First, a water year (Oct-Sept) update. You won’t like it:
One caveat about February’s total: It might be as much as 0.25 inches higher since a good bit of snow during the historic February 20th storm probably did not get into the Davis Vantage Pro gage located some six feet above ground level where wind raises havoc with snow measurements in particular. Gauges day had more all around mine. You can go to the U of AZ rainlog.org home, plug in the date (in this case the 20th, and see what other folks had compared to the crummy 0.52 inches the gauge here got following the meltdown. Generally, while there are a couple of goofy obs on the rainlog site, the amounts around here were 0.70 to 0.90 inches. Thus, our February 2013 total is more likely around 1.20 inches, not 0.95 inches as shown in this graph. Dang.
Here’s the March daily measurable rain climo:
Current and just passed weather
Traced last night, I’m sure you logged it. Drops were falling, pretty big ones, at 2:42 AM. Only lasted about a two minutes. If you want to see what happened in radar and clouds, go here. Shouldn’t be surprising that it traced here given all the virga, and isolated spots where drops were already hitting the ground last evening.
Here are some shots after I got back from PHX-Anthem late yesterday. Some drops hit the window, too. First, I thought I would share with you a wildlife response to coming changes in the weather, something you’ll begin to notice as you traverse the long road to cloud maven juniordom. Here, shelled creatures demonstrate a preoccupation with the sky over due to increasing Cirrus cloudiness in Anthem, late on March 2nd, the day BEFORE all the heavy virga. Its something to note when these creatures do this. They are telling you something about the coming weather. Well, anyway, that’s what you should say when you see this turtle formation; your neighbors will then think you’re some kind of turtle “whisperer” AND a weather guru all in one.
At the Anthem Community Park: Wildlife shown here were clearly becoming increasingly concerned about the thickening cloud cover late on the 2nd.
3:53 PM. Tentacles of virga from deep Altostratus clouds reach down toward the Tortolita Mountains.5:53 PM. Altostratus with virga and mammatus (left side), a term reflecting certain female mammalian characteristics. As I have reported here in the past, some of the female grad students at the U of WA weather department were offended by such nomenclature, asking why such clouds couldn’t have have been termed, “testicularis” (quite an unseemly term, really) and drew lines through a label of a wall print of “mammatus” on a fifth floor hallway. The culprit was never caught, and the “graffiti” was never removed. Makes you realize the kind of issues that budding, bright female meteorologists at the U of Washington are thinking about. BTW, this also demonstrates that the notion of “mammatus/testicularis” are always associated with, or indicating a thunderstorm, is quite goofy.6:30 PM. Had a late “bloom” as a distant hole in the overcast let the sun under light our Altostratus clouds with virga. Only lasted a few minutes. Nice.
The weather ahead
Of course, the big media weather stars with their gigantic salaries are all over this next storm, I am sure. Its mind boggling how much money they make having fun with weather on TEEVEE…
Here’s is the latest forecast from our friends in Canada, most of whom want to live here in the good ole USA!; that’s why the entire population of Canada is so clustered near the US border. You can feel them up there (hahah, I like to tease my Canadian relatives):
Valid for 5 AM AST, Friday, March 8th. “Vorticity maximum poised to strike AZ from low over central Cal. “Vorticity maximum”? Cloud and weather maker. There’s some writing on this; hope you can read it.“Bee” sting! LOOK at all the precip indicated for AZ! THis is so great, one of the great model forecasts of our time, well, this winter anyway.
Range of amounts with this next storm: I think in view of the wetting up of the models, I too, will wet it up. Bottom amount, almost surely in the bag, 0.25 inches now, up from 0.10 inches. Top? Wow, in view of passage of this system in the afternoon, you have to think about enhanced convection, thunderstorms here and there, and with those, and luck, the top has to be around 1.00 inches now. Notice how similar the track of this in the Candadian model is to our historic Feb. 20 storm, one in which amounts over half an inch to an inch were the norm. Can’t wait to see this go by, no matter what!
Sounds mysterious…maybe another sci fi movie title. I wonder what they are? Oh, here they are (I bet you weren’t expecting that):
The departures from average of the height where you encounter about half of normal atmospheric surface pressure (1013 mb) on your way up in a balloon, 500 mb. Lower heights (blue) means colder above you ( as in the southeast); higher heights (red) means a warmer than normal column of air is over you (as in all over the West). The air flows along the contour lines at this level. (From IPS MeteoStar.)
If you had giant lobes like this on you, you’d want to go to the doctor right away.
This is a common pattern, one that produces, “toasty in the West, and people who complain a lot about cold in the East and wish they’d have gone to Arizona for the winter.” Comes up about every winter or so a time or two, and we got one now.
You may remember that the ensembles of spaghetti were all over this pattern; it was well predicted 10 or more days in advance. I hope you told your relatives back East about it. It’ll be interesting to see how many warm and cold records are set during this anomaly couplet. Only lasts a day or two, and then its gone, and weather returns to a more seasonal pattern for awhile.
The weather ahead
What’s ahead for us AFTER the lobes of anomaly pattern passes in a couple of days? Pretty normal for a few days after that, and then wham-bam, this monster upper low shown below, and pretty much in the bag; a near certainty to occur. (Remember your Catalina spaghetti from yesterday…) For awhile the models have been painting it as quite dry, but lately this low has been filling up with quite a bit of precip for SE AZ, quite nice to see happen.
Valid for Friday night, 11 PM March 8th. Very nice. (Also from IPS MeteoStar.)
Can you guess what the lobes of anomaly will look like on this day? Well, why waste time guessing when here they are (well, there are actually three or more visible and partly visible, maybe we should say “lobesssssss” kind of string out the plural of that word to emphasize how many there might be.
What’s the weather with this anomaly pattern? Cold in the Southwest with precipitation and low snow levels around here. Toasty now in the East, where they are now quite happy with the weather.
Valid on Friday, March 8th at 11 PM AST.
I am going to expeculate that while the models have been rather dry up to now as this low passes, that we’ll get measurable precip here in Catalina, oh, bottom amount, 0.10 inches, top amount (its gotta be pretty wild here at this point), 0.60 inches, substantial. The main point is that this situation will bring some precip to Catalina, not be completely dry as so many runs before this have indicated. More snow will pile up on the Catalilnas, that’s pretty much for sure.
Local water news…
there’s water now in several of the small mountain creeks/washes leading down to the Sutherland Wash above Catalina. There’s no water in the Sutherland Wash, however, just yet. Seems to disappear before getting to the Sutherland. The first shot below is from Thursday’s horsey ride and shows the dry Sutherland Wash with a donkey rolling in the sand (Hint for bloggers: more people go to your web site if you have animals in it):
Thursday afternoon, Sutherland Wash at the base of the trail to the Deer Camp junction.
Later, this nice encounter with some running, gurgling water! Likely from snow melt from our historic Catalina snowstorm. Plenty still left at higher elevations, but its melting fast now, of course, with the warm lobe of anomaly over us.
Thursday afternoon, a riparian scene with TWO animals in it, several hundred feet in elevation above the Sutherland Wash. Famous wildlife author and frequent riding pal, Nora Bowers, adjusts the halter on her horse, Dreamer, while Buddy Donkey snacks. BTW, its best if you associate with famous people as we learned in the wisdom dispensed from the Firesign Theater performing group so long ago.
Well, here it is, the NOAA Catalina spaghetti output for March 8th, 5 PM AST, hold the sauce:
The 564 decameter height contours for 500 millibars over Catalina and environs (in the center) on March 8th at 5 PM. The yellow line is the 5 PM AST model prediction, and the gray pixel in the lower left corner is what’s left of the same contour (after I cut and pasted) yesterday’s 5 AM AST prediction. They were pretty much showing the same thing.
The plot at left, with likely a Guinness record for a long, thin caption, pretty much guarantees a big trough of cold air here by then, another door opens into winter, which seems to be gone right this moment, and, being March, you might be thinking, “la-dee-dah, no more winter here in southeast Arizona.” But as I often point out to my reader, and while trying to be a bit delicate about it, “You’d be so WRONG! I can’t even describe how WRONG you would be!” So keep that balloon-like parka ready, heck, there could even be some snowflakes with this.
And, of course, I am a be little disappointed, well, royally, because you should have seen this coming in the red dot-plot at left for Catalina on March 8th already, and I wouldn’t have to admonish you again. Oh, well.
BTW, the “red dot” is a baseball term used to describe the appearance of a slider coming at the batter–there’s a red dot in the center of the ball caused by the spin and where most of the red lacings appear to be concentrated because the pitcher had to grip the ball a certain way. Seen’em, at one time. Of course, you wouldn’t remember the great pitchers like Lee Goldammer of Canova, SD, or Dave Gassman; the latter amassing over 4,000 strikeouts in South Dakota summer baseball league play. It was a big story in the Mitchell Republic–they keep track of that stuff there (amazing and charming). Lee Goldammer pitched a DOUBLE header and his team won the SD State Tournament back in the late 1960s. (All true!) You see, Lee Goldammer struck me out on three pitches in 19721. Man he was good! I had hardly gotten to the plate, and I was walking back again!
Had a nice sunset a couple of days ago, some pretty Cirrus clouds again. Where I’m from (Seattle), Cirrus and sunsets are generally obscured by Stratus, Stratocumulus, and every other kind of cloud imaginable so that you don’t see them often because those clouds extend for thousands of miles to the west where the sun is setting.
6:28 PM, February 27th, not last night.
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1I was working that summer for North American Weather Consultants as a “radar meteorologist” in Mitchell, SD, directing up to four cloud seeding aircraft around thunderstorms. But when it wasn’t raining, I could play baseball for the Mitchell Commercial Bank team. The project was under the aegis of the South Dakota School of Mines, was statewide in 1972. Unfortunately, for the people on the ground, one of the aircraft was seeding a storm in June of that year hat dropped 14 inches of rain in the Black Hills, and the ensuing flash flood took over 200 lives. “Hey”, it wasn’t one of my aircraft. Ours were in the other end of the State.
Cloud seeding was absolved in the disaster, which was correct; the weather set up that day did it. No puny aircraft releasing stuff could have had any effect whatsoever. However, had that 14 inches filled a dry reservoir to the top and saved a city from a water famine, what would the seeding company have claimed in that case?
I know. It happened when I worked a project in India, the water famine there making the cover of Time magazine in 1975. The reservoirs in Madras (now, “Chennai”), India, where I was assigned by Atmospherics, Inc., as a “radar meteorologist” whose job again was to direct a seeding aircraft around storms, were at the bottom, just about nothing left, when I arrived on July 14th, 1975.
But on the third day I was there, July 16th, 1975, a colossal group of thunderstorms developed over the catchment area of the Madras reservoirs and, naturally, our one twin-engined Cessna was up seeding it. It was my job to see that we had a plane up around the thunderstorms.
Five to 10 inches fell in that complex of thunderstorms with tops over 50,000 feet, and there was a flow into the Madras reservoir (oh, really?) for the first time in the month of July in about 14 years. July is normally a pretty dry month in the eastern part of India, with Madras averaging just over 4 inches, only a little more than we do here in Catalina in July. The main rainy season in Madras is October and November, during the “northeast” monsoon. This is what those giants looked like:
Looking west-northwest from the Madras International AP at Meenambakkam, India, 1975.
But as a meteorologist, I saw that a low center had formed aloft over southern India, weakening the normally dry westerly flow of the “southwest monsoon” across southern India after it goes over the western Ghats. This weakening allowed the moist air of the Bay of Bengal to rush westward and collide with that drier westerly flow and set up a “convergence zone” where the two winds clashed and the air was forced upward forming huge, quasi-stationary Cumulonimbus clouds.
Below, what I look like when I am in India and starting to be skeptical about this whole thing, “Is this going to be another cloud seeding chapter like the one in the Colorado Rockies, to graze the subject of baseball again?”
First row, 2nd from left. Our pilot sits next to me.
As before in Rapid City, the weather set up the deluge; no aircraft releases could have made the least difference in such powerful thunderstorms. While the leader of the seeding project did not take credit for the odd flow into the reservoir that July, it was pointed out to the media, without further comment that, “yes, we were up seeding it.”
The odd storm with that comment, sans a description of the weather set up that did it, made it too obvious to the uninformed that seeding had done it. The Indian met service was, of course, outraged, and did their best to “fill in the blanks”, but the sponsor of the project, the Tamil Nadu state government, was unconvinced because it was obvious to them what had happened, and, after all, it was what they paid for!
I had already been disillusioned while working as a forecaster for a big, randomized cloud seeding project in Durango, Colorado by 1975, and this project was to add more “fuel to the reanalysis fire” that I was later to be known for. (hahaha, “known for”; I was despised in some quarters for checking their work after they had published it and it was being cited by big scientists, and I mean huge, like the ones in the National Academies, but like you when you thought summer was here NOW and there would be no more cold weather, THEY were so WRONG! I can’t even describe how WRONG those national academy scientists were, like the ones in Malone et al 1974 in their “Climate and Weather Modification; Progress and Problems” tome.) ((I knew they were wrong because they talked about clouds and weather associated with cloud seeding experiments in the Rockies, and I was seeing how at odds those clouds and weather was with the way it had been portrayed in the journal literature by the scientists who conducted the precursor experiments to the one I was working on in Durango.)) (((Wow, this is quite a footnote, if it is still one.))) ((((Still worked up about that 1974 National Academy of Sciences report, but don’t get me going on the 2003 updated one, which they botched royally, including not even citing the work I did correctly! How bad is that??????)))) As the title of today states, “seeing red.”
The reason for going to India in the first place was that it had been indicated in our peer-reviewed journals that randomized seeding in Florida, that clouds like ones in India, had responded to cloud seeding. Besides, I had an ovwerwhelming desire to see giant, tropical Cumulus and Cumulonimbus clouds up close! BTW, the Florida results fizzled out in a second randomized phase.
I thought today I would provide some answers to yesterday’s pop “ice-Q” quiz a new expression I just now made up except that I just now also found out that its already “out there” for a computer graphics card and some refrigerators.
But ignoring that fact completely, you might try using it in a sentence today: “My ice-Q level is gradually getting higher these days. I’ve been working on it for some time now.” Lot easier to say than “ice IQ.” Thanks in advance for using “ice-Q” in a sentence today! You’ll have to make it clear that you’re not referring to a graphics enhancing video card or to overclocking a computer and a refrigerator of some kind.
I thought, too, that maybe I need more science content; maybe I’m kidding around too much, teasing you with droll, well, maybe sophomoric humor, and ludicrously WRONG content, like indicating on a diagram that the Equator goes through Hawaii and that the day of the week changes when you cross the Equator. That was so funny! (Or was it?) ((Well, I laughed…)) (((Hmmmmm…maybe a laugh track1would help, like on all those TEEVEE shows that seem to indicate that America has the sense of humor of a moron.))) ((((Is this too strong?))))
So, today I thought I would ramp up the science content, give you something a little heavier to think about, give the old noggin’ some real exercise. Below, from Agee et al. in the February 15 issue of Science just out. I put it in extra big letters so you won’t miss anything:
Its about a bit of Mars found in Morocco at something like the Tucson Gem and Mineral show. If you ever dreamed of being a spaceperson and wanted to go to Mars to see what’s like, you don’t have to go. Some of its already here. Seems the planet was shooting stuff at us, oh, maybe “2.089” billion years ago. Some of Mars is at lot closer than you think, too. Its just over in New Mexico at the UNM Meteoritic Museum in ABQ! How great is that?
Some answers
Below, some of the very SAME photos you saw yesterday with arrows and writing on them. OK, I am repeating things. But you know what, life is a lot easier when you repeat things rather than have to think up new things.
End of answers.
Now I will look at the weather way ahead…
First, I did see a bunch of NOAA tornado watches out associated with our cold trough, now those watches are for central Florida, so it was good to hear that other than a scare, some big ones didn’t occur. You can get all the warnings and watches here, BTW.
Nothing out there, really, for us for two weeks or more. A close call for precip and another cold surge happens around the 9-10th of March, that’s about it.
Oh, me, another LONG dry spell ahead. Are we REALLY going to have a third drier-than-normal late winter and spring in a row? Sure looks like it now with February on line to be just short of an inch compared with our inch and a half average. Dang.
With no weather ahead, will likely hibernate for awhile. Watch some TEEVEE (hahahaha).
A really strong trough scrapes Catalina today on its way to Texas. Just ahead of the coldest air aloft, is a cold front sweeping southward toward Catalina this very minute. Should arrive with a “pressure check”–barometer turns sharply upward–before 10 AM AST. You’ll know it when you notice the wind has picked, then go outside to see what’s going on, and find that its blowing out of the north-northwest in gusts to 20-30 mph. You will also notice that the temperature isn’t going anywhere, may top out in the upper 40s today even though its starting out in the low forties as we speak, figuratively speaking.
Also with this trough up there is a band of clouds (higher based Stratocumulus ones) producing light precip down into central AZ now. Cloud tops are running well below -15 C, and so you expect stuff to fall out the bottom in the form of virga because its cold enough for ice and snow to form in them. Here’s the satellite “skinny” (from IPS MeteoStar) as we used to say so long ago:
For 5:45 AM AST this morning, Sunday, February 24th.
You can follow the progress of this front here, too, by noting where the temperature is LOWER than where it was yesterday. (Remember, as a CMJ, you always refer to temperatures as “higher” or “lower”; places you above the “pack”, though it is a bit snooty I suppose.) ((But this is who we are, we don’t call sprinkles, “drizzle”, and we don’t call rain mixed with snow, “sleet”.)) ((( Face turning red just thinking about those common misperceptions.)))
24 h temperature change for 5 AM AST.Valid for 11 AM AST. That core overhead, usually the boundary between precip and no precip to the ground here in the great SW, suggests light snowshowers on the Catalinas today. (Our best model outputs for local situations, from the U of AZ (“hey”, how about Wildcat basketball this year!) has no precip on the Catalinas today, just a close call to the N and E, so we’re going up against the BEST over a trace of snow :}
The weather ahead
After the dustup today, its cool for awhile, below normal for us, but then this happens at the beginning of March (based on the global data taken at 5 PM AST last evening). I’ve added two arrows with question marks to see if you have been paying attention.
What do the arrows point to, that is, what are the technical terms for these bulges and dips in the 500 millibar pattern (answers below, not printed upside down because WordPress doesn’t know how to do that):
Valid for 5 PM AST, March 2nd, a Saturday.
Answers to quiz: “Gi-normous ridge” (in the West) and “gi-normous” trough in the East.
This is the CLASSIC, often observed pattern of “warm in the West” and “cold in the East”, and as far as the “ensembles of spaghetti” go, you can HARDLY have more confidence that this will happen, even though its about a week away. This is a very strong signal for both regioins So it abnormally hot here in the early part of March. People will be complaining back East about cold; count on it.
OK, now lets look at a WEAK signal in these plots, weak just about everywhere, meaning anything can happen. This is for the end of the calculation period where they deliberately input slight errors to see how much of a difference it makes in the model outcomes:
Valid for 5 PM AST, March 10. Not much help, suggestion of a weak, dry trough in this region. These plots mostly look like this “bowl of rubber bands” 15 days out. That’s just the way it is, slight differences can make a huge difference in weather that far out. Tipping points can be relatively small.
Finally, our present trough will be a huge weathermaker in the South. While it would be great to chase this trough as generates exciting weather, you also KNOW that there is going to be some significant damage from severe storms and tornadoes with it.
Ending this now (6:49 AM) with Stratocumulus clouds with virga visible W-N; not yet to Cat Mountains. Want to finish before I see too much; wouldn’t be fair to U of AZ model… hahaha, sort of.
It was hard to see all the smoke around yesterday morning after the two previous stunning days with high visibility. I was thinking I had never seen so much smoke in Catalina as I saw yesterday morning. Here is some photos of that awful event:
7:56 AM. Heavy dark smoke layer evident to SW. Some Stratus clouds also were present.
8:40 AM. Normally, in my experience here, such smoke is husbanded to that region south of Pusch Ridge. But no, not yesterday, its HERE! What an awful view this was!8:45 AM. In this photo not taken while driving1, you can see that there are TWO plumes the lower one drifting south from the area of the Golder Ranch-Sutherland Wash development of expensive custom homes, some of which might have been burning wood for heat, or something else woody, while aloft is a second, separate plume. I could not tell where the higher one came from, even in this time lapse from the U of AZ. Note how in the movie the Stratus clouds in the morning change direction in movement. The movement at first is from the west-northwest (left to right), and those clouds contained the higher smog layer. So, could it have been from PHX??? ———– 1Smokey the Bear reminds drivers that only you can prevent smoky, well, a lot of it anyway.
In the afternoon, the smog was gone, mixed through a greater depth, the layering destroyed by the convection, those rising currents and compensating downward ones, that cream any morning layering. The dilution effect, and it also could have been that the aerosol load (smog) decreased with time, made things look much more clear. To this eye, there was still a lot of smog present, just diluted in the space between the ground and the bases of these small Cumulus clouds shown below. Still, there were so many pretty scenes on this horseback ride with a friend that I took more than 100 photos! Some water was present in some of the little washes, always nice to encounter, and some vividly green spots of of emerging growth (shown last).
The final point worth mentioning for pedantic reasons, is that yesterday afternoon’s TUS sounding indicated the same cloud top temperatures as the day before, about -12 to -13 C. Yet, there was no ice dropping out of those clouds. The day before, with the SAME cloud top temperature, ice and virga were widespread.
What’s up with that?
Ah, the complexities of ice formation in clouds!
When clouds are small and have a lot of droplets per liter in them, likely hundreds of thousands yesterday, given all the smog around, the drops end up being especially small because so many form on some of the smog particles (called “cloud condensation nuclei”).
In repeated flights at the University of Washington, we found that the resistance to form ice is dependent on not just on temperature, once thought to be the sole controller of ice formation, but droplet sizes in clouds as well. Small droplets sizes in clouds meant they were less likely to form ice, given the SAME cloud top temperature. Altocumulus lenticularis clouds are the poster child for ice formation resistance in clouds with their tiny drops, often having to be colder than -30 C before ice forms. On the other hand, clouds in the pristine Arctic around Barrow in the summer time, over the oceans away from continents, and in deep, warm based clouds even polluted ones, form ice at temperatures higher than -10 C when the drops in the clouds are large and have reached precipitation sizes (more than 100 microns in diameter to millimeter sizes).
So, it seems likely that yesterday, our shallower, pollutted clouds had smaller droplets in them than those deeper, less polluted clouds of the prior day in which we saw so much ice form in the later afternoon with about the same cloud top temperatures as yesterday. It is also the case, that when clouds are in large patches as they were the day before, that ice formation has more time to take place, and that, too, may be a factor.
Complicated enough? Yep.
2:52 PM. In the Catalina Mountains on the back from the Deer Camp trail. Cumulus humilis dot skies. No ice evident.
2:18 PM. Cumulus humilis sitting around over Sutherland Heights, and the Oro Valley
The weather ahead
After another round of cold, this one dry cold just ahead for us, the heat is on by early March, and along with that heat in most of the West in early March, likely record cold in portions of the East. Check this 500 mb map out for the afternoon of March 2nd, produced by last night’s WRF-GFS model run at 5 PM AST, rendered by IPS MeteoStar:
Look at the size of that cold trough and low center! Huge!
That isn’t the only weather news ahead, cold in the East, warm in the West in March. Our upcoming cold shock that hits on Sunday, is caused by an unusually powerful upper trough that dips down into Texas after it blows by us, then roars northeastward across the South on Monday and Tuesday. Expect to read about godawful tornadoes in the South on Monday and/or Tuesday.
I smiled seeing the groundskeepers scurrying about, sweeping and scraping snow off the courses and environs at the Dove Mountain golf tournament yesterday. I was smiling because the golf culture here is so different from that in Seattle, Washington, much more “pampering” here. Due to frequent inclement weather in Seattle, we have to toughen our skins against weather if we want to play golf. Rain? Snow? No problem.
In Seattle, golf season begins on March 1st. That’s because in March in Seattle, its only raining (or occasionally snowing) on every other day by then, not every day, as earlier in the winter.
So we’re going golfing on March 1st, dammitall, no matter what!
So shop keepers like this one below on Aurora Avenue in the north end of Seattle, knowing that Seattle golf culture, exult with big signs like this one when March 1st arrives!
The golf weather culture in Seattle, Washington, as represented by this sign. Photo by the writer, March 1st, 1990.
Inaccuracy in media re Catalina snowfall or maybe it wasn’t: a tirade
I was thinking that maybe a tirade would be a nice change of pace for you before some cloud discussions.
First, since I heard a weather presenter report that “2 inches” of snow fell in Catalina, a visual correction to that report. There was FOUR inches on the ground after settling/melting during the day and night of the 20-21st. If there is FOUR inches the following morning, it HAD to have snowed quite a bit MORE than FOUR inches! (The total depth of snow that fell was 5.5 inches here on Wilds Road).
Here is the proof, 4 inches of depth as measured by a raingauge dip stick, one tenth inch markers are 1 inch in length–I didn’t have a regular ruler. Some of the labels indicating light amounts of rain have worn off while the stick was being used in Seattle for 32 years, so you’ll have to count down from the 1.00, 90, 80 hundredths labels, ones clearly visible. For added proof I have added a second photo, and if you call now, you’ll get a third photo free plus for $75 for handling and shipping…
7:02 AM, February 21st. A raingauge measuring stick protrudes from a FOUR-inch depth of snow on a hitching post (where some snow could have even slipped off, or blew off!)7:04 AM. A slightly higher depth on a second hitching post–oh, yeah, leading the big western life here in Arizony with a horse and hitching posts.
I felt sad, though, remembering the words of humorist Dave Barry, speaking to the National Press Club back in ’91 I think it was, when he diverged from humor into a serious note, admonishing his Press Club Audience: “Why can’t we get it right?1”
Maybe in our case of the missing snow, it was because the person that called in the report was not a Cloud Maven Junior, and did not know how to measure snow. Maybe less actually fell where that person was (unlikely). Let us not forget that the snow on a flat board in Sutherland Heights, above Catalina proper, measured at nearly the same time as this, was SIX inches!
Yesterday’s clouds, and those snow-covered mountains
While it was sad to see so much snow disappear so fast, it was, overall, another gorgeous day in a long nearly continuous series of ones since the beginning of time here in Arizona, except maybe for those days of upheavals and dinosaurs and then when it was underwater, a remnant of the latter epoch as shown here in this fossil of a hydrosaurus, a precursor to grain eating critters like the Perissodactylas we have today…(horseys and such). As you can see, the teeth here were for eating something like mueslix, not for ripping flesh. I can’t believe all the information I am providing you today!
Possible hydrosaurus fossil encountered on a hike in Catalina State Park (still checking on what it is). Finding was reported to park rangers.
Here are some shots with some notes on them or in the captions. First those MOUNTAINS!
8:21 AM, February 20th, looking east from Sutherland Heights, which had SIX INCHES of snow on the ground at this time. Stratocumulus clouds top Samaniego Ridge.9:13 AM. The snowy Tortolita Mountains with some Altocumulus perlucidus above.
2:25 PM. With most of the snow already gone around Catalina, the majestic Catalina Mountains remind us of our great February 20th snowstorm and why we live here.
2:26 PM. While it was serene-looking over the Catalinas, to the southwest the sky was filling in with Cumulus and slightly higher Stratocumulus clouds. Why don’t you see virga even though we know they are at below freezing temperatures? In unison: “NO ICE!” (Tops too warm and cloud droplets likely on the small side.) This was to change in the next couple of hours.
3:24 PM. But first, another look at the Catalinas from Shroeder Ave in Catalina because I think its worth it before continuing. Golder Ranch Drive is on the far left.
5:25 PM. Clearly there has been a change in the temperatures at the tops of these clouds, likely now colder than -10 C. A trough of colder air was approaching aloft, and that likely lifted and cooled cloud tops. The cloud layer was due mostly to the spreading out of Cumulus tops (Stratocumulus cumulogenitus). The TUS sounding indicated cloud tops were about -13 C, capped by a very strong stable layer. There was a fall of sparse drops around this time, so some of it was getting to the ground.
The weather ahead
Cold then HOT. Hot when? Heat’s on already by March 1st for sure. Look at this “signal” in our trusty NOAA “ensembles of spaghetti” from last night:
Valid for 5 PM AST, March 1st. You won’t see a signal stronger than this one for 8 days from now. Likely will reach into the 80s when this ridge of warm air is fully developed.
The End, at last. Anyone still there?
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1Deadlines have a way of getting in the way of “truth.”
Three separate bands of snow in one day? Unforgettable, if not unbelievable, for Catalina, Arizona, made more so because its late February occurrence. Here at the top of Wilds Road we received a total of 5.5 inches from those three bands, with a peak amount of 4 inches on the “ground” (actually it was measured on a hitching post) just as the third and final band ended at 9 PM last night. The totals with each band, measured just about the time the snow was ending1:
Time of band Top of Wilds Road: Sutherland Heights (1 mi NE and 170 feet higher)
11:30 AM to 2:30 PM 2 inches 3 inches
4:30 to 6:00 PM 2.5 inches 2.7 inches (most fell in an hour and a half!)
8-9 PM 1 inch 2 inches (this just in), 6 inches on the ground there in sheltered locations)
Totals: 5.5 inches at the top of Wilds; 7.7 inches in Sutherland Heights. What a day, Mr. and Mrs. Catalina!
Water content in this snow here, 0.49 inches, so far. Waiting for melt down to get last few hundredths still frozen on the sides of the collector of the tipping bucket raingauge. Measured at Sutherland Heights: a fabulous 0.73 inches!
It’ll be gorgeous in the first few hours today after dawn, but with our late February sun, our great local scenes won’t last long. While more cold air is ahead, though with no precip in the few days, a HEAT WAVE has reared up in the models for the beginning of March, 8-10 days out!
Some photos for yesterday’s memorable snows2 (plural here is even amazing), From the beginning…
7:37 AM. A blustery, cool, and dramatic dawn scene, with snow showers in progress on the Catalinas from relatively shallow Stratocumulus clouds racing along them from the south.9:39 AM. A very exciting moment here! A non-preciping line of heavy Stratocumulus gets cold enough on top to start preciping over Oro Valley. Here we go! How cold were those tops getting? You want to guess, “Oh, about -10 C or so.” The TUS sounding at 5 AM AST had tops in that range already.11:37 AM. Just after the windshift and a 10 degree temperature drop from 44 F to 34 F, the snow begins to fall in Sutherland Heights.
6:11 PM. Wider angle view of that same scene after the second band dropped 2-3 more inches of snow in just over an hour. Getting pretty dark, camera or photog not doing the greatest job here.
5:59 PM. A blue palo verde tree bowing to snow.5:57 PM. “Piling it higher and deeper”, a common expression likely referring to snow and one that’s valid here.5:22 PM. How it got there… This is a shot during the heavier, second snow band during its prime S+ burst. “S+”, is “heavy snow” in weather teletype parlance, an early form of “texting.”
Will be taking more photos of course, early today!
The situation aloft (500 millibars) as S+ snow band 2 hit:
For 5 PM AST February 20th. The low center aloft is perfectly positioned for us as new precip bands are generated near its center as it sped eastward. Newer bands are heavier than older bands as a rule, and Band 2, was quite young with lightning in it. Band 3 is just forming, and it too, was mighty, though less extensive than Band 2.
Today’s clouds
Some Cu-Stratocu, patches of CIrrus and Altocumulus as a another lobe of cold air races SE from the Pac NW today. There’s a chance of snow flurries late tonight into tomorrow morning (can you imagine?) as the core of the trough goes by.
The End.
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1Measuring snowfall and snow on the ground, is one of the biggest bugaboos we have in meteorology. If there is any wind at all, forget about getting an accurate total, too much blows over the collector can. So, the precip amount reported for this storm is going to be on the low side. And, as the snow piled up yesterday, it was also disappearing at the same time on the bottom due to melting. Finally, as it piles up, it sinks down due to weight. So, the depths reported above are conservative, since if all the snow landed on a below freezing metal plate, we would only be dealing with one of those problems, settling, as with snowpacks in the high mountains.
2Hardly any of which was forecast from this keyboard. Wish there was a font smaller than ” 1 point” and this is it, in case you’ve never seen it. You don’t want to rub it people’s faces that maybe you were a little asleep at the wheel; too preoccuppied with the amount of precip which you forecast was going to be MORE than the models were predicting, and which happened, not the phase (solid or liquid) of the precip. But then, what REALLY matters to the vegies out there? The amount, of course, well, OK I guess vegies like it if more if the water sits there in a form that melts and has a lot of time to soak in.
I’m not missing any of this. Its too good. Supposed to rain off and off until the frontal blast about 10 AM -Noon, then clear up for awhile, then scattered showers develop from what will be icy looking Cumulus and small Cumulonimbus clouds, kind of the usual storm chronology we have here. This sequence shown in the U of AZ model run from last night is here, and its been well-predicted by the media weather folk as well. Don’t watch TEEVEE much, but I did catch some bits and pieces by George. It was pretty comprehensive, quite good really, and then I started to feel sad. Why am I doing this, blogging about weather myself when its already out there???????????????????????? Oh, well.
It will be interesting to see if there is more than a few flakes of snow as the front goes by, the rain becomes moderate to briefly heavy, and that’s when the precip will start to have ice in it, maybe turn to snow for awhile due to a diabatic effect where the snow level comes down due to big melting snowflakes dragging it down. An early morning frontal passage would have been better for the best snow accumulation, but, oh, well.
Still looks to be an appreciable amount here, both eyeballing the situation and in the U of AZ mod run from last evening. From this keyboard yesterday, the best estimate for this storm that just kind of popped out was 0.450 inches (the median between a lower limit of 0.20 and upper one of 0.70 inches). Since “we” last wrote, the U of AZ model has increased its precip for us, as though it was affected by something I said. The green “half inch” region has crept that bit closer to Catalina in this latest run below over where it was yesterday.
Accumulated precip for the 24 h ending at midnight tonight.
And we’ll need as much rain as we can squeeze out of this one as the follow up series of storms foretold so long ago in the mods have disappeared–shown during a time when our “truth viewer”, those NOAA spaghetti plots were down for a few days, or they might have tipped us off to be more “circumspect” about a run of storms by showing that they were not reliable predictions. No further rain is forecast for the two weeks after this now! Dang!
The intermittent rain that has been falling is WAY ahead of the front, over there by Yuma as I write at 4:41 AM.
Its developing in the moist flood of air that rushed in overnight at lower levels along with a huge icy shield overhead, no doubt a thick Altostratus with virga on top of Stratocu, maybe dumping some drops into the lower cloud deck. Need more of that.
——————Learning module———————–
The effect of rain drops falling into a lower layer of Stratocu?
If you dropped a cup of water on the top of the layer yourself, the amount coming out the bottom would be more than a cup. Those fast falling drops, about 5-10 meters per second, say for regular raindrops, collide with the itty bitty cloud droplets blowing sideways in the wind. The larger cloud droplets, say bigger than 20 microns in diameter, collide and stick to the fast-falling raindrop, adding to its size. We call this accretion. That bottom kilometer of storms where otherwise “harmless”, non-precipitating Stratocu is likely to be, is critical for appreciable snow and rainfall due to this process in mountainous regions. Almost always, the impression is that its the Stratocu that’s precipitating, but usually its not. So, when you see a raindrop fall, thank a Stratocu deck for making it that bit bigger, thought in some cases to increase precip by 50% due to the effect of accretion in the bottom kilometer (3300 feet).
Might look like this if you could step back to the south of the Catalinas today and draw a crummy cartoon of what was happening, but it was the best you could do at the time
From a 101 class I taught at the U of WA, with modifications to show I am in Catalina, AZ. Background: couldn’t get the real guy to teach that class that summer, and so I was enlisted to do the job at the last minute, thus lowering the accreditation rating of the University of Washington. You see, I have NO ADVANCED degree of any kind, and to have a lecturer without the big Ph. D. means you go DOWN! On the other hand, unlike most faculty at ANY university, I have been asked my opinion on something and was quoted about it in the Wall Street Journal in 2011! Oh, yeah, baby! Wanna spike a football right now! Credentialism; a bunch of hooey (sometimes).
————end of learning module and statement on credentialism aloong with a display of immaturity—————
Back to the storm…. After a couple of light and brief showers, we have amassed 0.01 inches! Only 0.44 inches to go to make a perfect prediction!
Yesterday’s clouds
Kind of a bust, really, and admitting that will make up for some exultations above. Sure, there were some Altocumulus with virga hanging down, but those virga trails needed to be about 20,000 feet longer to be anywhere near where I thought they would be. And then it cleared off almost completely during the afternoon! Oh, well. Pretty day, with lots of wind and mild temperatures. Here are a few shots:
6:55 AM. Altocumulus floccus virgae–has virga. These were up around 20,000 feet above sea level, or about 17,000 feet above ground level here in Catland. Top temperatures with all that ice falling out? About -26 C (-15 F).7:12 AM. Ditto.9:46 AM. More of the same but less.
6:25 PM. After a clear afternoon, a vast shield of Altostratus/Cirrus advances on Catalina.
…and it will seem like one. Windy today, real windy tomorrow morning before the cold front goes by in the mid-morning. Clouds is already here, rain predicted to develop SE of us in Mexico during the day. A jet max at 500 mb is already to the south of us, and that means that the door is open for a moist flow from the Pacific ahead of the main storm today, before the main blast tomorrow. So, there’s a chance of sprinkles and light showers around our area even today from thick splotches of middle and high clouds and the virga that will fall out of them.
But tomorrow; that will fab. Bruising cold front, gusty puffs of wind to 40 mph or more here in Catalina, especially likely on the higher ground, before it hits, followed by our “usual” huge temperature drop of 15-20 degrees in 1-2 h around mid-day, lets say about 10 AM-noon tomorrow, Wednesday (U of AZ mod run from last night sez it passes between 8-9 am AST, FYI, sometimes its a little fast). There ought to be light to moderate rain, briefly even heavy rain as it passes, maybe with some ice in the bigger raindrops.
What exactly is moderate rain you ask?
0.10 to 0.30 inches per hour, water is running off stuff pretty good. Its pretty common in most of our frontal bands. Heavy rain, which I think we will see, is just more than 0.30 inches per hour; drops are bouncing off the pavement an inch or two in height, and there are a lot of them. Now, it may not LAST an hour, this is just what you would call it if that intensity is reached. As a respectable CMJ, you’ll want to keep these numbers in mind, in case your friends ask you about something like this, “You just said ‘moderate rain’, what izzat, anyway?”
What the chance of measurable rain in Catalina and environs between now and Thursday morning?
About 200-300 percent, maybe 1000 percent on top of Mt. Sara Lemmon or even on Samaniego Ridge with this Big Boy blaster tomorrow. (We’re breaking new forecast ground here….you won’t hear the NWS telling you that the chance of rain is 200 percent!) ((Tell your friends.))
Amounts of rain here in Catalinaland?
Mods have juiced things up a bit, but a friend reported that yesterday the WRF-GFS had “as much as 0.25 inches” here. Friends, I pooh-poohed that forecast yesterday because it was TOO DAMN LOW for what we have coming. Besides, we need more than that, and this storm will deliver.
From this weather bully pulpit, the minimum amount, surely to be exceeded here, is 0.20 inches, the top I think now is more like 0.70 inches, that is, its not likely to exceed that amount. The median amount, the one most likely, the average of these two extremes, is 0.45 inches, a really good, and very needed rain. Its great to be able to say things like this, make people happy, except maybe snowbirders. Look, too, for happy Catalina Mountains with a LOT of snow on them. Get cameras ready for extra nice shots Colorado-ee shots on Thursday!
Hah, just looked at the U of AZ mod for the first time, and it is predicting that Catalina is in the 0.25 to 0.50 amount category, and Mt Sara Lemmon gets 1.5 inches! Yay! This will be so great if it happens, for our water situation. You can see that output here.
Saturday’s violent clouds
Never seen anything like them, those strange, and to me, violent looking high clouds, seemingly with tiny rope vortices in them; I swear I could see rotation. Here are a couple of shots. They seemed to pop out of blue sky for a few minutes, then disappear, then pop out again downstream some (toward the east).
12:24 PM, Saturday, Feb. 16th. There is no name that I know of that fits these clouds.12:38 PM. The one on the left just shot up in a minute or two; the one on the right MAY have a rope vortex in the middle.
12:45 PM, Saturday, Feb. 16th.
I didn’t remember to check PIREPS until long after the event. But, got help from NOAA’s David Bright who sent me a list of ones for Saturday morning throughout the West. Only one was intriguing in that list; “urgent, mod-sev turb….FL 310” (moderate to severe turbulence, flight level 31000 feet). But when I plotted the coordinates of that (9 AM AST PIREP, it was just about over San Diego, CA, and it was at 16 Z. There was nothing reported near us at the time of these photos, taken between noon and 1 PM (19-20 Z). But could that turbulent air, as represented by these clouds at Cirrus level, have gotten here from San DIego?
Below is the back trajectories starting at 9 km and 10 km ASL (30,000 to 33000 feet above sea level). Seems to lend credibility that our strange clouds MIGHT be the associated with the same region of turbulence reported by that pilot.
6 h ack trajectory for air arriving north of Catalina at 30 Kft and 33 KFt on Saturday, Feb. 16th at 2 PM.
Adding more mystery is the truncated TUS sounding, also attached, and the wild wind shifts. Did they lose the balloon? Maybe the balloon couldn’t take it, gave up as it got close to the turbulent layer above 22 KFT. Note how wild the wind direction got above about 16 KFT, or about 550 millibars. Normally these plots extend to the top of the diagram, 100 mb, but not on the afternoon of the 16th. Hmmmmmm.
The Tucson sounding, launched around 3:30 to 4 PM AST for Saturday afternoon, Feb. 16th. It will be known, in Z, or CUT time as the sounding for 00Z, Feb. 17th.
BTW, I have done a lot of work here for you on this strange case.
Yesterday’s beautiful uncinus, and another great sunset
Yes, mare’s tails on display yesterday. They make hygrometers out of of horse tail hair… Did you know that? Yep, its true. Horse tail hair responds to changes in humidity really well. You wonder who and how that was discovered? “Wow, look at how fat and short my horse’s tail is! Must be really humid today! I think I will grab a hair and make some kind of humidity sensor out of it, one that has linkages that trace the humidity on this little drum that goes around. I’ve always wanted to make something out of my horse’s tail.” (That venerable instrument? The horse hair hygrometer. Used for decades.)
9:38 AM. Does it get prettier than this? I don’t think so.6:19 PM. Patch of Altocumulus undulatus (has ripples), center, along with patches of Cirrus spissatus (thick Cirrus) and maybe some lenticulars on the right. It was a complex scene!
