Haha, most readers won’t even notice! But maybe some cow-centric, instead of cloud-centric, folks will drop by, raising the worth of this blog to above $35 if sold….that according to a “biz” site.
Had a rainbow yesterday. Hope you noticed. It was pretty early and overhead west. I think the clouds did not have ice in them. The rain echoes were not showing up on the radar, suggesting the beam went over the tops. Sounding suggested tops might have been as cool as -5°C. In any case, the drops were able to tip the bucket a couple of more times, and along with yesterday afternoon’s brief, light rain showers our total has climbed to 0.37 inches for the storm. Not bad, though as in money, you always want more.
These storm breakup days are always our prettiest, and that’s often what this site is about, being pretty. Yesterday had some fabulous scenes; couldn’t stop shuttering cam. It is a real neurotic compulsive behavior pattern, as afflicts some of us cloud and storm-centric folk. Check Mr. Olbinsky’s work; his work goes beyond phenomenal whether you want a wedding photographer or want to see a storm chasing video. But it takes that kind of eccentric energy to be special, to stand out as he does.
Here, though, we let the storms and cloud scenes, such as they are, hope for the best, and let them come to us…. Kind of a lazy storm chaser’s attitude.
5:49 AM. I really do think this rain came out of clouds that had no ice…maybe 70% sure.6:27 AM. Stratus fractus springing to life as Cumulus clouds lining the sides of Sam Ridge (Samaniego). Showed how much instability, the ease of which the slightly warmer air in these clouds could jut upward yesterday6:49 AM. Just pretty and so green after the rain.6:50 AM. Same scene, focusing in on a highlight.7:01 AM. More prettiness in a highlighted baby turret.7:01 AM. In case you missed it, here it is again, a little zoomed.9:03 AM. Rise of the Cumulonimbus capillatus incus (has anvil). This scene had a lot of portent for the day. You knew more would be forming, maybe drift over us later.9:33 AM. I thought this was a pretty neat scene, though its just a cloud shadow lining up with the rise of the Catalina Mountains.9:36 AM. Hmmmm. What the HECK is happening now? Low center was off in the direction, headed for us, with still cooler air aloft. But where are the Cumulonimbus clouds that should come with it? (They formed rapidly, but later.)2:23 PM. By mid-afternoon, things were swell all around, lots of Cumulonimbus clouds. They seemed to fade, though, as they marched toward Catalinaland, as this complex did. The rather sharp line in the lower part of the photo, and beyond which you can see distant clouds, is where the melting level was. This is often appears to be the “cloud base” but its really not in the sense of having cloud droplets. If you were to fly in it, all you would see is rain and melting snow just below this line, and just snowflakes above it. If the whole sky was covered in this, we’d call it Nimbostratus, and say the base was at that melting level.3:42 PM. Another pretty major band appears to be headed this way, rotating around that low center, shifting northward. Didn’t make it.6:35 PM. Somewhat promising that a nice dark line and heavy shafts were out there, thinking they might shift northward again. Nope. Fizzled.
Still cold aloft, so having some nice Cumulus today is in the bag, the early Stratocumulus devolving into Cu, that is.
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.
Well, that cloud WAS “creeping” toward us after suddenly appearing on Pusch Ridge at dawn… Looky here:
7:14 AM. It thinks we’re not looking.7:25 AM. In only three minutes, a spurt toward Cartalina, hugging the mountains where its safe.7:44 AM. I wasn’t watching for awhile, and suddenly, there it was across from me!8:00 AM. By this time it was just sitting, pretending it was something innocuous, but I knew better.1:44 PM. By afternoon, it was gone… Or is it? You see, creepy Stratus fractus is afraid of the sun, twist and writhes in a death throe, evaporating right before your eyes when the sun comes out, or the weak light from the sun, as yesterday, warms the air up a little. Stratus fractus is truly cold blooded and only strong light will make it go away! The end. Below, some apropos music and commentary…
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With Halloween only 10 and half months away, I thought I would “get in the mood” and make up a little creepy-ness for the little kids who read this blog. Hi, kids! Hope you didn’t get too scared reading this. “Uncle Artie” is sorry if you did get scared.
What you saw in that sequence of Stratus fractus movement is also demonstrative of what often happens to smog layers funneling out of the Tucson area toward Mark Albright’s house in Continental Ranch, Marana. Here’s an example of creepy morning smog (smoke and other aerosol junk), partitioned to the lowest layers near the ground by a radiation inversion, a temperature reversal that develops at night that results in a temperature rise as you go up. In the afternoons, after the sun has done its work for awhile, the temperature DECLINES as you go up and the smog molecules are dispersed over greater and greater depths. Got it?
7:32 AM, December 2, 2013. Maybe you remember this morning. Smog stays down there until the sun comes up, and then slowly creepy-creeps toward Catalina and our foothills as the wind changes direction and comes toward us in the late morning and afternoon. Happens during stagnant weather patterns, not much going on. Fortunately, the heating by the sun disperses this goop into a greater depth so the smog seems less obtrusive, less visible, though its still there. BTW, the second arrow pretty much point’s to Mark’s winter home in Continental Ranch. Mark is a research meteorologist/climatologist at the University of Washington who got his feelings hurt when he corrected exaggerations of snowpack losses in the Cascade Mountains of the Pacific Northwest and people in his own department got mad at him for correcting those claims; happened back in 2005 or so. But, of course, it still goes on. Mark and his colleagues were proved right in the ensuing years of mountainous snows in the Cascades. Of course, a hundred years from now, well, that might be another story. Tune in later, maybe around 2050 to 2100. It is interesting that when me and Peter Hobbs was correcting cloud seeding claims found in the peer-reviewed literature, ones made by people in OTHER universities, the people in MY department loved me for doing so!
Now, where was I after that big caption….?
Oh, yeah, the weather on deck
Sunday marathoners, achtung!
Looking more like a dry day now on Marathon Day, Sunday, though a cold front will have gone by just before it starts. Looks like measurable precip will be partitioned to the north of Oracle on Sunday, but it will likely be cloudy with Stratocumulus clouds as the day starts, but those should gradually disperse into scattered to broken Cumulus clouds with virga by mid-day, some of those deeper Cu could produce a cold one; i. e., a sprinkle.
Jet core (at 500 mb, 18,000 feet or so) is well north of TUS as Sunday starts, and its really hard to get precip here until the core passes, which on Sunday will be later in the day. But then, the cold front has long gone, and the tendency for precip with the jet core has diminished (subsiding air behind the front is moving in then) to just scattered deeper Cumulus clouds having some ice-forming potential. Deeper clouds are stymied on the right side of the jet (looking downwind) overall in the Southwest in the wintertime by warmer air aloft and stable layers, the kind that produce lenticular clouds.
Below, what”m trying to say in words, is shown in this 500 mb forecast from IPS Meteostar with the wind velocities on it:
Winds at about 18,000 feet above sea level forecast for Sunday morning at 5 AM AST. No rain is also predicted by this latest WRF-GFS model run on Sunday in the TUS area.
Since this is an analysis from a model output, one inherently containing error, there is that inherent bit of uncertainty. So, you, as a weatherfolkperson, imagine what can go the best (the most rainful error), and the worst, and make outlier predictions. Potential rain here in Catalina on Sunday: max, a tenth (everything goes right); bottom, zero (or trace), in this case, as predicted by this model.
Way ahead
I will leave you with this. I think its looking more promising for storms later in the month. I think you’ll see what I mean:
Now THAT was a monsoon-like day yesterday, one right out of the western state of Kerala, India; the thick rain of mid-morning, seemingly thicker than most here, the clothes-gripping humidity outside, the strip of fog on the side of the western Ghats, oops, Catalina Mountains, the relatively gentle breezes in the rain, the subdued green hues under the overcast of light rain at the end of the unusual morning drencher, aspects that, en toto, made the morining seem so India-like to me (and I’ve been there in those Kerala rains). Take a look at our green state and State.
10:37 AM, after 0.76 inches of thick rain with occasional thunder. Nimbostratus up top, Stratus fractus along the Samaniego Ridge.10:53 AM. Looking toward Charoleau Gap.
In the Ghats, India, 1975, in case you didn’t believe that I have been in ACTUAL monsoon rains.
And while the rest of the day was sunny, humid and cool for us, the rain wasn’t over with another thunderbludgeoning last night after 9 PM that brought 0.25 inches and the day’s Catalina rain total to 1.02 inches. Drink up, desert!
We also had a nice Altocumulus lenticularis at sunset, suggesting some wind aloft. Seemed almost fall-like seeing this because they are more common with our winter troughs.
6:53 PM.
Another Big Day ahead
3 AM, Arizona obs. Several stations have dewpoints in the low 70s, with TUS reporting, along with light rain, a shockingly high dewpoint of 72 F, really extraordinary.
Get ready! A disturbance over southern California will help organize our storms into ones like those that occur in central Florida today, grouping them into large clusters, with some eye-popping rain amounts likely somewhere in the State (“eye-popping”, 3 plus inches). Don’t be too surprised if you hear about a “tube” somewhere as well. Tubes happen in conditions like these.
After today, its “mostly” dry through the end of September, with the best chance of rain on the 27th-28th.
