Punctuation: its hard. Not sure about that in the title. Oh, well. Kind of sad that English is my first language, too.
Yesterday was definitely more Stratocumulus-ee (clouds flatter than expected) than anticipated, which hurt since it was foretold here that it would be Cumulus-ee day. And there was but the slightest evidence of any ice around, something that was also expected. So the record of almost always being right on weather and clouds (i.e., >50% of the time) took a hit, which hurt, to repeat something about personal feelings.
Too, with noticeable breezes at times, the sky almost completely overcast at mid-day as well, and the temperature well below 80 °F, it seemed darn COLD for late April.
Today, looking ahead, the air cools over us again as it did two days ago as a puddle of cold air slams down the interior of the West Coast and into AZ, and we should see some nice, photogenic Cumulus/shallow Cumulonimbus this afternoon, and, since the coldest tops will be well below -10 °C, there should be some virga and light showers around. So, another chance today for a little measurable rain here in Catalinaland before April closes out. The jet stream at mid-levels remains south of us, too, a critical aspect for cool season rain in the Great SW.
With more instability today than yesterday, there should be some more sun around compared to yesterday since holes due to downward moving air around the upward moving air in cumuliform clouds will be out there. Looking forward to today!
Still looking for the good rains next week as extra jumbo-for-May trough crashes into Cal from the Pac.
Yesterday’s clouds
In reverse order, today. They imported that way, and am too lazy to move them all.
6:49 PM. Looking toward Romero Canyon. Very nice lighting and shadows on our beautiful Catalina Mountains. Hard to believe that enough folks voted to cut off views like this when Oracle was widened and sound walls were put up in front of their homes to save, oh, 2-3 decibels is all, AZDOT said.6:49 PM. Nice lighting on Samaniego Ridge as the sun went down.4:23 PM. Nice “muffin-like” Cumulus over Ms. Mt. Lemmon producing a huge shadow. (hahah; its the cloud overhead left that’s causing the shadow. Kind of a dramatic shot I thought.3:15 PM. Lots of cloud coverage by those flattened tops (Stratocumulus cumulogenitus) with small to moderate Cumulus clouds below.3:12 PM. Thought I saw just that slight veil of ice (center), but maybe “grasping for a seed and swallowing a camel” here.1:06 PM. Looking NNW at Cumulus cloud with flattening tops due to an inversion lurking north of Saddlebrooke village.1:06 PM. A mix of Stratocumulus with small Cumulus clouds below lurk over and west of the Catalinas.7:35 AM. “Regular” Altocumulus with underlying Stratocumulus lurk to the north.7:29 AM. Altocumulus lenticulars lurk behind the Catalinas.
If you don’t believe me, and slept through it during the power outages when it was COMPLETELY dark last night, here is a MEASUREMENT of the event from a private weather station, The arrow points to the event, 58 knots, which is about 67 mph. This is the greatest wind measured by the PWA in seven years, here and a few down there on Wilds. The measured (here, the max one-minute speed) wind is, of course, LESS than the actual greatest 1s or 2s puff, likely well over 67 mph. Unless you have a fancy ultrasonic anemometer, too much inertia in the cheaper ones to get those instantaneous puffs.
NEW: Got to 100 mph on Mt. Sara Lemmon before tower on which an ultrasonic anemometer was installed blew away.
Hope your trees are intact:
WInd measurement over the past 24 h from a Davis Vantage Pro Personal Weather Station located somewhere in Sutherland Heights. (Remember in Israel, that popular top 40 radio station that said, “Braodcasting from SOMEWHERE in the Medeterranean” and every one knew it was that ship located a half mile or so offshore of Tel Aviv. Played Springstein, that kind of thing for all to hear.
Only 0.17 inches tipped by the Davis Vantage Pro, but with wind blowing as it was, you KNOW that’s going to be substantially low. We really can’t measure rain that accurately in any thing but perfectly calm conditions. The more accurate measurements are made if your gauge is sheltered by vegetation that is about the height of the gauge top right near the gauge, but then increases like the inside of a bowl as you gradually move away from it in all directions. No trees, please, too close! Preferably your gauge is on the ground not up somewhere, too, which would exaggerate the losses from wind.
Now, I will go outside and measure the rain in two ground mounted gauges, one a NWS-style 8-inch gauge, and the little toy 4-inch gauge from CoCoRahs, that national group that wants your measurements! Sign up now. Here are the other totals:
NWS gauge, 0.22 inches
CoCoRahs gauge, blew over, no total! Dammitall! Wasn’t as protected in the weeds as I thought. That total “likely” was around 0.24 or 0.25 inches. CMP had privately predicted, 0.28 inches for this storm, whilst a major forecast professor from CSU who lives in Catalina predicted an INCH1!
Brutal out there, too. Temp only 43° F, still windy.
The weather way ahead
Sorry to say no rain for Catalinaland in our latest computer forecasts through the middle of February as the Big Niño hyped so much here and elsewhere is turning out to be big poop so far.
Cal rains only great in the far north of the State during January, and in the northern Sierras.
Sucked in by the Big Niño thoughts here, CMP was predicting quite the mayhem in Cal during the last 15-16 days of January, and 25-30 inches at some locations during that time here is a table for that period from CoCoRahs. Note Shelter Cove, near the King Range, has the most. Totals are sorted in descending order, Jan 13-31.
No doubt your curiosity was piqued and peaked by seeing how much rain could fall on you if you lived in Shelter Cove, on the Lost Coast of California. Well, here’s what its like there. Has an AP, too!
A view of Shelter Cove, showing airport and control tower. Yep, you can fly right in!Another view of Shelter Cove. King Range is in the distance. NO DOUBT, rainfall up there WAS more than 25 inches if about 22 fell at Shelter Cove!
May try to get some more of that Cal precip since Jan 13, finding a modicum o direct verification of that huge amount of rain prediction.
No Mavericks surf competition yet, though larger waves have been battering the Cal coast over the past two-three weeks. Below, surf for today.
4:04 PM. Nice lenticular, devolving into flocculated Altocumulus downwind. The cells the form downwind from the smooth upwind edge are likely due to the latent heat released when condensation occurs, causing weak up and downdrafts to develop father downwind.5:58 PM. Dusty sunset. No worrisome dark spotting on sun.
The End
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1Maybe the “Ivory Tower” has not only protected him from the hiccups of the “real world” due to tenure and that kind of thing, but also from discerning what real weather will be like. hahaha. Just kidding. Sort of. Recall CMP was NOT tenured, but just a “staff” meteorologist with a “light” at the end of the funding grant tunnel, year after year for about 30 years. So, I am pretty mad about “tenure”. Hahahaha, just kidding maybe.
“Tenure” was a recent subject of a Science Mag editorial (“Wither (wither) Tenure“), too; costs everybody, especially students, a LOT of money, it was said.
Too, often young bright researchers are blocked by senior professors having tenure and making large amounts of money that hang on well past their productive years.
Cloud Maven Person: Resigned from the U of WA Cloud and Aerosol Research Group due to feeling he wasn’t earning his high “Research Scientist III” pay anymore, brain dimming, though there was a pile of money that he could have continued on with. Title of resignation letter: “Time to Go”. This free-ed up monies for staff folks that remained in our group, too.
Com’on decrepit tenured faculty, give up! Resign now!
PS: My friend tenured fac is STILL active, gives talks/presentations around the world still, even though he’s quite a geezer now, as is CMP.
What a great wildflower-producing/maintaing storm! While some, well most, of the exceptional weather expected, like TSTMs, funnels, hail, locusts, and afternoon arcus clouds, were not really observed, a lot of rain was. Here’s your cloud day for our stupendous storm, not yet over, beginning with a how-it-fell chart:
How it fell.7:43 AM. A very Seattle-like view if the Catalina Mountains were the Olympic Mountains west of Seattle, complete with standing lenticular cloud overhead, here due to the SSE winds aloft. Overnight, with just 0.19 inches, we were one of the driest places in SE Arizona due to shadowing of the rain due to that southerly wind.8:31 AM. Almost the same scene, lenticular plate overhead holding in place, though it soon began to fade.
9:00 AM. Hike to get closer to rain, and to see if Sutherland Wash, east of Sutherland Heights, had any water in it after a few inches had fallen on Ms. Mt. Lemmon. Very pretty sight, coulda been on the west side of the Cascade Mountains, except for the lack of forests.9:03 AM. Another dramatically gray scene, something in the way of a cloud street coming off the Catalinas at ME.9:08 AM. Classic Arizona rain day scene. Can’t really be anywhere else with that saguaro, can it? Oh, btw, there was NOTHING in the wash at the Cottonwoods!9:47 AM. Bored with the lack of rain, took this; Jake the horse, also bored, enjoys new sawdust while waiting for the rain which can’t seem to get here.. Dreamer horse looks on.
11:15 AM. Still wating for rain, though it continues to pound the Catalinas, which is good.10:50 AM. Still hasn’t rained here in Catalina after the rain near dawn. However, this nice cloud base began to hover to the south of us. Will it do anything? Stand by.
11:47 AM. That hovering cloud base, much like a lenticular, continued in place, but at this time, rain was beginning to fall from the downstream portions over us! And, look how summer-like the rain intensity looks on Pusch Ridge! It started to get real exciting now.
1:21 PM. Still R- to R falling out of this stationary cloud just upstream of Catalina. You could see that the backside of the rain upwind of us was only a mile or two away, but it never arrived during that 2 h rain. One of the most interesting rain situations you and I have ever seen. About a quarter of an inch fell during this situation. Nice. And still, the “Yikes” period mentioned yesterday, suggested by the progs, was still ahead! But would it disappoint?1:59 PM. For those meteorologists and cloud mavens that like to work without cheating and looking at radar, this scene should have got your heart pounding. Note the dark line on the horizon, “The Yikes Event”m triggered by “Red Curly Air” aloft, is about to happen!
1:59 PM. Close up of the arcus cloud on the and windshift line on the horizon about to move in.2:26 PM. In case you didn’t believe me, this. Visions of lightning and hail danced in my head; maybe some arcus would turn into a tube!2:57 PM. Cutting to the chase, the so-so arcus cloud fronting the rain just before the gush of wind and hours of rain for Catalina arrived. The rain here is just arriving at Oracle Road. No LTG, no hail, no funnels were observed though I listened and looked damn hard. That hangy-down thing did not have rotation. See chart at beginning of blog for the great rain that fell. Of course, with all the upper level support this had (“red curly air”) you knew it was going to be a wide rain band, not a cheesy narrow one. We didn’t get the more severe Cumulonimbus clouds probably because there were no sun breaks ahead of this line (as was anticipated); temperatures stayed cool, in the mid-50s. Still, it was a great work of rain (again, see chart).
The End, of yesterday’s cloud story, finished the next day after that. See yesterday’s cloud story today.
And, will there be a tornado today, too? Arcus cloud almost a certainty. Get cameras ready! Read on…farther down.
4 (FOUR!) inches at Park Tank, Reddington Pass area by 6 AM ! Incredible for so early in the storm! Check more totals out from your friendly Pima County ALERT regional gauges. Mods on track to verify those huge amounts that were predicted the day before yesterday! Washes will be running! Flowers happy! I’m happy! Lot of excitement here! ! !
Only 0.15 inches here in Sutherland Heights/Catalina…. so far (6 AM). :{
Yesterday’s study in gray
Today!
Some excitement just now, after seeing that a major rain band had passed by, and we’re now in a break in the rain.
Will it rain more? Tune in at 11 to find out….. (hahahaha; we don’t do that here! More excitement.)
Went to U of AZ mod run from 11 PM AST last night, the very latest, then saw that a narrow, heavy band or precip, maybe a squall line, something out of the Midwest, was foretold for us Catalinans this afternoon!
Then went to examine upper air and positioning of vorticity maximums ejecting out of our incoming trough (vorticity maximums represented by redness in the plot below from the University of Washington’s Weather Department– color scheme by Mark Albright, the color man up there:
Positioning of “red curly air” (vorticity or rotational areas) in the atmosphere at 1 PM AST today, looking for the cause of the afternoon rainband. The approach of red curly air is accompanied by upward motion in the atmosphere. When I looked at this, I exploded with a “yikes!”. more excitement, today’s theme.
This was exciting due to incoming “red curly air” this afternoon above us, AND, due to those spreading out of the contours over us (see arrowhead). Diffluent contours are indicative of air spreading out aloft, something that leads to enhanced upward motion.
And, to blab on, the air aloft will be cooling off on top of our high-for-winter dewpoint air (50s), which should lead to large Cumulonimbus clouds, likely organized in a line of thunderstorms, as all this happens this afternoon or evening.
And, going over the edge here some, as is my wont, we might well see a funnel cloud somewhere today. This is the kind of situation that you can get them. So, to sum up today:
Possible funnels! Will they reach the ground somewhere in AZ? Maybe. Lightning! Hail likely, too! Rain rates likely to reach an inch an hour, though that rate may not last an hour unless you’re real lucky and get shafted real good.
Will be watching intensely for all these manner of things today! Haven’t been this excited since Oct 2nd, 2010, I think it was when they had that tornado in PHX!
Remember, too, our motto:
Right or wrong, you might have heard it here first!
The weather way ahead
While a long spell of dry weather comes after this 2 day event, the mods have popped up with a heavy dose of rain in two weeks. Of course, normally this would be considered Fantasy 101. HOWEVER, a slight amount of credibility is added when such a pattern that brings rain strongly resembles the one you have now. Check out these upper level flow maps out, as rendered by IPS MeteoStar, that has just moved their pay wall to March from February (yay!). The first one below is for today’s situation, and the second one for Valentine’s Day in two weeks. Look pretty similar don’t they.
You see, weather has a memory like your horse. You ride to Deer Camp way up in the Catalinas; you’ve never been there before, nor has horsey, and then you head back, but you’re not sure of the way.
Well, horsey will remember for you!
(To continue with the extra excitement theme of today’s blog!)
Well, the weather has a memory that we call “persistence”, likes to do the same thing over and over for awhile, and so when a similar pattern turns up in the models that you have now, we give it a little more credibility than none when its two weeks out, maybe 30% chance of actually happening (i. e., still a bit of a long shot).
Here’s what we have today; low off Baja spinning moist air from the far southern latitudes into AZ.Valid at 5 AM AST, February 14th, Valentine’s DayThe big rain accompanying the Valentine’s Day Storm.
1) The quarter inch predicted/hoped for here fell on Borrego Springs, CA, (0.27 inches) instead. So, it was pretty close. We received a measly trace in the past 24 until we got 0.05 inches just now! Barely made the 0.05 inches, thought to be the least that could fall. So, in humility, will be expanding limits of storms, maybe go with 0-5 inches possible amounts for every next storm. Should hit those.
2) Mods still think more rain is ahead over the next few days, beginning on Thursday. This period of rain has always been predicted to be more than yesterday anyway.
3) As an outstanding weather note for my reader, I thought I would post this photo from a friend in Seattle of the exceptionally warm weather for this time of year they had yesterday in Seattle (60s). A young1 woman at Green Lake in Seattle displays how warm it is by dawning a bikini, near where the present writer used to live. “Smells like global warming”, as Seattle’s own Kurt Cobain1 might have said about yesterday, if he wasn’t dead.
While there have been studies about cherry blossoms and that kind of thing coming out earlier in the spring back East of late, maybe there should be one about bikinis coming out earlier, too. How many weeks earlier in spring than during the Little Ice Age, do we see bikinis nowadays? How long has the bikini season been lengthened? Is it commensurate with lengthening of the growing season? That would be a VERY interesting scientific question to address, one that needs to be fully addressed via graphs and photo documentation. Applying for NSF global warming grant monies now…..
Yesterday afternoon at Green Lake in Seattle. A young woman dawns a bikini! Unheard of in January in Seattle! Thought I would display this full size so that you could see how warm it is. Thanks to Bob S, Ballard District, for supplying this datum.
Yesterday’s clouds
8:31 AM. Rainband encroaches from the south horizon. Flow was from the southeast, but movement of band was to the north. The clouds in the foreground are two layers of Altocumulus. The banded rain cloud moving toward us would be Nimbostratus.11:30 AM. Dammitall, its still not here, and now the rain coming out of the band is so slight you can see through to the other side! Nice birds of some kind on the wires, upper left. Makes me think of that Leonard Cohen song, Bird on the Wire, best interpreted by Judy Collins, of course.
11:31 AM. Lotta birds on the wire. I thought you should see this. Above, Altocumulus/Stratocumulus, with a higher layer of Altostratus.4:08 PM. After the trace and clearing, a new bank of Altocumulus/Stratocumulus and rain band approached from the south. Virga can be seen on the horizon, too. Hope building again for measurable rain.4:19 PM. From the corral, a display of Altocumulus/Stratocumulus lenticulars downstream from the Catalinas. Nice lighting on hills, too.4:30 PM. Cloud maven juniors should have noticed that the lower layer of clouds here (left of center), are LOWER than the clouds that passed over earlier. That means the incoming rainband had a better chance of producing measurable rain though it didn’t.4:40 PM. Another great sign that measurable rain was on the doorstep though it didn’t were these faint Cumulonimbus tops showing up beyond Pusch Ridge. Gettin’ excited here, as you were no doubt. Some pretty hard radar cells came up out of Mexico then.
That’s it. No more photos, no rain last night, either, but in some kind of rain miracle, it has just put 0.05 inches in the gauge! So, the forecast from this typewriter that 0.05 inches was the least that could occur in this “storm” has been verified!
Conditions not ripe for much more, though a few light showers are still upwind. Clouds oughta thin as the morning goes along, with huge breaks in the clouds this afternoon.
Mods suggest more rain beginning as early as Thursday night. This one has more potential for rain here, somewhere between 0 and 5 inches, i. e., only a 10% chance of less than zero; less than 10% chance of more than 5 inches. There, that should do it….
The End
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Composer, lead singer for that Seattle band, Nirvana. You can see Kurt in a cloud of smoke singing, “Smells like air pressure here“, a Bill Nye parody of the true Nirvana hit where Cobain sings in a lot of smoke, “Smells like teen spirit.” Compare versions.
It doesn’t get much better than this plot below for our Catalina weather 10-13 days ahead, which is always pretty fuzzy-looking as a rule. “Better” means for rain chances here, which is not everyone’s “better.”
Here’s the excitement:
Note blank area, that is, an area free of lines area centered on the gambling and other mischief-permitting State of Nevada1.
Note how the red lines dip down into Mexico, whilst the blue lines bulge northward into Canada along the West Coast.
This error-filled plot2 tells us that it is almost certain that a trough will be in the lower middle latitudes where we are on January 22nd or so. Just about guaranteed.
In the meantime, those blue lines indicated that a ridge of high pressure is going to divert northern storms into Canada and southeast Alaska. Sometimes we refer to situations like this as “split flow”; the southern portions of storms in the Pacific move ESE toward southern California and the Southwest, while the northern portions split off to the NE, as is happening now. Weak upper level disturbances pass overhead, the next one tomorrow, and with it, a little more rain, the models say.
U of AZ mod has rain moving in toward dawn tomorrow with totals here amounting to about like that last rain, 0.10 to 0. 25 inches. Given model vagaries, probably the lower and upper limits here are likely to be 0.05 (worst case scenario) and 0.50 inches (best case scenario), so a best guess would be the middle of those, 0.275 inches, not too much different from the AZ mod. This is the sports-like part of weather forecasting. What’s your estimate, fantasy or otherwise?
BTW, there were quite a few stations reporting over an inch of rain in Santa Barbara and Ventura Counties during the past 24 h, and so while weak, this system is pretty juicy, lots of liquid water as measured by dewpoints which should rise into the upper 40s to low 50s here during the next day. Also, there have been some embedded weak Cumulonimbus clouds and that’s a possibility here tomorrow, too, as the rainband goes by. You’ll be able to tell that by strong shafting below the clouds. As always, hoping we here in Catalina get shafted tomorrow.
But the ones these days are weak, while the split ahead in 10-13 days is likely to contain much stronger disturbances, well, at least ONE before it gives out.
Yesterday’s clouds
7:22 AM. Sunrise Altocumulus.
11:42 AM. Another very summer-like looking day with clouds beginning to pile ever higher over the Catalinas.
12:51 PM. Small Cumulus are developing over the Catalinas while far above them are, two crossing contrails, about the same age suggesting that aircraft crossed paths simultaneously. The FAA flight separation rules now allows for 1,000 feet of separation instead of the 2,000 feet in years past, and so if you’ve flown recently, you may have noticed planes that appeared to be a lot closer to you than ones a few years ago. This has been permitted due to improvements in aircraft GPS accuracy, and was deemed needed due to the vast increases in air traffic in the decades ahead. Still, there were times when opposite flying aircraft were so CLOSE, passing by like bullets, that you wanted to scream to the pilot, “Hey, wake up and smell the air space!!!!”
1:44 PM. Probably had a little ice in that smooth section, but overall really looked like a miniature summer Cumulonimbus cloud. Did not see if it had an echo, and never was it clear that there was ice.2:02 PM. As Altocumulus castellanus overspread the sky, lenticular clouds were still visible beyond the Catalinas. Some lenticulars began to sprout turrets, an odditity, but one driven by the condensation of water, something that releases a little heat (in this case) to the atmosphere causing the cloud to be more buoyant.
5:32 PM. A sunset of Cirrus and Altocumulus. Not bad.
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1What a great and honest state motto that would be! “Nevada: That US State where gambling and other social mischief is OK with us!”
2Don’t forget that due to growth in computer capabilities, we can now have many model runs from the same data and be done with them in a timely way. These “spaghetti”, “ensemble” or better yet, “Lorenz” plots are computer model runs with deliberate (!) slight errors introduced to see how the model forecasts of high and low pressure centers changes, given a few slight errors. This is because there are ALWAYS errors in the data anyway, there are always error bars on measurements, etc. By doing this, only the strongest signals in the forecasts remain, indicated by grouping of lines these two colors of lines, red and bluish. So, the forecast of the jet stream coming out of Asia is very, very reliable. Things go to HELL, downstream (toward the east), but some likely patterns can still be seen, such as the one over the Southwest US where a trough/low is almost certain in our area then. Will it bring us rain in Catalina? Hell, I don’t know because if the trough is a little too far to the east of us, we might only get cooler. However, since Cloud Maven person has a postive rain bias, he will say, “Absolutely. There will be rain in the Catalina area on January 22nd or so”–the actual timing might be off by a day or so.
Front will roar across like a mouse, not a lion, as hoped for a few days ago. Not too many rain “calories” in it. Measurable rain will still occur, starting sometime between 9 AM and 10 AM AST–oops. raining now at 7:10 AM! Check out U of AZ model for rain timing. First drops fall here in that model output (from 11 PM AST last night), between 8 AM and 9 AM. The frontal band, such as it is, is almost here! However, the model rain tends to arrive a little fast here, though not always. FYI, be on guard.
C-M is holding firm with a minimum of 0.15 inches today, but previous foretold possible top of 0.80 inches a few days ago is out of the question. Will be happy with 0.25 inches at my house. Since I am also measuring the rain as well as forecasting it, I have a feeling things will turn out fine.
There will be a nice temperature drop, windshift, and simultaneous rise in pressure as the cold front goes by–it’ll be fun for you to watch the barometer today and see the minute the front goes by as higher pressure begins to squash down on you.
Rain might reach briefly moderate intensity (defined by official weatherfolk as 0.10 to 0.30 inches per hour). It would be great if it lasted an hour at that rate, but it likely won’t. Its moving pretty fast, and it doesn’t seem like more than 2 h of rain can occur today. Look for a nice clearing in the afternoon, and a COOL evening.
Drive south if you want to avoid rain today. Jet core (in the middle levels, 500 millibars, 18, 000 feet above sea level) is almost overhead, and just to south, and that core is almost a black-white discriminator of rain here in the cool season. So, we’re on the edge of the precip today. More to the north; less to the south.
Some clouds for you
1O:55 AM, December 11. Thought you should see this nice line of Ac castellanus and floccus underneath Cirrus spissatus.7:02 AM. Sunrise.12:32 PM. Wind picking up at the ground and aloft. Note tiny Ac lenticular with Cu fractus clouds.3:14 PM. The high cloud shield from the storm encroaches. Could call this either Cirrus spissatus or Altostratus translucidus.5:22 PM. Now we’re talkin’ Altostratus with underlit mammatus and fine virga. So pretty.5:29 PM. A late “bloom”, not really expected. Shows that there was a clear slot far beyond the horizon. Had to pull off by the Refuse Waste station on Oracle to get this. I hope you’re happy.
The weather ahead and WAY ahead
Speaking of bowls, and let’s face it, with only a 100 or so we could use a few more1; we here in all of Arizona are in the “Trough Bowl” now.
This means that troughs (storms and cold fronts) that barge into the West Coast will gravitate to Arizona instead of bypassing us and they will do that over and over again. Being in the Trough Bowl is great fun! Lots of weather excitement for weather-centric folk like yours truly. When you’re in the Trough Bowl, the weather is “unsettled”; is NEVER really nice (if you like sun and warmth) for very long because a new front/trough is barreling in at you.
So, while today might be a little disappointing, we will have many chances to get the “real thing”, i.e., a behemoth of a trough among the many that affect us in the weeks ahead.
In the longer view, a behemoth of a trough for the Great SW has just popped out of the models1 just last night in the 11 PM AST run! Gander this monster truck trough for AZ. Where’s that monster truck event announcer, we need him now!
Valid for 11 PM AST, Christmas Day! Wow. Can’t really take this at face value that far out, but if it did happen, likely would be snow in the Catalina area, and horsey would likely need a blanket after it went by. Will keep you informed periodically about this as the days go by.
OK, enough weather “calories” for you today. Hope you’re excited like me.
The End
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1Furthermore, why don’t we have bowls for women’s teams, what happened to Title IX there, maybe Beach or Sand Football? )
2As rendered by IPS MeteoStar, which is about to go from “free” to “fee” in January. Dang.
Of course, only CLOUDS can rain, so the title is a little silly, but it sounded more dramatic like that. This is the first measurable rain, it fell between 9 and 10 PM here, in EIGHT weeks!
And you could sure smell that special fragrance from the ground and desert vegetation as soon as you stepped outside to do your exercises this morning!
Nice sunrise yesterday morning to start the day. In case you missed, of course, I am there for you.
BTW, in the captions below, I have included for you a discussion of climate issues in a kind of stream-of-consciousness format. OK, its a rant that came upon me out of the blue. CM sometimes gets mad and loses control for a few seconds; need to get some counseling maybe…
6:56 AM. Altocumulus perlucidus. Say no more. Might be a lenticular sort of on the right. Not the classic almond shape, but it did hang on for a long time in that spot. Say no more.
Kind of gray after that in Altostratus with an undercutting, lower layer of Altocumulus by mid-afternoon darkening the sky up some more. Some virga here and there with sprinkles-its-not-drizzle reaching the ground by late afternoon in the Catalina area. Here is your cloudscape for later in the day, very Seattle like during approaching storms that actually rain lightly on you for hours:
10:35 AM. Classic Altostratus translucidus, ice path in cloud all the way to the sun.10:39 AM, after walk down a slope to give YOU a view to the southwest, classic Altostratus as seen when not looking toward the sun. Hard to tell if its translucidus or opacus looking this way. By the way, even when you can see the sun, As clouds are thousands of feet thick, tops usually at Cirrus clouds levels.1:26 PM. Here come the lower, flocculent masses of Altocumulus clouds, ones composed of droplets.3:15 PM. It was all downhill for cloud bottoms after the Altocumulus moved in. Now, the bottoms are lumpy and much larger, casting them as Stratocumulus. There was some virga and very light rainshowers reaching the ground at this time, too. A few drops fell at 3:11 PM. Only the great cloud mavens of all time would have noticed. Lasted maybe one minute.3:15 PM again. Lot going on here, so I thought I would point out some things on a gray day, in particular for my fellow meteorologist Mark A at the U of WA who winters in the Tuscon smog plume. Mark is a super sleuth when it comes to snowpacks, but maybe doesn’t have so much moxie when it comes to smog. Mark, as you know may now, was fired as Assist State Climo for Washington when he demonstrated and kept complaining, along with two faculty members, that the claims of gigantic snowpack losses due to global warming (now repackaged as “climate change1“) in the Cascade Mountains were hugely exaggerated, likely the result of cherry picking a cold snowy beginning and ending with a run of El Nino winters, ones that lead to less snowpack in the Cascades of Washington and Oregon. Such cherry-picking led to a wonderful suggestion of huge declines that has led to a bounty of funding and continued employment, promotions, accolades, citations by Big Media, etc, because such claims, even if exaggerated and untrue, are what we want to hear! And, no one ever got a job for claiming they can’t find any sign of global warming, or only a little one, but rather are vilified for even suggesting exaggerations in the “global warming” domain. Mark, BTW, continuing his sleuthing has recently shown that similar claims for declines in snowpacks in Montana near Glacier National Park, have not been decreasing but rather increasing. He’ll get HELL for this one! So, more vilification is likely ahead for poor Mark, as well as more smog.
What’s ahead, besides the Big Pac 12 Fubball Game on Friday evening?
More clouds. Maybe a few more sprinkles especially tomorrow after dawn. See nice map below from the U of WA Dept of Atmospheric Meteorology (original colors on the map below by that big troublemaker, Mark Albright)
Valid for 8 AM AST, tomorrow morning, which is Thursday, in case you’ve lost count of the days of the week. The arrow denotes an upper level trough, or bend in the winds. Ahead of the bend (sometimes referred to as vorticity, or curling air, or red curly air) the air tends to rise producing cloud sheets, whereas behind red curly air, the air descends. See Seymour Hess, Introduction to Theoretical Meteorology, 1959, Florida State University Press. As you can see by the arrow, that slight bend in the winds is about to pass over your house in Catalina, and the U of Az model output from last evening sees a little rain here with that passage. Yay! Also note suggestion of bifurcated jet flow with a minor maximum in wind (slight bunching of contours) to the south of us, nearly always required for rain here in the cool season.
Went on an hike yesterday to see what the water levels had gotten to in the Sutherland Wash, located at the base of Samaniego Ridge, during our historic downpour. I began at the Cottonwoods at the Baby Jesus Trail head and worked my way down the wash about a mile, to where the fence is that demarcates the Coronado National Forest boundary and the State Trust Lands. It appeared that the flow in the Sutherland Wash had reached depths of 4-6 feet in the narrower parts, and about 3 feet deep, and 80 feet wide (!) near the south fence. Had crossed that part of the wash by that fence many times on horseback. I had seen little streams of water in it a number of times, but nothing close to what apparently had happened on Monday morning; it must have been a stunning sight. The peak of our storm appeared to fall on the Sutherland Wash watershed.
First, nice sunrise yesterday. Hope you caught this.
6:01 AM.9:10 AM. Rocky surfaces on the Catalinas glistening from water. I thought maybe that water might be still be flowing in the Sutherland Wash, up against the foothills, but only in one little spot was it running.10:41 AM. Investigative work begins in the Sutherland Wash at the Cottonwoods near the Baby Jesus Trail head.10:41 AM. Using the investigative technique of looking for scour marks, debris piles, and mashed plants, the investigation began. In summary, I could find no evidence that the Sutherland Wash had ever had a higher flow in it than what occurred on Monday. Imagine the flow here, enough to push over that young tree!Imagine the volume of water going over this old cement wall, just south of the Cottonwods!
I suddenly realized, when viewing the mashed plants, pig weed and such, along side the untouched ones, that the concept of mowed lawns was likely introduced to early man since he would have seen how nice and orderly the flattened areas looked after floods compared to the wild, stalky, unkempt look of the untamed natural vegetation. Thinking about writing this hypothesis up, submitting to the J. of Amer. Cultural Anthropology…. Man always wants to tame things.10:50 AM Debris pile.Somehow these morning glories made it through the mayhem.More debris. It got to be kind of fascinating, started looking for the biggest ones, really getting into it.10:56 AM. Wash must have been about 4-5 feet deep here, judging by that neat, nice looking mashed down area on the bank.Certainly an implication of water violence here!Pretty marbled swirls due to multicolored sands. Almost hated to walk on it.More interesting swirls.Really getting fascinated by the drama presented by a debris pile. Hope you are, too.The wash has widened considerably here, but the violence is still evident. I thought this was a pretty dramatic viewpoint.The debris in this young tree suggests the wash was five or so feet deep here, pretty amazing when you add the velocity to that.At the end of the hike, here past the fence and where the equestrian trail enters the wash, measuring from bank to bank showed that it was 80 feet wide, and about 3 feet deep!But somehow, this little guy survived the scouring rampage.
The weather ahead….
Still looking like an upper trough along California will scoop up soon-to-be Hurricane “Odile” (not “Opal”, as suggested here yesterday) and send its remains into Arizona and with that, another blast of tropical rains. Another four or five inches added to our current water year total would make it look pretty good (hahah). Right now, Catalinans are looking at 14.56 inches for this WY (Oct to Sept). Average is 16.82 inches over the past 37 years.
The End.
PS: There was some ice in heavy Cumulus clouds off to the north toward Oracle Junction yesterday, BTW. Hope you noted it.
Well, it finally happened, we got shafted royally (as CM likes to say, referring to getting rain shafted) yesterday afternoon with a badly needed 1.09 inches here in Sutherland Heights. More than 2 inches fell nearby, too, such as near the intersection of Hwy 77 and 79! The highlight of the storm was, of course, all of those several close lightning strikes between 2 and 3 PM yesterday. If you weren’t out watching them, here’s one for you, one that popped Lago del Oro. (Mr. Cloud Maven person reminds his reader that during lightning, do not stand outside by a tree outside as here. Hmmmph, a new thought…. Maybe that’s where the expression, “Death warmed over” comes from, a person unlucky enough to have been struck by lightning…and then somebody finds him right away!
2:06 PM. Looking northwest; a literal highlight of the day.6:17 AM. The remarkable site of a Sc lenticularis stack over Catalina due to strong easterly winds up there. This is more like a scene from the front range of the Rockies in wintertime. It hovered up there in place for a couple of hours before withering. One almost started looking for infamous “rotor cloud”, filled with severe turbulence. You can see this remarkable cloud for summer and the things it did, courtesy of the U of AZ time lapse film for yesterday, a real keeper! Still have that lenticular cloud over and downwind of Ms. Lemmon today. Interesting.6:23 AM. After a few drops, a little rainbow was seen off to the NW. Quite nice.7:56 AM. (Caution-long, sleep-inducing caption ahead. If you’re driving you’ll want to pull off the road.) Of concern after awhile is whether we might have a gloomy, but dry Seattle-type spring day, or maybe only light steady rains amounting to only a few hundredths or tenths as a disturbance moved toward us. Or, would that disturbance be potent enough to generate deep storms sans heating? For those who live here in the summer, we know that the sun is potent enough, even with dense clouds, especially ones that are NOT composed of ice crystals, to vaporize pretty heavy overcasts. This would be a good thing, because a little heating goes a long way when you have deep, and low based moisture as we had yesterday. Doesn’t have to get that hot. The clouds shown here are composed of droplets, not ice crystals, but, of course, I have just now insulted your Cloud Maven Junior cloud intelligence because you can see the sharpness and detail of the tiniest cloud features; they are not “blurry-looking as ice clouds would be, and more importantly there is no virga, a site that would mean there was ice inside the clouds, ice that would grow into major snowflakes, melt and fall out as rain. So, there is hope here in this sighting of droplet clouds, to continue this novella, for a “burn off” in spite of the heavy, and dark looking clouds because its early in the morning still and they probably have higher concentrations of droplets in them and that in turn cause more of the sun’s light to be reflected off’n the top, and that’s why they look so dark, a darkness that has been enhanced that bit by a little trick of photography called, “underexposing.” Oh, the cloud type? Stratocumulus stratiformis (the second descriptor because there’s so much of it.)
9:46 AM. Within only an hour or two, the thought of a heavily overcast all day could be jettisoned as the normal mid-morning to mid-day thinning occurred. But, now, would the storms be clustered enough to hit Catalina, or would they end up being too scattered as in the day before where big dumps missed us? It was, however, now in the bag, that huge clouds would rise up later in the day due to some heating. Note Ac lenticular slivers.1:47 PM. While doubts arose as the sky filled in again with dark, lackluster Cumulus and Stratocumulus clouds over Catalina, powerful storms were ripping across Tucson and points S leading one to believe that there was a chance these clouds would pile higher until reaching the ice-forming level in spite of moderate temperatures. Sure enough, one of the Great Moments in clouddom, is catching those first strands of rain/graupel that fall from such a cloud, as here. Really, its like seeing a marbled murrelet streaking in from the coast whilst in a redwood forest, its that rare (see Rare Bird, Marie Mudd Ruth, award winning author and friend who likes clouds a lot, in keeping with a “mud” theme here today. Remember, too, you only got a couple of minutes to catch this stage as the large drops and soft fall out at about 15-20 mph.1:59 PM. Moving rapidly westward, unloads west of Saddlebrooke. Worried here since it missed.2:00 PM. More rain and thunder appeared upwind on the Catalinas leading to renewed hope. In fact, the whole sky at this point seemed to be turning into one huge Cumulonimbus. It was great!
3:27 PM. An inch had fallen and it looked like we were going have a lake side property. Next time will get kayak out! Sometimes toads erupt from the earth when this happens, but I guess they like it darker than this.
4:01 PM. One of the prettiest sites after our major rains is this line of Stratus fractus clouds that cuddle up against Samaniego Ridge. Yesterday was no exception, and it was another memorable site of the day.
The weather ahead
Well, drying. Unfortunately we’re in for another long dry spell likely beginning after today. Hoping we can squeeze out one more day with rain this afternoon. Today’s storms will move from an unusual summertime direction from the south-southwest and southwest, so you;ll want to be watching toward the Tucson Mountains to Twin Peaks for stuff that might come in in the afternoon, more of a fall pattern as the winds are shifting aloft today to from the SW. The Catalinas get active with Cu and Cumulonimbus piling up by late morning, but they drift toward the north and not over us as they did yesterday, all this from the U of AZ model run from 11 PM AST last night.
