.
A few days later I was informed by that oncologist that I would likely experience a series of abdominal operations over the coming years due to the development of the disease called, pseudomyxoma peritonei, in which a mucinous jelly like growth attaches to organs in the gut. There is no cure I was told; portions of the gut are removed, the doc said, until no more can be removed and you die of “blockage.” It didn’t sound good.
Keep in mind the date of this event, August 2003.
Now the science part.
In September of 2002 a farmer from west Texas was upset over a cloud seeding program his county was going to undertake and had decided to write to all of the universities having atmospheric science programs about the status of cloud seeding. Was it proven? And would it work in the summer clouds of west Texas?
He eventually reached me at the University of Washington. I had published critiques and reanalyses of cloud seeding experiments in peer-reviewed journals, usually with the Director of our Cloud and Aerosol Group, Peter V. Hobbs, as a co-author, over the preceeding 25 years. In the farmer’s note, he said that he had contacted over 130 universities, and that my name had come up often. I cherish that e-mail even today, an indication that your peers had noticed your work.
I should mention that all of this reananlysis work was self-initiated, and except for one paper, they were done off and on on my own time with no funding whatsoever over a period of about 25 years. I sometimes partially joke about this aspect in introductions of talks on this subject by describing all this self-funded work as a “crackpot alert”. But I was trying to be a good crackpot.
I sent this farmer the fairest objective one-page note on cloud seeding I could, one that I thought my peers would also agree with. Its our job as scientists, even if with think they are still faulty reports out there, we have to cite them until they are officially overturned. I wrote to the this farmer that cloud seeding had not been proven in those types of clouds (summer Cumulonimbus ones) in ways that we in the science community would find convincing. That is, proven through randomized experiments, double blind ones, and in which the results had been replicated. That’s the gold standard for all science. I did point out, as I must as a scientist, that there were “promising results” using hygroscopic methods of seeding of such clouds. That was about it.
Implementing a commercial cloud seeding project creates jobs (don’t forget, the author has participated in these), and it looks good for sponsoring organizations, like state and county governments, to try to do something about droughts. Makes constituents happy even if most academic scientists question such a practice absent proper evidence.
Within 24 h of sending that note, I received this e-mail from Texas:
“You will die in 11 months from a fast-growing tumor, you f…… rascal.”
It was pretty odd since it had a timeline, and that 11 months was odd, and I thought use of the word “rascal” didn’t fit the preceding expletive. Another expletive would have fit better. There was no way to connect this e-mail to the note I sent that farmer, but the timing made it clear it had something to do with it.
Well, EXACTLY 11 months after that note I was on my way to the hospital leaving a half a cup of coffee on my desk at the U of WA due to an odd tumor exiting my appendix. And, by golly, I WAS going to die, but in 5-10 years!
I will never forget that day the surgical oncologist at the U of Washington hospital told me that. The disease never showed.
I always wanted to write to that e-mail address from where the threat originated (a phony one) and say,
“Hah-hah (emulating “Nelson” on The Simpsons); it was a SLOW growing tumor!”
——————————–
One final note.
Scientists don’t like it when you’re reanalyzing their work, naturally. The very first review I saw of my first paper reanalyzing a randomized cloud seeding experiment was so bad, and had a personal attack that I did not have the credentials to reanalyze that experiment1 it made a fellow, cartoon-drawing graduate student in our group, Tom Matejka, laugh. He then came up with the image below of how that reviewer must have seen me. His drawing was so perfect a depiction, I loved it. The paper, “A reanalysis of the Wolf Creek Pass cloud seeding experiment”, was the lead article in the May 1979 issue of the Journal of Applied Meteorology.
I have also included a photo of Tom, one of my favorite grad students passing through our Cloud and Aerosol Group at Washington. You can see the playfulness in his face.
Tom Matejka, circa 1979.
—————–
1True, actually; I had no credentials in that domain at that time.
Lotta high temperature records falling in Arizona lately, info courtesy of U of WA Husky researcher, Mark Albright’s web page here.
Arizona daily record temperatures and precipitation
SXUS75 KPSR 150830
RERPSR
RECORD EVENT REPORT
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE PHOENIX AZ
130 AM MST FRI MAR 15 2013
...RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURES SET AT PHOENIX AND YUMA...
A RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURE OF 95 DEGREES WAS SET AT PHOENIX AZ
YESTERDAY. THIS BREAKS THE OLD RECORD OF 91 SET IN 2007.
A RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURE OF 96 DEGREES WAS SET AT YUMA AZ
YESTERDAY. THIS BREAKS THE OLD RECORD OF 95 SET IN 1934.
$$
SXUS75 KTWC 150104
RERTWC
RECORD EVENT REPORT
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE TUCSON AZ
535 PM MST THU MAR 14 2013
...RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURES SET FOR THURSDAY MAR 14...
LOCATION RECORD OLD RECORD
TUCSON INTL AIRPORT 92 87/2007
BISBEE-DOUGLAS AIRPORT 85 83/2007
KITT PEAK 71 71/1972
PICACHO PEAK 90 90/2007
$$
SXUS75 KPSR 150013
RERPSR
RECORD EVENT REPORT...UPDATED
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE PHOENIX AZ
0511 PM MST THU MAR 14 2013
...RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURES SET AT PHOENIX AND YUMA...
A RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURE OF 95 DEGREES WAS SET AT PHOENIX AZ TODAY.
THIS BREAKS THE OLD RECORD OF 91 SET IN 2007.
A RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURE OF 96 DEGREES WAS SET AT YUMA AZ TODAY.
THIS BREAKS THE OLD RECORD OF 95 SET IN 1934.
$$
SXUS75 KFGZ 150057
RERFGZ
RECORD EVENT REPORT
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE FLAGSTAFF, AZ
556 PM MST THU MAR 14 2013
...RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURES FOR NORTHERN ARIZONA ON MAR 14 2013...
CITY (PERIOD OF RECORD) NEW HIGH PREVIOUS RECORD/YEAR
PAYSON (1949 - 2013) 78 78 (TIED) IN 2007
PRESCOTT (1899 - 2013) 77 77 (TIED) IN 2007
PRESCOTT AIRPORT (1948 - 2013) 79 78 IN 2007
SELIGMAN (1905 - 2013) 81 81 (TIED) IN 2007
THESE RECORDS ARE PRELIMINARY PENDING OFFICIAL REPORTS.
$$
CO
SXUS75 KPSR 142314
RERPSR
RECORD EVENT REPORT
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE PHOENIX AZ
0414 PM MST THU MAR 14 2013
...RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURES SET AT PHOENIX AND YUMA...
A RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURE OF 93 DEGREES WAS SET AT PHOENIX AZ TODAY.
THIS BREAKS THE OLD RECORD OF 91 SET IN 2007.
A RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURE OF 96 DEGREES WAS SET AT YUMA AZ TODAY.
THIS BREAKS THE OLD RECORD OF 95 SET IN 1934.
$$
SXUS75 KTWC 140034
RERTWC
RECORD EVENT REPORT
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE TUCSON AZ
534 PM MST WED MAR 13 2013
...RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURE BROKEN AT THE TUCSON INTL AIRPORT THIS
AFTERNOON...
A RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURE OF 89 DEGREES WAS SET AT THE TUCSON
INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT TODAY. THE OLD RECORD OF 88 DEGS WAS SET IN
1989.
$$
Here's what a giant blob of anomaly over the West looks like;
not sure I've seen one this big before, kind of a "planet out of control" map:
The height anomaly pattern at 500 millibars for 5 PM AST yesterday. They don’t get bigger than this. To reach the height of the 500 millibar pressure level you have to go up in a hot air balloon higher than usual because the pressure doesn’t change so rapidly when you go up in a hot air balloon and its hot (air has lower density). But, its cold in New Hampshire, too cold for late March so perhaps we can take some solace in that as part of another “warm in the West, cold in the East” pattern. (See low height anomaly off New England coast.)The green line is “climatology” at 500 millibars. Note how that green line bulges southward in the Southwest indicating a prevalence of troughs at this time of year. We have the opposite now, but its fading fast. Look at how the yellow and green lines are out of phase.
The weather ahead
LOTS of troughs in our future once this bag of hot air over us dissipates, but not one of those troughs is far enough south or strong enough to bring rain over the next two weeks. Ugh. Our best chance for anything still remains around the 21st–a trough in the area guaranteed, but only the thermometer will get a workout from it, cooling off from the warmth of the previous day, likely some noticeable wind, as per usual in the spring with trough passages.
So, that’s about it for weather, thermometer getting some work, the anemometer some, too, but not your rain gauge. Oh, me.
However, with approaching troughs, there’ll be some nice Cirrus clouds and with them, occasional nice sunsets and sunrises in the days ahead.
With no rain in sight now, and its looking more and more like a third late winter and spring in a row with precip below normal (there’s only been one other “three in a row” in our 36 years of Catalina records), I thought would pay homage to the Great 2010 13 Day Run of the CDO at East Wilds Road (farther below).
In the meantime, yesterday I came across a nice gurgling creek, making the kind of gurgle that characterizes New Age relaxation CDs. It was coming down the Big Rock Creek wash-tributary that empties into the Sutherland Wash at the Cottonwoods, a local name given to an area of the Sutherland Wash were illicit beer parties often take place. There was no water in the Sutherland above this point.
3:55 PM yesterday at Big Rock Creek by the Sutherland Wash cottonwoods. Horse Jake forages.2:54 PM. The Sutherland Wash downstream of the Big Rock Creek tributary. Horse Jake; his little mind wonders why I am taking another photo of not that much.
The Great CDO Run of 2010
I had forgotten that the Canada del Oro wash (river?) at East Wilds Road had run for as many as 13 consecutive days beginning on February 28th and likely ending three years ago today1. Here are a few of those shots with the date. That run, and the “Road Closed” sign on E. Wilds at the CDO began to feel like a permanent feature of life here in Catalina. You wondered if catfish were in there. It was such a special time then. And it had already run several times beginning after January 20th.
What was surprising to Mr. Cloud Maven person, a cloud maven not a drought maven, was that after two consecutive bountiful months of rain and snow, the State of Arizona, and our local region of Arizona were still considered to be in drought, “abnormally dry”, according to the Drought Monitor folks. Here is there map for March 16, 2010.
The US Drought Monitor map for March 16, 2010.
At the end of March, and after three consecutive months of above normal rain and snow in our area (8.02 inches in Catalina, or nearly twice the normal amount), with one of the best wildflower displays in many, many years in progress, 200 inches of snow and one the best all time ski winters at Mount Lemmon, articles in the AZ Star about all the water that was flowing in the washes, we were STILL classified by the Drought Monitor folks as “abnormally dry” (see below).
I began to have the depressing thought that it was impossible to exit a drought classification after those three fabulous months.
The western US Drought Monitor map for April 6, 2010. Go figure.
The End
————————-
1The Pima County stream gage at the bridge over the CDO wash at Golder Ranch Drive wasn’t working during that time (flow data here), and I don’t have photo evidence for two days, the 5th and 6th. Dang. Also, the run likely continued a little beyond the 12th, but don’t have photo evidence for the 13th, either. Dang#2.
Yesterday, that is. It felt like I never left. Only 49 F here; was 55 F in Seattle yesterday.
But the main thing that made it seem “so Seattle” was the persistent low Stratocumulus overcast, almost no sun whatsoever, and a little rain. We picked up another 0.03 inches in a couple of morning episodes of R– (an old weather texting1 shorthand for “very light rain”) to bring the storm total here to 0.55 inches. Of course, the best part of that overcast was that it allowed the ground to be damp for another day, helping the spring grasses and wildflowers by keeping the soil moisture in the soil and not flying away under a hot sun. The worst part of the overcast that lasted almost all day, was that Mr. Cloud Maven person had the day completely wrong–thought it would break open in the afternoon to “partly cloudy” and so he was as gloomy as the sky. You see, as a weather forecaster, you can’t even really enjoy a nice day if you didn’t predict it. Had some sad 75 F days in Seattle when I only predicted 69 F; everybody having summer fun but me.
Enough nostalgia, here are the clouds, even if you have no interest in seeing such boring clouds again:
6:56 AM. Interesting little punctuated lenticular. Mr. “CMP” has just finished his long blog and thinks the sky will break open in the afternoon. Hah!
8:00 AM. Stratocumulus tops Samaniego Ridge–with the turrets, you might lean toward adding the descriptor, “castellanus.” Note blue sky here, if you didn’t see any at all yesterday. No precip evident.8:02 AM. Looking north toward S-Brooke. Fine shafts of precip emit from Stratocumulus clouds indicating those regions in the cloud where there was more liquid water at one time, that is, where these clouds are humped up like those Sc clouds on Samaniego Ridge in the prior photo (the precip from those clouds may have been out of sight). But, was the precip shown here due to ice or the colliding drops process? I wasn’t sure at this point. You see, after a storm, the clouds can be real clean, almost oceanic-like meaning they have LOW droplet concentrations, and when the droplet concentrations are low, the drops are usually larger and can get to sizes where they can stick together when they collide (think 30-40 micron droplet diameters). You probably don’t have a clue about those sizes, but it sounds great if you see rain like this and tell a neighbor that, “those clouds might have drops larger than 30-40 microns in diameter near cloud tops.” Instant neighborhood expert!
8:06 AM. Then the clouds to the west of Oro Valley and Catalina began to produce fine precipitation and advance on Catalina. How nice. Definitely was looking like a true drizzle event (caused by colliding drop rain formation process), at least to me at this point. That process is a rare event in AZ when very light rain or true misty drizzle (tiny drops, close together) forms like that. Usually our clouds have too many droplets from natural and anthropogenic sources and the cloud droplets stay too small to collide and stick together, instead bumping around like marbles with all the surface tension they got. And then because they’re all tiny, they don’t have much impact when they hit, there’s not a lot of velocity difference like there would be in a cloud with a broad droplet spectrum, the kind of spectrum we see in “clean” clouds where drops bigger than 30 microns are a plenty. Note trails of precip coming down in center. BTW, to go way off topic, to distract from how bad my forecast was, in “hygroscopic” seeding, particles like salt are introduced at cloud base to encourage the formation of rain through this process in polluted Cumulus clouds. Worked in Saudi, based out of Riyadh, winter of 2006-07, flying in a Lear jet, helping to select Cu for random seeding using that methodology2. Our office at the government met building, I recall, was cleaned by the “Bin Laden” group. Hmmmm. Maybe its a common name there, to go even farther off topic.10:09 AM. So Seattle! (Have to make up for that last bloated caption.)4:49 PM. And that’s your entire day.6:27 PM. Sunset tried to do something. But, like the day, it was like that sugar icing on a stale dried out cinnamon roll, just didn’t quite make it, though cinnamon rolls are quite good as a rule.
Today’s clouds
Some residual small Cumulus, maybe clumping into a larger group this morning for a bit, which you would then refer to as Stratocumulus. Should gradually diminish in size and coverage until almost completely clear in the afternoon. Expect a north wind in the afternoon, too.
The weather ahead
There isn’t any, well, not right away, but WAY ahead….
Chances for rain begin to pick up after the 19th as we enter the “zone of curl”, “cyclonic curls” in the upper atmosphere with a lot of “vorticity” in them again, with temperatures falling back to normal values. Pretty tough to have warm weather for long at this time of year in AZ. You see, its troughs like to “nest in the West” in March, April, and May, even when they’re not strong and far enough south to bring rain, maybe only wind. Its a climo thing, and it causes many areas of the West to see an increase in precipitation in March from February, and also halts the rapid rise in spring temperatures (especially in Seattle, hahahaha, sort of).
This because the global circulation pattern, responding to the climb of the sun in the sky and warming continents in the northern hemisphere, those forces acting on the position of the jet stream, and weakening it here in the NH (northern hemisphere), is changing the jet stream pattern so that storms begin to move southeastward from the north Pacific across the Pac NW into the Great Basin area in the spring, bringing cold north Pacific air into the West. There was a great report about this phenomenon by old man Bjerknes out of UCLA with his Ph. D. grad student, Chuck Pyke, back in the mid-1960s. Pyke was a UCLA sports nut, BTW, to add some color to this account.
We won’t see that “trough in the West” pattern for awhile here in our “oasis of warmth” now about to begin, but count on it returning, as it appears to do late in the model runs from last night. Climo is forcing it.
The End, except for footnotes.
——————————————- 1Yeah, that’s right. Weathermen, as we would say it then, were way ahead of their time, “texting” each other long before kids thought of “texting.” You might write a weather friend, if you could find one: “We had a TSTM to the S with FQTLTGCCCG ALQDS last night for a few H. MVD N.” PIREPS, SIGMETS, too, were all “texted” and texted by teletype! Tell your kids.
2Was under the aegis of Research Applications Program (RAP) at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, CO. Money was good…though not nearly as much as you would make as a TEEVEE weather presenter (hahaha). I was a post retiree guest scientist for RAP NCAR. Clouds could be real bumpy there in Saudi, thought I was gonna die once as bottom dropped out of the Lear going into Cumulonimbus at night that one time. Pilot liked to cut it close between the hail shafts and the rising parts of the Cu with little or no precip, using his aircraft radar. But sometimes, it was a little too close…and we got into the shear zone between a strong updraft and the downdraft.
May take Jake Horse out to see if the Sutherland Wash is running, anyway, if the CDO is not running here in Catalina.
Thunderstorms (at least 4 separate ones yesterday), with hail, graupel, wind, rain; what a nice day for Catalinans and our environs. Lightning was still visible as of 7:52 PM last evening, and close enough that thunder could be heard, technically meaning a thunderstorm is in progress in weather parlance. Here’s some pea-sized hail for you, sent by a listener, “Dave”, in Sutherland Heights:
Was awakened by a moderate rainshower just before 3 AM. Dropped 0.03 inches in a few minutes, to bring the total to 0.40. Another shower followed within half an hour, but bucket didn’t tip for even 0.01 inch. May have to jiggle it to get that extra 0.01 inch that I KNOW fell. Hahahah.
In the meantime, exulting over the large amounts, so well foretold by the U of AZ Beowulf Cluster run from 24 h ago. Truly amazing! Our total here was also well=predicted by that model; amounts in this storm increase northward reaching 0.87 inches at Oracle State Park, 0.55 inches at the NE corner of Saddlebrooke. We SO needed a good rain. Here’s where the totals are:
Here are some mind-boggling statewide totals from the USGS, some approaching two and a half inches of water content at Sunflower near Payson! How great is that?! Really, this has been a billion dollar storm in dropped water and snow. Maybe it should have a name now.
You will can also access rainfall data from the U of AZ rainlog.org network here, and from CoCoRahs national network for Arizona here. As always, its necessary to point out that in the rainlog network, the measurements reported this morning will be assigned to yesterday’s date, while the ones in the CoCoRahs system will be assigned to today, March 9th.
Since its unlikely to rain for at least 10 days, I thought I would overdo the precipitation data for our billion dollar storm.
Sadly, as you will see in this Pima County ALERT gauge totals above, we in the north end of the County really got the nice rain; most of the county did not. We were lucky we were that bit farther north because it wasn’t the wind direction helping us out in most of the storm; that “help” is taking place now because the wind is more from the west at cloud levels. Going into yesterday yesterday evening the wind at cloud/mountain top levels was from the south-southwest rather than from the west, and normally that more southerly flow helps the south facing sides of the Catalinas, as much as us. So, it was more to do with cloud top temperatures and those clouds being a bit too warm to the south, while northward and to the northwest (perpendicular to our jet stream), the temperatures decreased rapidly at the same level in the atmosphere, and that in turn, allowed cloud tops to deepen more as they went nortward. Make any sense? Here’s a map of temperatures aloft for yesterday, two graphics to try to explain this:
A 500 millibar map at 5 PM AST. Center of coldest air is to the northwest of us at that time, gets colder over you as you take Highway 79 to Florence and beyond. Cloud tops do, too. The full loop is here.
Mapm for the same time with colors showing temperatures getting colder to the NW of us. More likely to have deeper clouds and thunderstorms as you go NW. Full loop is here.
First, here’s last evening’s TUS sounding, as rendered by the Cowboys of Wyoming. Its got some writing on it:
The Tucson sounding at 5 PM AST, yesterday, March 8th. Cloud tops marked by asterisks to represent ice crystals, and bottom by little “o’s”. The arrows in roughly an “R” shape is an attempt at replicating the thunderstorm sign used by NOAA. Even though the clouds were topping out at less than 25,000 feet, they still contained enough ingredients such as hail and updrafts to generate enough static electricity for lightning.
———begin tedious stream of consciousness again, probably worth skipping——–
Graupeling hard here at 3:38 AM! Third shower since getting up! Pounding roof. Very small, like rice grains. Just quit, like someone turned a light off at 3:41 AM. Tells me its a new cell that just formed with narrow strands of precip/graupel. Investigating…no echo at 3:36 AM nearby… waiting for next 6 min sweep… 2:42 AM: No echo! I have not seen this happen before. Could it have developed and died in less than 5 min? Did not tip bucket! Its just like yesterday, we had no less than four hail/graupel episodes and I was beside myself thinking of those balls of ice bouncing OUT of my rain gauge collector! I was being short-changed in the amount of precip I could report. I think I am going to have to add to my rain total, maybe 0.03 inches due hail balls that bounced out
——————–end of tedious stream———————-
OK, now up to 0.13 inches in rain that has fallen since about 3 AM. This is great, because now the total amount in the storm is 0.50 inches here!
Yesterday’s clouds
After a few sprinkles-its-not-drizzle amid brief sunbreaks yesterday morning, the first thunderstorm rumbled across Marana and the Oro Valley at 9:30 AM.
9:55 AM. Thunderstorm with hail and heavy rain moves into Oro Valley.10:21 AM. Looking upwind toward Pusch Ridge at the bases of a line of rapidly moving Cumulus congestus clouds.10:25 AM. Hail-producing cloud has passed by, but shaft increases in size and visibility. This is a time when tremendous amounts of ice is forming in the cloud, ultimately leading to its demise as a fluffy area looking area of only ice crystals. Without the liquid droplets, that disappear during this stage where ice forms explosively, no graupel or hail can form. Its a normal life cycle event for cells like this.12:12 PM. Another line of young Cumulonimbus clouds races toward Catalina and Sutherland Heights, a recurring theme yesterday.12:23 PM. Passage of that complex of Cumulonimbus clouds shown in the prior shot resulted in this hail shaft trail on the foothills of Samaniego Ridge. Hail shafts are very narrow. If it had been snow, there would have been much greater coverage.2:30 PM. But the day wasn’t done then, was it? Here something in the way of an arcus cloud rolled across Oro Valley and onto the Catalinas. Thought maybe a tube might form.4:55 PM. Just kept on giving. Here yet another line of developing Cumulus congestus, just reaching the precip stage a little upwind of Catalina, dropped a few more graupel particles while going on to dump heavily farther north. This recurring pattern of clouds developing, able to become deeper with colder cloud tops is the primary reason the north part of Pima County did so well yesterday and this morning,
Today’s clouds
These early morning stratiform (flat) clouds will disperse into Cumulus and Stratocumulus in clumps. They’ll be cold enough at cloud tops for ice and virga, but clouds likely will be too shallow for more than a hundredth or two in the heaviest precip areas around Catalina. Things dry out later in the day, the Cu becoming smaller, so the best chance of measurable rain is before, say, 2 PM.
Get camera out fast, too. THere was a huge dump of hail or snow on Charoleau Gap last night or this morning I suspect, and it looks spectacular even now at 6:53 AM. Its local, because its not seen at the same elevations to the south on Samaniego Ridge. But, it will just be gorgeous with those deep blue skies and white Cumulus clouds all around.
This is so great, today’s badly needed substantial rain for our Cal pops and other wildflowers, now beginning to bloom. You may have seen some poppies along North Oracle Road in the past week.
Here is the current radar and cloud situation from IPS MeteoStar (loop is here). You can see three rain bands, very similar in configuration to the historic snowstorm of February 20th that also had three bands. What’s potent and interesting is that the lead band with precip just to the west of us (passing over Ajo at this time). That cloud band is usually just that, composed of thick, middle and high clouds (Alstostratus/Cirrus/Altocumulus) without any precip or just virga. And its usually also followed by the “clearing before the storm”, the ones that lead on many occasions to those super spectacular sunsets before the surge of low clouds and precip. You can see that “clearing before the storm” aspect in southwest AZ in the image below.
But, as you can see, THIS cloud band “before the storm”, has developed some rain. So, in this case, we have a chance to pick up some light rain before the major bands arrive later in the day. You can also follow the progress of the storm on those great WunderMaps here. Might be on this site ALL DAY.
4:10 AM combination satellite and radar, the best on the web IMO.
Here, too, is the University of Washington’s 500 mb map for 5 AM AST this morning showing the flow at about 18,000 feet above sea level. You can see the three bands here, too, and a fourth taking shape in the center of the low, now off southern California. You will see that the strongest winds at this level are over Tucson now, meaning rain is imminent, and it is. Already had a trace, a few drops fell at 4:06 AM. Expect lightning in AZ today, maybe around here, too, with the second or third bands.
Here’s the loop U of AZ weather department’s mod output from last night’s 11 PM run, which gives you an hour by hour account of the storm over the next two days. While the main bang is today, a lobe of cold air aloft follows it and scattered light showers continue into tomorrow. What will help Catalina’s rainfall is that the wind will be more westerly rather than southerly at cloud levels during and after the storm, which means they will pile up on this side of the Catalina Mountains the best, and which should do better than other areas. The U of AZ mod knows something of this, and you can see the precip in the panel below extending from the Catalinas toward the west and over us. Its due to this frequent occurrence during and following storms that really boosts our winter precip totals over surrounding areas of similar elevation.
There are a lot of parameters available from this output. You can look at the whole range of them here.
Valid for 3 AM AST tomorrow morning, March 9th.
Yesterday’s clouds
It was asserted yesterday that there would be some Cumulus and Cirrus by Mr. Cloud Maven person.
Here they are:
4:16 PM. Forecast of Cumulus cloud(s) verifies! It was small, but great.6:10 PM. Cirrus creep underway from the west.
Sure, it was clear practically the whole day, and some people might complain that they got eye strain looking for Cirrus and Cumulus clouds during the day…. But then, you can find people who will complain about anything.
Its not about hairdressing. Its about the “curl of the low” and its jet stream configuration, as shown here by here (IPS MeteoStar):
Valid for Wednesday, March 20th, 2013. Want to see if anyone reads the captions.
Oh, shoot, this is for a storm and cold blast about 13 days from now! (Secretly, with the storm tomorrow so well predicted at this point by all—might as well show you that it might not be the end of March storms.)
OK, lets try again to get a more timely forecast map:
Oh fer Pete’s Sake. This is valid for 256 h from last night, or the morning of March 18th! But we’re in the curl AGAIN!
Oh, shoot, this ones for 256 h or almost 11 days from last night! What is going on here?
One more try for something relevant, well. its all relevant (suggests we’re in the “trough bowl”:
Finally, valid for 11 AM AST tomorrow morning, this from last night’s WRF-GFS run.
Maps look kinda similar don’t they? Hence, talk about the “bowl” phenomenon where troughs “remember” where they’ve been like your horse does, and they know where they should be. There’s a long fair weather gap between the one tomorrow and the ones later; don’t get fooled by thinking winter’s over.
This last one for tomorrow suggests the rain is either here or imminent at 11 AM AST as the jet core at 500 millibars, is already deployed to the southeast of us by that time. The timing of all of what happens tomorrow is pretty good for rain amounts since with the chilling air aloft (making it easier for air to rise from near the surface), the cold front will blast across Catalina in the later afternoon. This means that the little heating that we will get tomorrow, limited by windy conditions and clouds, will work to plump up the Cumulonimbus clouds in the frontal band–oh, yeah, there should be some, and that means what?
Graupel (soft hail)! Shafts of them, here and there in the frontal band. The presence of graupel, and it’ll be bashing snowflakes and ice crystals on the way down (the latter can’t get out of the way fast enough) means the clouds will get “plugged in”, electrified, due to those collisions because they generate electricity and lightning is virtually certain in AZ tomorrow. Talk about excitement! Cbs, graupel, lightning, a strong frontal passage, strong winds, and a greater than 100-200 percent chance of measurable rain in Catalina! It doesn’t get better than that!
This pattern also favors better accumulations of precip here with the winds being more southwesterly to west at cloud levels. Amounts? Mod, the very excellent U of AZ mod run indicates Catlania-ites will get around half an inch! I am so excited since this is close to the median amount (0.60 inches) forecast from this microphone two and more days ago! Something must be wrong! Here’s the AZ cumulative precip map for Arizona. Look at all the precip in the State, about an inch and a half of liquid expected on top of Ms. Mt. Lemmon! This is going to be so good for our drought.
Valid for 3 PM AST on the 9th. Most of this falls on the 8th, but passing showers add that bit more into the 9th.
Yesterday’s clouds
They were great, such as they were, and before leaving for NM and points east. Take a look:
6:56 AM. I wanted to hug these little Cirrus uncinus clouds. So cute, just trying like anything to make a little snowstorm to water the ground. Just look at those long tails!
7:47 AM. Then you got to see a Catalina lenticular cloud. How nice was that? Note parhelia on the right.8:04 AM. A nice, patterned Altocumulus perlucidus translucidus.
All in all, I thought it was quite a good day for you. As usual, thinking about others here.
Today’s clouds
Today we’ll likely see some precursor Cirrus, maybe a flake of Cumulus here and there. I will predict more clouds, if necessary, as they occur.
Temperature records have been falling recently, lots of them, you can see them here. This is what the “lobes of anomaly” at 500 millibars and the circulation patterns associated with them did over the past three days. A lot of the cold ones were in Florida, as you will see. Too bad for those people in Florida who went there instead of to Arizona to escape winter cold. Their whole spring break vacation was probably ruined, if its spring break now. The Arizona Chamber of Commerce should be advertising heavily in Florida right now! “Sad about being in Florida on your vacation? Well, its not too late to come to Arizona where its warm, not cold!” (We won’t mention our recent snow, of course.)
Yesterday’s cloud
Being cloud-centric, thought you’d want to see it1.
2:23 PM. Cumulus humilis. Kind of cute, sitting there, trying to be the best it can be.
The storm ahead
Seems to be getting bigger in the Canadian model as time goes by, and so I thought I would allude to that before you even read what I was going to say with a fatter sub-title having color, one then filled with portent.
This Storm (yes, that’s right, I’ve improperly capitalized the word “storm”; I do a LOT of improper things with language here) is now going to be so great it may get its own name, like “Phil” or “Wanda.” Years later: “Remember how Phil saved our spring vegetation back in ’13? Put a dent in the drought we were having?”
Check the load indicated in the Enviro Can mod below, those accumulations expected by 5 PM AST, Friday, March 8th. This is stupendous. Notice the Canadians have gone from the usual green, maybe a little yellow, to seeing red in the amounts of precip for this storm. I was beside myself when I saw it, because when you live in a desert, you kind of expect storms to become less rather than more in the models. Should be some thunder in it, too. This will be a real chance to get above normal rain here in Catalina for the month of March (1.46 inch average) in one load spanning two days. Notice, too, how the whole Southwest benefits from this Goliath. Will it be a trillion dollar crop-saving storm like the one at the end of January? Might be, since crop-saving rains move out into those droughty areas of the Plains States, like Nebraska. Hooray! Literally millions of people will be made happy by this storm!
Also, when you have a great storm, meteorologists like me become important, too, and so a great storm is great for us since we might dominate the news, not just be an itty bitty after thought. Our favorite expression: “The one behind this one is even BIGGER.”
Unfortunately, there is no storm after this one, so let’s hope we get all that it can be from it.
In fact, as an impersonator of a true scientist, I have to report that the USA! WRF-GFS model makes this only a million dollar, oh, maybe a billion dollar storm (might not get its own name). Much less precip is indicated in our models, ones based on the SAME data as that in the Canadian model below, that from last evening’s global observations made at 5 PM AST. Not even going to show that output. Not happy.
Still sticking with 0.25 inches as bottom of this storm (bad things happen to it) and 1.00 inches at the top (that is, ten percent chance of less; ten percent chance of more, as perceived from this keyboard). Best guess median of these: about 0.60 inches, or about the same amount of liquid as the historic snowstorm produced on Feb. 20th.
Still looking forward to this.
The End.
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1 Testing 1-2-3. There was some Cirrus, too, visible in the photo, and several other Cu humilis, along with their little brothers, Cumulus fractus.
