Stories from the field – Page 2

Best model output for you

Been looking around at quite a number of model runs (well 2, anyway) trying to find the best one for you. Here it is. Its yesterday’s WRF-GFS run that was based on 11 AM AST global data. Has some great rains for us here in Arizona. Those rains, and that incredible hurricane that saunters up the coast of Baja in about ten days, aren’t depicted as well in later model runs, so there’s not much point in showing them. If you want a great, OBJECTIVE forecasting, you know, go to Bob, or the NWS, or wait for Mike L’s detailed one from the U of AZ later this morning! You’re not going to find “objectivity” here when it comes to forecasting rain for a desert region¹. Let’s look at two examples of weather excitement in that now-obsolete-run-but-doesn’t-mean-it won’t-happen-anyway-just-because-its-a little-older-run”¹: 1) Lotta rain in Arizona (that’s a different near-hurricane over there in the SW corner of the map, one that in one model run from Canada, formerly went over Yuma! Sorry Yuma, and all of Arizona, both of which would have gotten, in that event, a bigger dent in the drought than shown below. Oh, well.

2014081818_CON_GFS_SFC_SLP_THK_PRECIP_WINDS_072 — Valid on Thursday at 11 AM AST. Green pixels denote those areas where the model thinks rain has occurred during the prior 6 hours. Most of AZ covered in green pixies! Sweet.

2) Fascinating near-hurricane just off San Diego on the 29th of August, likely surviving so well due to the California Niño mentioned here lately. BTW, this particular hurricane is predicted to be exceptionally large and intense out there when it revs up in a few days, maybe a Category 4 at its peak, looking at some of the model runs. “Let’s go surfin’ now, everybody’s learnin’ how….” The Beach Boys, 1962, sayin’ it like it was for us near-beach bums way back then when the summer hurricanes in the Mexican Pacific sent huge waves poleward on to our southern California beaches, as the one below will².

Valid in ten days. — Valid in ten days, Friday, August 29th at 11 AM AST. Near hurricane brings rain to San Diego. Colored regions now denote where the model thinks it has rained in the prior TWELVE hours (coarser resolution because its not going to be that accurate in the placement of highs and lows anyway, so why waste time over-calculating stuff?

Yesterday’s clouds

What an outstanding, if surprising day it was! After it appeared, in later model runs available late yesterday morning, that the late afternoon/evening bash from the high country wasn’t going to happen after all (producing local glumness), we had a remarkable in situ explosion of cloud tops. Those clouds just erupted from an innocuous, patchy group of Stratocumulus that invaded the sky around 5 PM. Still, even with the early turrets jutting up there, it didn’t seem possible, at 7 PM, there would be much more growth into showers, let alone, thunderstorms with frequent lightning lasting several hours that happened. Eventually rain even got into Sutherland Heights/Catalina, with 0.17 inches here, and 0.12 inches at the Golder Bridge, and that didn’t seem possible since the rain shafts were so locked onto the Catalinas, and east side for so long. Dan Saddle, about 5 mi S of Oracel, counting the mid-afternoon thunderstorms that locked in upthere, got a 2.68 inches over the past 24 h! That should have sent a little water down the CDO. BTW, a location in the Rincons is reporting 4.09 inches in the past 24!

5:50 AM. Day started with "colorful castellanus." Hope you saw this. — 5:50 AM. Day started with “colorful castellanus.” Hope you saw this.

Update ann DSC_0239 — 12:26 PM. After a late morning start, the Cumulus congestus tops were streaming away from the origin zone of Mt. Lemmon to over the north part of Saddlebrooke and the Charouleau Gap. No ice evident yet, but it was just about to show itself.
BTW, the “51ers” have a nice baseball team in Vegas (of course), this brought to my attention by neighbors recently, showing that a degree of strangeness permeates American life, as also shown in these blogs.

12:44 PM. Ice virga now seen in the right hand side falling out as I passed the budding wildlife overpass now being constructed on Oracle Road. I guess scents and signage will be used to direct wildlife to the overpass.

1:49 PM. Took about an hour more of rain and development for the thunder to start from these locked in turrets that kept springing on The Lemmon.

4:54 PM. Long before this, it was "all over', the rains no doubt up there had helped to put the fire out, so-to-speak, and with no anvils advancing toward us, there was even hardly any point to remain conscious. It is done. — 4:54 PM. Long before this, it was “all over’, the rains no doubt up there had helped to put the fire out, so-to-speak, and with no anvils advancing toward us, there was even hardly any point to remain conscious. It is finished.

6:54 PM. Shallow grouping of Stratocumulus provided a nice, if boring, backdrop to the setting sun's light on Samaniego Ridge. — 6:54 PM, 2 h later. Shallow grouping of Stratocumulus provided a nice, if boring, backdrop to the setting sun’s light on Samaniego Ridge.

7:04 PM. Only ten minutes later, and I'm out wondering around in the backyard looking for a nice sunset shot, when I see this shocking site, a protruding turret far above the other tops. Still, I pooh-poohed anything but a ragged collapse in the minutes ahead. It was too late in the day for heating or anything else to generate rain in situ from these lower clouds (now topping Mt. Lemmon). — 7:04 PM. Only ten minutes later, and I’m out wondering around in the backyard looking for a nice sunset shot, when I see this shocking sight for the time of day, a protruding turret far above the other tops. Still, I pooh-poohed anything happening but a ragged collapse in the minutes ahead. It was too late in the day for heating or anything else to generate rain in situ from these lower clouds (now topping Mt. Lemmon). Nice pastel colors, though.

7:32 PM. Though "pinkie" in the prior photo did fade, new turrets kept bubbling upward, and in disbelief, this one reached up beyond the ice-forming temperature threshhold (is probably topping out between 25-30 kft, not huge) and a strong rain shaft emerged on the Catalinas. After a little while longer, lightining began to flash to the east as the Reddington Pass area started to get hammered. Eventually in the early nighttime hours. these cells propagated to the west, giving us that bit of rain here in The Heights of Sutherland. How nice, and how mind-blowing this whole evening was! — 7:32 PM. Though “pinkie” in the prior photo did fade, new turrets kept bubbling upward, and in disbelief, this one reached up beyond the ice-forming temperature threshhold (is probably topping out between 25-30 kft, not huge) and a strong rain shaft emerged on the Catalinas. After a little while longer, lightining began to flash to the east as the Reddington Pass area started to get hammered. Eventually in the early nighttime hours. these cells propagated to the west, giving us that bit of rain here in The Heights of Sutherland. How nice, and how mind-blowing this whole evening was!

Today

Got some Stratocu (castellanus in some parts) topping Sam (Samaniego Ridge) this morning, an outstanding indication of a lot of moisture in the air, moisture that’s not just at the surface. U of AZ has thunderstorms moving toward Catalina during the late morning (!) and afternoon from the SW, not the usual direction we’re accustomed to. So, keep eyeball out toward Twin Peaks or so for exciting weather today! Oh, my, towering Cu top converted to ice, must be 25-30 kft up there right now at 7:06 AM! Also, notice nice shadow on lower Ac clouds.

The End

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¹“Truth-in-packaging” portion of web blog statement.

¹Its chaos in the models due to errors in them we don’t always know about, chaos that we try to get a handle on with plots from the NOAA spaghetti factory. But you know all that already, so my apologies for repeating myself again and again. I thought I would see what would happen if I put TWO “1” footnotes….

²Of course, in those days, we had little knowledge about how many hurricanes there were down there due to the lack of satellite data and ship reports. But when the “Weather Bureau”, as it was called in those days did know, there was always good surf on the south facing beaches, like Zuma Beach. So going to the beach, unlike now where wave forecasting is so good, was a real crap shoot. You’d come over that first viewpoint of the ocean on Malibu Canyon Road, on your way to Zuma. one that over looked the ocean a little offshore from Malibu, and either go, “Holy Crap!”, or hope for the best. It was a swell time for lightly employed youth. Below, the best “Holy Crap!” view coming around to that viewpoint, early September 1963 (never saw anything like it before or afterwards; swells were never visible so far offshore from this spot, meaning Zuma would be gigantic). Still remember those Zuma waves, so far out to sea, as the height of small telephones…

Nearly drowned that day at Zuma, me and my pal ignoring lifequard's advice not to go in. HELL, we'd been body surfing the biggest ones we could there for years by then. Fortunately, he didn't have to come and get me, which saved a lot of face. — Nearly drowned that day at Zuma, me and my pal ignoring lifequard’s advice not to go in. HELL, we’d been body surfing the biggest ones we could there for years by then. Fortunately, he didn’t have to come and get me, which saved a lot of face.

Encore of disappointment

Yesterday afternoon and evening were remarkably similar to the day before; great, spectacular banks of brilliant white turrets with black bases approached from the northeast filled with rainy portent, but, as with that previous day, disappointed. Once again, those clouds tended to fade some as they much beyond the Catalina Mountains, southwestward across Catalina, Saddlebrooke, and Oro Valley. Even the rainfall here in Sutherland Heights, 0.08 inches, was almost identical to the day before!

While there were many similarities, one had to be hopeful looking at those clouds as they spread across the valley. They many more Cumulus turrets above them compared with the prior day, had not faded completely to flat stratiform clouds riding an outflow wind. In fact, if you noticed, as they encountered the warmer air to the west of us, ramped up into major storms around I-10 and farther west. They are still going strong, now, a little before 4 AM, approaching Puerto Peñasco/Rocky Point! (This is a peak time of day for rain in the Colorado River Valley, oddly, spanning Yuma to Needles since many of our evening storms here continue on to that area during the night.)

Models still have lots of rain in our future as tropical storms whiz by in the Pacific west of Baja over the next 5-10 days (models have, not surprisingly, backed off direct Arizona hits for now¹). Still there’s plenty of time and water in the air to catch up on our normal summer rainfall. At 4.58 inches, we’re not terribly behind the six inches expected in July and August in Catalina, and with recent rains, the desert has rebounded in a satisfying green over the past couple of weeks.

From the afternoon of August 16th. Anyone for “cactus golf”?

Of course, it you were up early yesterday, you may have seen the lightning (LTG) to the south through southwest. We missed a nice complex of heavy rain that brought 1-2 inches in a couple of spots as it passed across Tucson and into the Avra Valley.

Your cloud day

6:32 AM. Miniature arcus cloud leads the way ahead of those heavy Tucson rains. At the leading edges, many of those clouds would be called, Altcoumulus castellanus, mid-level clouds with spires. But sometimes they cluster, as yesterday into clouds too large to be “Altocumulus” clouds, but rather Cumulonimbus ones with mid-level bases.

7:03 AM. Rain continues to move westward into Avra Valley and Marana. Note crepsucular rays shining down on Rancho Vistoso or someplace like that. There are quite a few “Vistosos” around it seems.

7:36 AM. I loved this little guy, all by itself of up there, trying to do the best it can to be something. Such a pretty scene if you can avoid the snail implication.

2:05 PM. Of course, the Cloud People like me always want to document "First Ice" of the day, and here it is in this sprout off the Catalinas. Can YOU see that critical aspect of our clouds in this shot, one not taken while driving, of course? — 2:05 PM. Of course, the “Cloud People” like me always want to document “First Ice” of the day in his/her cloud diaries, maybe mention it to neighbors later, and here is that moment for yesterday afternoon in this sprout off the Catalinas. Can YOU find that critical aspect of our clouds in this shot, one not taken while driving, of course? Remember, almost always in Arizona, clouds need ice to rain.

4:44 PM. As predicted in the U of AZ model, great banks of Cumulus and Cumulonimbus clouds roar down from the Mogollon Rim and other high terrain to the northeast of Catalina with the promise of a substantial rain. Looking N across Sutherland Heights and Saddlebrooke

5:36 PM. Incoming Cbs (Cumulonimbus clouds) getting really close, but cloud maven person forgets to look up and in a couple of minutes, giant drops are falling by the millions. Kinda reminded me of that time at the Mitchell, SD, airport in '72 when I was radar meteorologist on a project having four aircraft that were to be sent up to try to prevent hail by "overseeding" them with silver iodide. Well, it was midnight or so, and the radar can't look up, but rather out, at storms to send the planes toward, and the 1-inch hail stones started pummeling the airport from a cell that developed overhead, like that one yesterday afternoon did over Sutherland Heights! — 5:36 PM. Incoming Cbs (Cumulonimbus clouds) getting really close, but cloud maven person forgets to look up and in a couple of minutes, giant drops are falling by the millions. Kinda reminded me of that time at the Mitchell, SD, airport in ’72 when I was radar meteorologist on a project having four aircraft that were to be sent up to try to prevent hail by “overseeding” them with silver iodide². Well, it was midnight or so, the radar can’t look up, of course, but rather out, at storms to send the planes toward. Well, the 1-inch diameter hail stones started pummeling the airport from a cell that developed overhead, like that one yesterday afternoon did over Sutherland Heights!

5:41 PM. Surprise! Extra big drops, too, for a brief time, and 0.06 inches. It was so fantastic! — 5:41 PM. Surprise! Extra big drops, too, for a brief time, and 0.06 inches. It was so fantastic, as unexpected rain always is!

6:02 PM. Its looking "oretty good" here, a couple of expansive, solid dark bases. But, there are also those "weak" updraft updraft areas denoted by broken light and dark areas. — 6:02 PM. Its looking “OK”, better than the day before here, with a couple of larger, solid dark bases. But, there are also those “weak” updraft updraft areas denoted by broken light and dark areas. Nice lightning on the left; lighting on the right.

6:37 PM. While one of those bases unloaded with a few cloud-to- ground LTG strikes over there by the Palmer in Sutherland Valley, the base to the north of us just could not work its way S, and unloaded — 6:37 PM. While one of those bases unloaded with a few cloud-to- ground LTG strikes over there by the old Golder Ranch in Sutherland Valle. The bases to the north of us just could not work thier way S, and pretty much remained in place, unloading on Charouleau Gap

6:49 PM. Hopes for a substantial rain fading fast as the cloud base this side of the Charouleau Gap rain area began to look chaotic. The rain that's falling there needs to be replenished by new turrets that convert to ice, and if that's not happening, then the rain just falls out and the storm ends. Here, that rainy area was just not replenished by building turrets, and so got lighter and lighter until it faded away. — 6:49 PM. Hopes for a substantial rain fading fast as the cloud base this side of the Charouleau Gap rain area and estedning overhead of Sutherland Heights began to look chaotic, not firm and smooth. The rain that’s falling on the Gap needs to be replenished by new turrets that convert to ice, and if that’s not happening, then the rain just falls out and the storm ends. Here, that rainy area was just not being replenished by building turrets adjacent to it, and so it got lighter and lighter until it faded away. Also, the rain shafts never had that black, straight sided look that goes with strong convection.

7:03 PM. Rosy glow at sunset...yet another great name for a western singer! But, getting back on task, notice the rain shafts and how wispy they are, with sloping rain. That indicates the tops aren't too high, the updrafts weak, and the clouds probably just barely made it to the ice-forming level. — 7:03 PM. “Rosy glow” at sunset…yet another great name for a western singer! Where do these come from? But, getting back on task, notice the rain shafts and how wispy they are, with sloping rain. That indicates the tops aren’t too high, the updrafts weak, and the clouds probably just barely made it to the ice-forming level.

U of AZ mod run from last evening’s 11 PM AST data indicates a day today like the past two: coupla small Cumulonimbus clouds on the Cat Mountains by mid-afternoon, then a line of big storms again sweep down from the higher mountains to the NE in the evening. Maybe today we’ll get that big rain finally. If nothing else, the skies will be spectacular and dramatic again.

The End.

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¹A peak just now at the 11 PM WRF-GFS run shows that the unusually strong tropical storm not so far offshore from San Diego has been resuscitated. Go here to see this exciting storm and all the rain we’re supposed be getting over the next two weeks. Getting pretty worked up about it again.
²Does seeding to reduce hail work? The evidence is mixed, and is not convincing to national panels or the American Meteorological Society. Still, that type of cloud seeding is carried out in many locations in the Canadian and US grain belts.

One of the greatest Seattle days in the history of Catalina, Arizona

Yesterday, that is. It felt like I never left. Only 49 F here; was 55 F in Seattle yesterday.

But the main thing that made it seem “so Seattle” was the persistent low Stratocumulus overcast, almost no sun whatsoever, and a little rain. We picked up another 0.03 inches in a couple of morning episodes of R– (an old weather texting¹ shorthand for “very light rain”) to bring the storm total here to 0.55 inches. Of course, the best part of that overcast was that it allowed the ground to be damp for another day, helping the spring grasses and wildflowers by keeping the soil moisture in the soil and not flying away under a hot sun. The worst part of the overcast that lasted almost all day, was that Mr. Cloud Maven person had the day completely wrong–thought it would break open in the afternoon to “partly cloudy” and so he was as gloomy as the sky. You see, as a weather forecaster, you can’t even really enjoy a nice day if you didn’t predict it. Had some sad 75 F days in Seattle when I only predicted 69 F; everybody having summer fun but me.

Enough nostalgia, here are the clouds, even if you have no interest in seeing such boring clouds again:

6:56 AM. Interesting little punctuated lenticular. Mr. CMP has finsihed his blog and thinks the sky will break open in the afternoon. Hah! — 6:56 AM. Interesting little punctuated lenticular. Mr. “CMP” has just finished his long blog and thinks the sky will break open in the afternoon. Hah!

8:00 AM. Stratocumulus tops Samaniego Ridge--with the turrets, you might lean toward adding the descriptor, "castellanus." Note blue sky here, if you didn't see any at all yesterday. — 8:00 AM. Stratocumulus tops Samaniego Ridge–with the turrets, you might lean toward adding the descriptor, “castellanus.” Note blue sky here, if you didn’t see any at all yesterday. No precip evident.

8:02 AM. Looking north toward S-Brooke. Fine shafts of precip emit from Stratocumulus clouds indicating those regions in the cloud where there was more liquid water at one time, where these clouds are humped up like those Sc clouds on Samaniego Ridge. But, was the precip due to ice or the colliding drops process? I wasn't sure at this point. You see, after a storm, the clouds can be real clean, almost oceanic-like meaning they have LOW droplet concentrations, and when the droplet concentrations are low, the drops are usually larger and can get to sizes where they stick together when they collide (think 30-40 micron diameters). You probably have a clue about that size, but it sounds great if you see this and tell a neighbor that, "those clouds might have drops larger than 30-40 micron near cloud tops." Instant expert! — 8:02 AM. Looking north toward S-Brooke. Fine shafts of precip emit from Stratocumulus clouds indicating those regions in the cloud where there was more liquid water at one time, that is, where these clouds are humped up like those Sc clouds on Samaniego Ridge in the prior photo (the precip from those clouds may have been out of sight). But, was the precip shown here due to ice or the colliding drops process? I wasn’t sure at this point. You see, after a storm, the clouds can be real clean, almost oceanic-like meaning they have LOW droplet concentrations, and when the droplet concentrations are low, the drops are usually larger and can get to sizes where they can stick together when they collide (think 30-40 micron droplet diameters). You probably don’t have a clue about those sizes, but it sounds great if you see rain like this and tell a neighbor that, “those clouds might have drops larger than 30-40 microns in diameter near cloud tops.” Instant neighborhood expert!

8:06 AM. Then the clouds to the west of Oro Valley and Catalina began to produce fine precipitation, definitely looking like a true drizzle event (caused by colliding drop rain formation process), at least to me at this point. This is a rare event when very light rain or true misty drizzle (tiny drops, close together) occurs in Arizona. Usually our clouds have too many droplets from natural and anthropogenic sources and the cloud droplets stay too small to collide and stick together, instead bumping around like marbles with all the surface tension they got. — 8:06 AM. Then the clouds to the west of Oro Valley and Catalina began to produce fine precipitation and advance on Catalina. How nice. Definitely was looking like a true drizzle event (caused by colliding drop rain formation process), at least to me at this point. That process is a rare event in AZ when very light rain or true misty drizzle (tiny drops, close together) forms like that. Usually our clouds have too many droplets from natural and anthropogenic sources and the cloud droplets stay too small to collide and stick together, instead bumping around like marbles with all the surface tension they got. And then because they’re all tiny, they don’t have much impact when they hit, there’s not a lot of velocity difference like there would be in a cloud with a broad droplet spectrum, the kind of spectrum we see in “clean” clouds where drops bigger than 30 microns are a plenty. Note trails of precip coming down in center. BTW, to go way off topic, to distract from how bad my forecast was, in “hygroscopic” seeding, particles like salt are introduced at cloud base to encourage the formation of rain through this process in polluted Cumulus clouds. Worked in Saudi, based out of Riyadh, winter of 2006-07, flying in a Lear jet, helping to select Cu for random seeding using that methodology². Our office at the government met building, I recall, was cleaned by the “Bin Laden” group. Hmmmm. Maybe its a common name there, to go even farther off topic.

10:09 AM. So Seattle! (Have to make up for that last bloated caption.)

4:49 PM. And that's your entire day. — 4:49 PM. And that’s your entire day.

6:27 PM. Sunset tried to do something. But, like the day, it was like that sugar icing on a stale cinnamon roll, just didn't quite make it, though cinnamon rolls are quite good as a rule. — 6:27 PM. Sunset tried to do something. But, like the day, it was like that sugar icing on a stale dried out cinnamon roll, just didn’t quite make it, though cinnamon rolls are quite good as a rule.

Today’s clouds

Some residual small Cumulus, maybe clumping into a larger group this morning for a bit, which you would then refer to as Stratocumulus. Should gradually diminish in size and coverage until almost completely clear in the afternoon. Expect a north wind in the afternoon, too.

The weather ahead

There isn’t any, well, not right away, but WAY ahead….

Chances for rain begin to pick up after the 19th as we enter the “zone of curl”, “cyclonic curls” in the upper atmosphere with a lot of “vorticity” in them again, with temperatures falling back to normal values. Pretty tough to have warm weather for long at this time of year in AZ. You see, its troughs like to “nest in the West” in March, April, and May, even when they’re not strong and far enough south to bring rain, maybe only wind. Its a climo thing, and it causes many areas of the West to see an increase in precipitation in March from February, and also halts the rapid rise in spring temperatures (especially in Seattle, hahahaha, sort of).

This because the global circulation pattern, responding to the climb of the sun in the sky and warming continents in the northern hemisphere, those forces acting on the position of the jet stream, and weakening it here in the NH (northern hemisphere), is changing the jet stream pattern so that storms begin to move southeastward from the north Pacific across the Pac NW into the Great Basin area in the spring, bringing cold north Pacific air into the West. There was a great report about this phenomenon by old man Bjerknes out of UCLA with his Ph. D. grad student, Chuck Pyke, back in the mid-1960s. Pyke was a UCLA sports nut, BTW, to add some color to this account.

We won’t see that “trough in the West” pattern for awhile here in our “oasis of warmth” now about to begin, but count on it returning, as it appears to do late in the model runs from last night. Climo is forcing it.

The End, except for footnotes.

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¹Yeah, that’s right. Weathermen, as we would say it then, were way ahead of their time, “texting” each other long before kids thought of “texting.” You might write a weather friend, if you could find one: “We had a TSTM to the S with FQTLTGCCCG ALQDS last night for a few H. MVD N.” PIREPS, SIGMETS, too, were all “texted” and texted by teletype! Tell your kids.

²Was under the aegis of Research Applications Program (RAP) at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, CO. Money was good…though not nearly as much as you would make as a TEEVEE weather presenter (hahaha). I was a post retiree guest scientist for RAP NCAR. Clouds could be real bumpy there in Saudi, thought I was gonna die once as bottom dropped out of the Lear going into Cumulonimbus at night that one time. Pilot liked to cut it close between the hail shafts and the rising parts of the Cu with little or no precip, using his aircraft radar. But sometimes, it was a little too close…and we got into the shear zone between a strong updraft and the downdraft.

Seeing red

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.

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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 Internation AP at Meenambakkam, India — 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.

End of footnote I think….

Climate kerfluffle reprised in southern hemisphere

With no rain in sight, and only modest temperature fluctuations ahead, some reading material is presented to you today with commentary today, a “soapbox day.”

Cloud photos from yesterday are at the bottom if you want to skip to that and avoid thinking about things because its too early in the morning to get riled up.

I will start with an opinion piece concerning climate change and climate science from Australia. It also mentions a recent event in the climo community concerning a Southern Hemisphere temperature reconstruction and the apparent rejection of what would have been an important paper by the peer-reviewed journal it was submitted to after crucial errors were found by an outsider/reviewer. The author of this opinion article also mentions “climategate” a chapter of science that had a profound effect on this writer. Now there are polemical aspects, not all of which this writer would agree with, still, its worth reading:

Speak Loudy and Carry a Busted Hockey Stick

The link to this article was circulated to our Atmos Sci Dept by one of my best friends, and really a science hero to me, Mark Albright, the former Washington State climatologist. Mark was a mild-mannered researcher lurking in the background at the U of WA for many years until he got upset over what he (later joined by two allies there) was to show were vastly exaggerated journal-published and media accounts of snowpack losses due to GW in his own backyard, in the Cascade Mountains of Washington and Oregon. Mark felt science had been corrupted by dogma, perhaps the pursuit of funding; he has not been the same since. Believe me, I know what he has been through.

A retired distinguished professor at the U of WA Atmospheric Sciences Department circulated a counter articleto the one that Mark circulated, also worth reading for the “other side.” It appears below, along with that professor’s note about the article Mark circulated. I felt this note by the professor should be included, too:

“Worth reading is this article by a Reagan/Bush Science board appointee. It demonstrates objective science versus the Australian article which is full of vituperation, accusations without substance, slander, and very little science.”
.
http://www.desmogblog.com/2012/11/15/why-climate-deniers-have-no-credibility-science-one-pie-chart

In the headline of this second article, the word “denier” is used in its title as a pejorative, mass label for those who question some of the global warming publicity stunts (assigning particular storms like Sandy to GW) down to results published in peer-reviewed journals, such as reports of exaggerated snowpack losses. Not good, and that headline tells you where that article is headed: criticism is not to be tolerated. But it also shows that the majority of science being published on climate change supports the finding that a warmer earth is ahead. But there is a reason for that; its being pushed by the monumental amounts of money being poured into that climate research domain.

There are many of us out there that do believe that funding is pushing the research on global warming in one direction in this job-poor era we’re now in, just as it did, and still does, in the cloud seeding domain: no one ever got a job saying cloud seeding doesn’t work. In my own career–yes, Mr. Cloud Maven person had a professional research one, and one spiced with controversy¹ over several decades–the opinion article from Australia rings true in many aspects about how science works and what influences a preponderance of “conclusions” that get published in journals.

In the climate funding domain, don’t look for more funds if you conclude a million dollar study by indicating that you didn’t find any sign of warming over the past 30 years, as is the actual case in the Pacific Northwest. NO ONE is going to touch that hot potato and serve a finding like that up to a climate journal. Its not gonna fly. It makes explaining global warming difficult. And as Homer Simpson advises, “If something’s hard to do, its not worth doing.”

But at the same time, a counter finding to global warming presents to those of us who try to be truly ideal, disinterested scientists, a fabulous opportunity to look into something that is not immediately explicable. As scientists, we should live for opportunities like this!

But will it happen, will some brave soul at the University of Washington or elsewhere delve into this counter trend and try to explain why its happened in a journal article? Its hoped so.

But those of us, still on the GW bandwagon, if grudgingly so due to the actions of some of our peers, know that regional effects of GW are dicey. Some areas will warm up more than others; cooling is possible if the jet stream ridges and troughs like to hang out in different positions than they do today. And of course, if we smog up the planet too much, all bets on warming up much are off since clouds act to cool the planet, and pollution makes clouds last longer, especially over the oceans where pollution can interfere with drizzle production, which helps dissolve shallow clouds, and pollution causes more sunlight to be reflected back into space. The cloud effects are being more carefully, precisely evaluated in our better computer models.

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It is ironic, too, that the second article, the one passed along by the professor, ends with the mention of plate tectonics “as the ruling paradigm of science” as it is.

But, some word about how that paradigm came about; it was a “long and winding road.”

Alfred Wegener, a meteorologist, first proposed the theory of continental drift/plate tectonics around the turn of the century. A nice account of this science chapter about origin of the theory of plate tectonics is found in the book, Betrayers of the Truth, by then NYT science writers, Nicholas Wade and William J. Broad.

Because Alfred Wegener was a meteorologist, however, and NOT a geographer, namely was an outsider to the official science community studying the continents and how they got that way, his ideas were laughed at, not taken seriously for more than 40 years! Only in the 1960s was the idea of plate tectonics accepted.

I mention this tectonic chapter of science because there is a similar chapter that reappears constantly now in the climate debates. Several of the strongest critics of GW results, critics that have delved deeply behind the scenes into published findings of climate change in a scientific manner, much as this writer did concerning cloud seeding experiments in the 1970s-1990s, are criticized for being “outside of the group”, just Alfred Wegner was in his day rather than those “in the group” considering and acting on whether the findings of outsiders are valid.

Fortunately, this is beginning to change because, guess what? Outsiders have found some pretty important stuff that HAD to be addressed in spite of the desires of some idealogues out there pretending to be objective, disinterested scientists. Science as a whole, still works.

A cloud note: Alfred Wegner is also known for proposing the idea that ice crystals in the presence of supercoooled water (a common event in the atmosphere) grow and fallout, leading to precipitation at the ground, known as the Wegner-Bergeron-Findeisen mechanism. Every 101 meteorology textbook points this out.

The last photo below is a demonstration of that effect; those sunset supercooled Altocumulus shedding a few ice crystals that grew within them.

Yesterday’s clouds

SONY DSC — 7:33 AM Cirrus fibratus radiatus. Sometimes perspective makes banding look like its converging or radiating. I estimated that this was not the case here.

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¹Some examples of the controversy the writer has been involved with:

“We don’t hate you but we don’t love you, either.”

This quote from a leading US cloud seeding scientist to the writer at an American Meteorological Society conference on cloud seeding and statistics after his cloud seeding experiments had been reanalyzed by the writer.

“I want you to leave my office and don’t come back. Just do your own thing.”

This quote from THE leading cloud seeding scientist of the day when I went to his country to see for myself the clouds he was describing in peer-reviewed journal articles, descriptions that I had doubts about. His descriptions were later shown to be far from reality.

And, from an outside observer, and well-known cloud researcher at the National Center for Atmos. Research in Boulder, a comment to the writer when he visited the University of Washington:

“I think the (cloud seeding) community sees you as a ‘gadfly’.”

From the Oxford Concise Dictionary, “gadfly”:

“A cattle-biting fly; an irritating, harassing person.”

Q. E. D.

El Nino may be in the works for next winter; stories from the field

Here you can read the latest statement from the Climate Prediction Center on the neutral conditions that have developed in the eastern Pacific Ocean–La Nina is gone–and what it sees for next winter from their computer models. While things are not clear because they are so difficult to foretell, they are talkin’ El Nino some. As we know, the Southwest can benefit tremendously in rainfall when an El Nino develops, and so it is uplifting news to hear ANYTHING about an El Nino in the future and I though you would want to read that, too. Here you can see the last few weeks of global ocean temperature anomalies and how they are changing.

Why talk about next winter now? We should always be looking ahead in life, planning retirement, vacations, what football games to attend next fall, the important things in life; besides, there are no clouds to talk about, only hot air currents, maybe a dust devil, so I need some filler material. Remember when newspapers used filler material to make columns come out even, add some little fact? Those were great.

Too, I may have to dredge up some “stories from the field” to fill in the boring gaps in weather we have today, like that time they almost rolled over our VW microbus on that big boulevard in Madras (now Chennai), India, in August 1975. That big boulevard was reserved that day for the funeral parade of freedom fighter, Kamaraj, (against the British) with Indira Ghandi leading it. We should not have driven on it. Hundreds of thousands of people lined that boulevard for miles that afternoon! You would not have believed that scene!

The crowd. What I look like when I am in India (on the right)

I am still white-knuckled thinking about our knuckle-headed project leader who thought it was going to be OK to drive on that funeral route so we would get back to the hotel faster. He ordered our driver to go onto that boulevard, and then told him to, “just wave at the police”, guarding the route as we drove down it. We were returning from the Madras airport at Meenambakkam where we had been on standby to seed some clouds if they developed over a nearby reservoir catchment area. We were the only vehicle on that boulevard as the people waited for the official parade.

But then some of the crowd, maybe just a dozen or so, took exception to our driving down that boulevard and rushed our microbus. Our driver, sped up and slowed down in spurts, swerving left and right as well trying to shake people off his van. And the ones trying to climb on it did fall off, thank god, but fortunately no one was injured (or run over!)

In another bit of luck, the windows of that microbus were completely opaque due to heavy condensation on the inner surface of the windows, and so the crowds could not see that it was three Anglos in the back of that damn bus violating that boulevard. Heart pounding now as I relive that drive.

A bit farther, the driver somehow found a side street among the crowd and drove ever so gradually through all of those people lining the boulevard and finally onto the side street he knew was there.

That was an awful thing to have done and still regret being a party to it. But, somehow, too, my life was spared so I could write this blog in Catalina, AZ. Interesting. It better be good!

The latest map below (May 9th conditions) shows that the “warms” have it overall in the global oceans, and what’s important for us is that the cooler-than-normal water in the eastern half of the Pacific along the Equator (representing La Nina conditions) has dissipated.

For comparison, shown this map for May 9th is one for February 1st conditions when our La Nina was holding forth. Note the below normal temperatures along the Equator westward from South America across the Dateline on that map, and then look to the new one.

So there are no strong forcing factors at present to alter our climate from “normal.” Still means that the weather machine will continue doing its thing, hot, cold, rainy, extremes, etc., but there won’t be a dominant pattern, the kind that leads to a greater chance of drought in the Southwest and southern states as La Nina’s tend to do in late winter and spring. Yay! Summers don’t seem to be much affected by either of these conditions.

The Big One, that giant trough, is still on the way for implantation in the West, but only wind projected here

Dang. No rain. Likely we’ll hear about low temperature records in parts of California, Nevada, the Pac NW, extreme winds at various places, and hot and windy conditions here and in the Plains States. Very little rain is projected out there as well, at least in the early going of this enormous trough and low system. Starts affecting us on Wednesday; the TEEVEE weather presenters will be all over this one!

Yesterday’s awful Cumulus clouds; better ones today!

From the University of WY Cowpokes, this awful sounding from yesterday afternoon at Tucson. Where the two lines first pinch together, around the “500” label, is where the Cumulus cloud bases were yesterday afternoon (marked by the oval)! To see why those Cumulus were awful ones with too much ice, check the temperature lines, the ones that slope upward to the right with the labels on the bottom, “0”, -10, -20, etc. Yep, that’s right, the bottoms of those clouds were at 500 mb, and -20 C! The Weather Cowboy sounding algorithm, the one that produces all the numbers in the column at right, thinks the bottoms of Cumulus clouds were even HIGHER, at 428 mb and nearly at -30 C (that “LCLP” number)!

So, the awful looking, dried out, Cumulus clouds have been explained.

Too high, too cold, too much ice. Reminded me of the old days in Durango, Colorado, in the early 1970s. Charming town, but awful place if you wanted to see Cumulus clouds without much ice. Too high, too cold, and too much ice there, too.

What’s wrong with too much ice?

Too many ice crystals completing for itty bitty amounts of “condensate” (yes, Virginia, even at those temperatures, cloud begin as liquid droplets). But when they are so cold to begin with, so many of the droplets freeze, that they all try to take the water from the ones that haven’t frozen (cause them to evaporate, the water molecules rushing to the nearest ice spec.

So when nearly ALL the droplets freeze, the ice crystals are all itty bitty as well, and can’t fall out, even though individually they may have a bit more mass in them than the droplets. They just float up there and gradually die.

Stories from the field interlude

OK, gotta get this out… In the domain of cloud seeding, where ice-forming nucleants are put into clouds, the phenomenon of having too many ice crystals would be called, “over-seeding”. Believe it or not, deliberately “overseeding” clouds to make them look like the ones we had yesterday, and so that they wouldn’t rain has been tried!

Yikes. Why?

The Coors Brewing Company, in the early 1970s, did not want their hops in the San Luis Valley of southern Colorada (around Alamosa) spoiled by having rain fall on them at the wrong time. The program was ended when alfalfa farmers in the same area, ones that WANTED RAIN, terminated the program prematurely with sticks of dynamite; they blew up the seeding contractor’s radar, used to direct aircraft into the clouds to seed them. Mr. Cloud-maven person, the writer, was working in Durango in those days, on the other side of the mountains from Alamosa, on a scientific cloud seeding project (a randomized one) to see if seeding could cause more snow to fall from winter storms, so he was close to the “action.”

Yes, everyone gets excited about clouds and weather, especially alfalfa farmers! Its so great.

Below a few shots of yesterday’s small, ice-ed out Cumulus.

DSCN1690 — The haze below this little Cumulus fractus cloud is due to ice having formed in it! Bad news from the get go if you're hoping for virga and rain later in the day.

DSCN1713 — Merely a Cumulus humilis, center, and having a bit of puffery. But its mostly ice. Quite awful-looking, really.

About today’s “better” clouds

Overnight there was an invasion of air from the east carrying increased lower level humidity. How cold will the bases be today after yesterday’s -20 C or so? Around 0 C our TUS morning sounding suggests. While that’s still cold, it should mean rain to the ground here and there in the fatter Cumulonimbus clouds that will be around even though they will be dominated by ice again. With these higher base temperatures, it means more water condensing in the clouds BEFORE ice forms. When that happens, you are likely today to get “graupel” forming in areas of the clouds where the condensation is greatest, and the ice just beginning to form. “Graupel” or soft hail, falls rapidly compared to ice crystals and aggregates of ice crystals (i.e., “snowflakes” to get away from jargon) and those graupel up there are likely to be what MAINLY gets to the ground today, melted of course, into raindrops. This because the “free air” freezing level is about 7,000 feet above us here in Catalina (3,000 feet elevation). Should be a fun day, reminding us of out upcoming summer rain season.

And, what do we think about when we think about graupel/soft hail forming in the clouds overhead?

Electricity, lightning! Yes, these clouds will be getting “plugged in”, so to speak, this afternoon here and there. Be watchful.

DSCN1691 — Nice display of Cirrus uncinus in the late morning as Cu began to form.

BTW, if you want a really expert discussion for today, go to Bob’s page here. (He may weigh in on this later…) And, of course, our NWS here. They seem to be getting pretty worked up and excited about today’s weather and all the wind that might blow out of our afternoon thunderstorms.

BTW, nice flowers out there in the desert now days; this on our “Arizona rose” (took about nine attempts to upload this! Bad WP!)

The End.

Stories from the field; yesterday’s clouds

While waiting for the next big thing, that big Cal storm on the 12th, one that buzzes AZ with a chance of rain a day or two later, but one that will certainly dredge up dust here (you might say that an occurrence of dust is “in the bag” with it, as it should be with this one), I will occasionally devolve into a “Stories from the Field” essay. These will involve strange, humorous, or interesting things that happened in field projects. So, here we go. You may or may not be too interested in these. If not, skip to next section about clouds well below here.

In 1972, I was loaned out in one summer from my main job in Durango, CO, one with a randomized cloud seeding experiment. I worked for a State of South Dakota cloud seeding project. That SD project, operating from May through August, was run under the aegis of the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in Rapid City.

As a baseball player, one that continued playing long after his years of HS and JC ball, I played ball games there in Mitchell, SD, where I was stationed at a radar. I played for the newly formed, Commercial Bank baseball team. When the forecast was for no threatening weather near Mitchell, I was able to leave the radar and join my team for a game. It was the best of all possible scenarios since the games were likely to be rained out when I had to work at the radar.

Threatening weather might require launching one or more of our four Piper Twin Commanches, ones loaded with cloud seeding flares, at our Mitchell Airport site to go up and do some seeding. I was one of the several “radar meteorologists” scattered around the State that year that were charged with launching and directing aircraft around Cumulonimbus clouds that were deemed targets for seeding. Never mind what that was right now; I haven’t finished my baseball story…

One late afternoon, I was playing for the Commerical Bank team against the Woonsocket, SD, team (I did NOT make that town name up!) The “pretty good” Rich Linke was pitching for Woonsocket. It was a good, well-played game; close right to the end.

However, the forecast for “no weather” that afternoon of the game was going bad. I did not have a cell phone yet in 1972, and there was no way to reach me in Woonsocket where I was catching for that Mitchell team that afternoon.

Instead, one of our pilots, who also had a sense of humor, had an innovative thought: He (Bud Youngren) would buzz the diamond at tree top level to let me know our cloud seeding planes had been launched to go out to some hail storm farther west.

So, unbeknownst (is that still a word?) to anyone, and with a Woonsocket runner on third in the bottom of the 8th inning, and the game tied at 2-2, our Twin Commanche ROARS over the field at tree top level! You could see the rivets on that plane!

It was VERY exciting! Stunning! Jaw dropping! An incredible sight! Everyone was amazed!

The punchline. We lost the game, 3-2.

The Woonsocket runner on third base, taking note of the distraction caused by the treetop buzz and remaining calm himself apparently, scored what proved to be the winning run in the bottom of the 8th as we all looked to the sky marveling at what had just happened!

But I knew what it meant by the type of aircraft going overhead. I had to leave the game immediately to go back to the Mitchell radar I manned.

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That year, 1972, of the statewide cloud seeding project, was also the year of the devastating Rapid City flash flood that June in which up to 14 inches of rain fell in a six hour period or so. More than 220 people were killed in the ensuing flood. Up in an aircraft seeding that storm with salt (called “hygroscopic seeding”) was a School of Mines scientist, Kumud B., a genial, gentle man always with a smile. Kumud, who left the SD School of Mines later, was my officemate in a lab at the University of Washington’s Cloud and Aerosol Group for many years when I joined that group in 1976.

BTW, that type of cloud seeding, “hygroscopic”, was absolved of having any measurable effect on that devastating flash flood in the bitter lawsuits that followed¹. But with such a gentle man, we practiced a form of gallows humor, “Man, I can’t believe how many people you killed!” Only with someone you, in a sense, love, can you tease like that.

However, it was an awful “joke” in retronspect, something I am guilty of from time to time, but Kumud always smiled at it. In truth, the type of seeding he was doing would NEVER have had much if any effect on such a potent storm that Nature had thrown together that day; it was organized by a potent upper level feature combined with strong, moist winds from the SE over the whole State that day, elements far beyond the control of humans or seeding. However, a seeding plane (not mine!) should never have been near it; it had been kind of a forecast bust in itself by the lead Rapid City forecaster that day.

Below, in memoriam, Kumud B., who killed all those people in 1972. (Hey, I didn’t say I wouldn’t stop kidding him. I am sure he is smiling upward from wherever he is. “I loved you, man!”)

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Yesterday’s clouds

Hmmm, kind of a sidelight now after all the above. All high clouds yesterday, Cirrocumulus (Cc) once in a while, Cirrostratus fibratus (Cs fib) at one time, and some distant lenticular clouds, Ac or Cc ones. Too far away to tell. Here are a couple of shots. In general, these kinds of clouds just tell you that there is widespread lifting going on as when a “trough” approaches; ahead of a trough (to the east) the air tends to rise gradually. If the layer (s) being lifted are patchy in moisture, or the lifting is uneven or both, you get patchy clouds. Does precip necessarily follow? Almost always in Seattle in a few hours, but here, nah.

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¹It is often the case that when people or property are injured/damaged in cloud seeding operations, that the purveyors of cloud seeding claim it had little to do with that damage or the injuries and deaths. It is only when there is no damage or deaths that cloud seeding is effective. (hahaha, a little sarcasm there.)