Sunsets – Page 12 – Cloud-maven

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.

Future weather has a lot of AZ rain, but its more uncertain using US models

Here’s is the latest model run from our USA WRF-GFS (aka, “goofus”, as the Europeans might call it, looking down their noses at our inferior weather predicting model compared with their “ECMWF” model as described (here) in the November 9th issue of Science.

It was an upsetting read, BTW. Seems the Euros use bigger, faster computers than we do, ones that they were able to afford by charging a lot of money to see the results. Very bad.

In case you want the meat of that Science article: “From the BEGINNING (this writer’s emphasis) ECMWF has been the world champ in medium range forecasting. Today ECMWF forecasts remain useful into the next week, out to 8.5 days. That leaves the rest of the forecasting world, inculding the U. S. National Weather Service with its less powerful computer, in the dust by a day or more.”

What have our guys (includes women) been doing all these years? (Just kidding, maybe.)

OK, onward with what we have to work with…..

This WRF-GFS run is just from last nights 11 PM global data crunch, the VERY latest as of this writing. I picked it out from earlier runs to show because this run latest has a lot of rain in Arizona. Namely, it was a subjective call to display a few snapshots from it. Displaying the results of this run has nothing to do with scientific objectivity. Enjoy; it might not be real rain that falls to the ground, only real in the model’s calculations. Still, its great to see and think about.

Instead of showing the full size of these model outputs as I normally would do, I thought I would size them in proportion to their credibility based on the Science article. We can’t see the better ECMWF-British model results unless we pay a lot of money, so this will have to do. Unless you click on these below, you’ll have to use a microscope…

0001xz — Valid for November 29th, 11 PM AST, only 264 hours away!

0001MY — Valid for 11 AM AST, November 30th, 12 h later

0001QK — Valid for 11 PM AST, November 30th–off and on rains now for TWENTY-FOUR hours!

0001yK — Valid for 11 AM AST, December 1st. Still raining around here.

0001LI — Valid for 11 PM AST, December 1st. Rain still falling in the 12 h ending at this time.

So, once again, our late November-early December storm has returned to the model fold. Its been coming and going. For example, the 5 PM AST global model run had NO RAIN in AZ, so I didn’t want to show those results.

But just ahead….this

In the nearer future….. Seems the Environment Canada computer model, built around the SUPERIOR ECMWF model, has rain here in about 48 h from now resulting from a tiny, weak low that ejects from the deep tropics right over us. Cool, though the air itself would be warmer and more moist than we usually see at this time of year in a rain situation (higher dewpoints). Must regard this as a serious rain threat now. Here’s a snapshot of that rain day from Enviro Can (see lower right panel for 12 h rain totals and areas covered–would fallen overnight tomorrow night into Wednesday morning. The whole better than the US model runs is here.

Yesterday’s clouds

Another fabulous early winter day in Arizona. Out of state license plates picking up in number. Can’t blame ’em. Here’s a sample of yesterday’s skies and another great sunset:

In case you missed it; these clouds and a trace of rain (!)

Once again we were treated to a spectacular sunset, another one in a long series of occasional sunset spectacles, ones that probably go back before the 1900s. We didin’t have color film in the 1800s, so we can’t be for sure if there were spectacular sunsets here except via artist’s renderings, of necessity, of course, analog ones comprised of subjective estimates of sunset colors being seen, not the real ones. I you would like to read about clouds in paintings over the centuries, go here and here. In this second link, you will find that Leonardo da Vinci was quite interested in Cumulonimbus downbursts gave painting them a shot. Its not that great, to be honest.

We meteorologists often sadly ruminate on the career of Leonardo, thinking that had he only turned his attention away from art, sculpting and the like, and instead turned to the problem of weather forecasting, how much farther ahead we would be today. A real shame. Maybe we wouldn’t be relying on spaghetti plots so much.

Also got a trace of rain here in Catalina–you could sure get that smell of rain as soon as you went outside this morning.

We also had some real interesting mottled-looking skies yesterday due to Altocumulus underneath a layer of Altostratus translucidus. Those underlying Altocumulus clouds were in a layer with a lot of instability (temperature dropped rapidly with height in it) and so there were many little spires (castellanus and floccus varieties). This happens because a little bit of warmth is added to the air when moisture condenses in it, and that bit of warmth was able to drift upward. As that happens the air around those little cells of updrafts settles downward gently to take the place of the rising air creating voids. So, you get clear air spaces between the little cloudlets. I think that’s what happened here.

Let see, what else is going on…. Most of that plume of moisture from the tropics is gone, and so only expect a few Cumulus today. Oh, yeah, big storm about to slam northern Cal and Oregon. Take a look at this map series from the Washington Huskies to get an idea of how its growing in size before hitting the coast.

No rain predicted here in past two model runs (last evening and last night, 06 Z) for the next 15 days, but we are quite sure that’s wrong. Will be looking for that end November early December rain to reappear because I have a subjective hunch it will. If it doesn’t reappear, I will likely pretend I never said anything about it, in keeping with long tradition in public weather forecasting.

BTW, and belaboring the point a bit, here’s an example of how errors in public forecasting SHOULD be handled; “right up front”, in this case, an anonymous Seattle forecaster addresses the terrible temperature forecast he made the previous day following day:

19 19 19_unknown_unknown

(It was a fun time….hope you get a smile out of it)

The End.

Raining hard here at 4:08 AM

Little cell going by (aka, weak Cumulonimbus). I hope you’re up to enjoy the sounds of a good cellular rain on the roof. I feel like another song coming on. Ooops, same one, but its a good one because it not only has rain and thunder in it, but also pathos¹. (I thought the thunder in this song gave it a lot of dramatic impact, and we had some thunder NE of Saddlebrooke yesterday afternoon around 2:45 PM.)

Cell has added 0.03 inches to our 0.13 inches and this morning’s total is now a quite nice 0.16 inches on top of the 0.30 we got yesterday. Raining harder now after it let up! Oh, that didn’t last long. Dang.

Total here at 6:55 AM: 0.18 inches! Two day total here, 0.48 inches.

This is so great since this second part of this two part storm was “marginal” as a rain producer, might have only produced 0.05 inches as the bottom estimate for rain, made a few months ago (just kidding), with a top possible amount of 0. 40 inches. So, we’re getting close to the middle of the prediction range made so long ago, 0.225 inches, a prediction you may remember, one that was based on spaghetti.

This rain is associated with the strong cold front that passed through Catalinaland about 2 AM, just after those strong gusts occurred, 30-40 mph last night. Here’s what the nighttime temperature did, drop 14 degrees!

And, as you no doubt know, the atmosphere pressure goes up instantly as the cold front goes by and the colder heavier air piles on top of you. (Time hacks don’t match on these charts for some reason–have not noticed that before….)

annotated 2012101009_Cat temp drop — Arrow points to passage of cold front at Catalina, AZ.

annotated pressure 2012111012 — Atmospheric pressure on top of you here in Catalina, AZ. Arrow denotes cold front and rise. With this denser air, you may notice that you’re having difficulty getting up, moving around as you push more “molecules” of air around for any given movement compared with yesterday when the air was not so dense. It also might be because you have more clothes on today…. Hahahaha

Here’s a really nice link to radar happenings locally from The Weather “Underground” (nothing to do, BTW, with “The Weathermen” of the 1960s-70s even though it sounds like it).

Learning module….skip if bored already.

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One of the things that is happening right now at 5:01 AM LST, is that cells are appearing on the radar or intensifying as they move toward Catalina. This happens a lot when the air at cloud height is moving toward the Catalinas and upslope toward Oracle and Mammoth, getting squeezed between the Tortolita Mountains and the Catalinas. That lifting makes the tops go up to higher colder levels, and when the tops to the west and southwest are too warm for ice formation, say above -10 C (14 F), then just a bit of lifting triggers ice formation making a cloud “visible” on radar as the ice grows in size into snowflakes, maybe collides, too, with some itty bitty cloud droplets (too small to be seen by radar) growing even larger and falling faster. This is maybe the biggest reason why Catalina has so much more rain than upwind areas (17 inches annual rain) compared with about 11-12 inches upwind. Most of that difference comes in the wintertime in situations like this, and so some extent, like yesterday’s more general rains.

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What’s ahead for today?

Back edge of this rain band, more or less solid clouds dotted with deeper ones producing rain, is on the doorstep.

Here it is as of 4:45 AM from the U of AZ Weather Department Satellite Facility, with a CONSIDERABLE amount of arrows and writing on it:

So, according to this “diagram” the back edge of this band on the sat image should be here by no later than 10 AM today, that is, chance of additional rain up until around 10 AM in a brief shower, but only a hundredth or two likely. After that, just clouds, probably a lofted Stratocumulus layer, then a widespread clearing with scattered to occasionally broken Cumulus.

Since it is so cold aloft now with the freezing level around 5,500 feet (snow shower now (7:29 AM) on Samaniego Ridge), ice will like form even in modest Cumulus clouds this afternoon, that means virga or maybe an ISOLATED light rain shower possible through around dusk.

Yesterday’s clouds

Here are some of the best cloud photos from yesterday, such a pretty day here in Catalina, where Cumulonimbus clouds stayed just to the north of us off and on all day.

The End, at last!

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¹Actually, I made it sound like I wrote this song in yesterday’s blog, but in fact, I did not, though I WOULD have if I had thought of it. Note that the person who uploaded this song to You Tube, did not know how to spell, “Cascades.” No wonder we’re falling behind.

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Hel-lo-ooooo, its 3 AM and raining, and you’re not up

That’r right, real cloud maven juniors get up in the night to experience all the raindrops they can after a droughty period. Been up since a little after 3 AM; its now 4:07 AM with an accumulation of 0.16 inches, a Dust-B-Gone amount, of which I have experienced exactly 100% of it as an audible event on a thin Arizona room roof. Its great to have a thin roof so you can listen to the rhythm of the falling rain. I feel like writing a song…

Quite nice, too, to hear this after SO MANY weeks of nothing except litho and bio meteors, i. e., dust and spores, Burrow weed and desert broom seeds floating in the air, and other untoward aerosols and particles that are best left on the ground.

Listening to rain on a roof can be used for meditation purposes, letting life’s questions resolve themselves without really trying, like, what are those ants going to do NOW with their wonderful little symmetric cones? Did they know it was going to rain and close the hole up in time? Note tire tracks and resiliency of ants… Says something about bouncing back after a disaster.

Why is it raining? Got us a little stream of tropical air in the mid-levels of the atmosphere that had been meandering off Baja. Mods saw this coming, maven was skeptical, but what’s great NOW is that we here in Catalina seem to be getting the most out of this little plume of moist air. Here’s a sat loop:

First, this just in: 0.22 inches at 4:22 AM! I am beside myself with joy!

This just in (again): 0.30 inches TOTAL by 6 AM. Fabulous.)

Here is the sat-radar loop from IPS Meteostar and below, these sat and weather map images from the U of WA Huskies Weather Department showing the little blob of clouds “that could” (get here and rain on us). You can see how that Big Trough (over Pac NW) swept it toward us, kicked it in the butt. There is some writing on these images to help you understand them; point things out for you. I really went out of my way here.

annotated 201211090900_300mb — Today, at 3 AM as the rain begins.

Notice the big gap between the little cloud patch over us in the 2nd map for 2 AM this morning and the band coming across California. Means there’ll be a break in the rain here until late tongiht or early tomorrow morning when the Big Cold Front with the Big Trough arrives here. Until then, just the gusty winds and some pretty clouds, filling in from time to time, maybe some rain visible to the north of Catalina.

Yesterday’s clouds

Below are a couple of photos of those nice Altocumulus castellanus with virga that came in rolling in across the sky suddenly yesterday afternoon. Actually, when they grow into real shower preoducing clouds, they’re also transitioning in name to Cumulonimbus (Cbs) clouds, though they are weak ones, not like our summer variety.

If you really looked, you could see that the bases of the Altocu/Cbs were well above the freezing level by noticing all the snow virga dropping below the bases. The TUS sounding suggests that the bases were at 14,000 feet above sea level (around 11,000 feet above the ground) and at -5 C (23 F).

Too dry underneath for much of the precip to get to the ground.

Dry model prediction WRONG! 0.02 inches falls in Catalina!

It’s great when models falter, and yesterday was one of those times that a human bean can exult. The U of A model, crunched out on the Beowolf Cluster (I can’t even imagine how powerful such a computer would be with a name like that), said that Catalina would have NO RAIN yesterday, zero, nil, 40-love, zilch, etc. (though there was predicted “model” rain close by).

In fact, in the space of about three minutes, just after 12 noon yesterday, Catalina, right here, received 0.02 inches!!!! I couldn’t believe how WRONG that model was! It was a tremendous victory for those of us predicting a little rain, like even a trace; those that rebelled against the “king” and won, 2-nil. If in soccer, it would have been a real drubbing.

Here are the clouds what done it yesterday, small versions of Cumulonimbus clouds that arose from a widespread layer of clouds with shafts of rain that looked like weak versions of our summer thunderstorm shafts:

Harangue about those models we love and hate

We desert lifers have a love hate relationship with our mostly superb weather forecasting computers such as at the U of AZ, ones that no longer require us to think when making weather forecasts for the next day or two. (please see the colloquium by Prof. Cliff Mass in Seattle that pointed out that the NWS was wasting its time putting man-power on forecasts for the next day and beyond; the computers have largely won that battle.)

Where can we forecasters provide skill? In the weather right now! That which occurs in the next few to 12 hours. That’s because, like yesterday, the models don’t know exactly where those showers, ones they might have even predicted, are going to be EXACTLY, and we can fine tune those predictions. Happens all the time in the chaos of our summer rain season, for example.

But we hate those models like now when they predict dry conditions week after week. Why can’t a dry forecast day turn up wet, be WRONG? But they excite us when forecasting rain, even in the fuzzy predictive days one to two weeks ahead. We know for the most part, such predictions can’t be relied upon, but still we hope they WILL be correct, of course, me in particular (I’m from Seattle and am still adjusting to dry MONTHS).

And here in the desert, most of the rain days predicted in the week to two week range dry up in the models it seems, so there’s always a modicum of disappointment being handed out by them. We have rain days again today out around the 22nd of Oct, but its not worth mentioning.

LA Nada/ “El Nina” update.

The link up there is for a huge technical presentation based on the Climate Prediction Center’s Oct 9 update. You might be bored by it, or this blog, but then, maybe you wanted to take a nap anyway.

In sum, it looks less and less like an El Nino will form, the Climate Prediction Center losing confidence in their earlier prediction, darn. But they haven’t bailed altogether. El Ninos can often produce wetter winters here, so I’m a little bummed out, as you will be if you’re not sleeping, by this update.

Miriam’s sunset

At least former hurricane Miriam gave us a nice sunset of mostly layer ice clouds (Cirrostratus; Altostratus (where thicker). Note portion of halo, upper center, above pointy-top cedar tree on the horizon. Looks a broken streak of droplet clouds (Cirrocumulus) just below that bit of halo.

Today’s overcast of Altocumulus and Stratocumulus, also associated with Miriam, develops some light rain to the south of us now. Wasn’t supposed to get here (from U of AZ model yesterday), but, there it is, SLOWLY heading this way. Will it make it? Don’t think so. If it does, it won’t be much, a trace? Dang.

Next rain here, sometime in October…. None now shown for the next 15 days. Maybe summer stats later today or tomorrow. (Correction, updated at 1:05 PM local based on the US WRF-GFS model run at 5 AM:

the almost “usual” rain has shown up, 324 h from now, that is, Thursday afternoon, October 11th. Below is the precip for the 12 h ending at 5 PM that day. Also, as “usual”, don’t count on it, but its not impossible either. There a tiny heavier rain blob over Catalina or so.

Didn’t get to a rain stat presentation yet due to being absorbed by former company team’s activities in SEA last evening where, at the conclusion of the match, there was a display of sport’s anarchy. The attendees of this event, in some kind of euphoric riot, lost control of themselves, climbed out of their seats and advanced onto the floor of the stadium where only the athletes and their entourages are supposed to be.

Two curious friends were at that game, my friend Nate, who got a big check (250 K$!) from Al Gore at the Whitehouse a few years ago due to being a science star, and my other friend Keith, who made a LOT of money photographing the explosion of Mt. St. Helen’s in 1980 because he was where he shouldn’t have been went it went off. Keith then quit the Ph. D. program in the geophysics grad school at the U of WA and started a company, Remote Measurements, due to all the money he made from that poster of the explosion.

Nate and Keith now share season tickets now to the Husky football games, as Nate and I once did, which I think proves something about fans of college fubball.

What does it prove?

Maybe its that you can like college fubball and still get a big check from Al Gore (who later went on from being Vice-president to a star in the movies).

Or, it just proves that you don’t have to be THAT bright to be a success in science (hahahahah-its just long, hard hours, not brillance, that counts).

And, it may prove that college fubball fans are sometimes not be who we think they are. Feeling defensive here about being so absorbed last evening, so let us not forget that the writer was thanked by the People of Earth with a small monetary prize, a “scroll”, AND…a trophy (!) for his and Peter Hobbs’ body of work in the domain of weather modification, all these goodies being presented in Capetown, SA, in 2006. So, there, IQ feels better now.

As a joke on that that latter thought, my friend and grad school officemate, Ricky, from Harvard U. no less, and I used to throw a football around at lunchtime on the lawn in front of the 7-story department of Atmos. Sci. Building at the U of WA. Before we went out the door to play catch, I warned Ricky that his perceived IQ would drop by 30 points when people look down and see him tossing a football, and, forget dating any of the women in the Department… :} Just kidding!

The End.

“Unlikely” rain still in models for end of month, except there’s more of it now

Just yesterday I pooh-poohed the chance of rain toward the end of the month based on spaghetti, the NOAA spaghetti. In fact, I was afraid to be too happy yesterday when I saw that rain was foretold here after the long dry spell we are now in. So I looked around for some reasons to mash down my happiness, happiness that might well be mashed anyway by reality when the end of the month got here. Maybe, in the event of getting too happy about foretold rain that didn’t materialize again, and then being let down one more time, I wouldn’t feel like blogging anymore, and both of you might disappointed in that turn of events.

But this morning I looked again at the rain prediction map for the end of the month, based on our best model, the US WRF-GFS. As if to personally humiliate me, there was even MORE rain for AZ, and the very epicenter of that rain was forecast to fall on my house on the 28th of September! That model KNEW I had said rain here was unlikely (though not impossible).

Take a look at the small purple blob in the map below from the WRF-GFS model indicating 1.50 to 2 inches on top of Catalina that day! Imagine! What a wonderful rain that would be! The whole wonderful sequence is here. And below the rain map is the map for the winds and contours the day before the storm hits. This is the BEST weather map I have ever seen for AZ! Look at that tropical storm center over Hermosillo. Its incredible, still amost a hurricane at the 500 mb level (around 18,000 feet). Never seen one like this before, and it couldn’t be a better map if I drew it myself!

OK, so we got us a possible great storm in the works.

But, if you’re like me, you should keep your rainy hopes in control. Its still an unlikely event, even with the global data taken last evening at 5 PM AST, crunched into millions/billions of calculations, has come out with this “solution.” It won’t take much for this to disappear entirely with the vagaries in solutions shown in yesterday’s spaghetti plot.

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In addition to all of this excitement, yesterday’s sunset, featuring Altocumulus clouds with no ice virga. They were likely less than 500 feet thick. Tops were about -9 C (18 F) at 17,000 feet MSL, bases about -7 C (21 F). Such thin clouds, and those in a hazy layer like yesterday’s, have higher concentrations of cloud drops in them, causing them to be quite small, and in that attribute, resistant to freezing. The larger the drops in the clouds, the higher the temperatures in which ice forms, as a rule.

Also, at high levels, there is likely to be a dearth of those special aerosol particles we call ice nuclei. The most active natural ones come from soil particles. So the higher a cloud, the less likely will be a soil particle. There is some evidence that desert dust is an especially good ice nuclei.

So, it is not unusual to see Altocumulus layer clouds sit at low temperatures (-10 to -20 C) and not produce ice (which you would see as virga trailing down from them). There was a bit of virga visible in a spot or two in this morning’s Altocumulus clouds, ones that were a tad colder at top, at -10 to -11 C.

Will be polishing raingage surfaces every day now so I will be ready.

The End.

Pattern clouds, a few afternoon drops here, a lot over there, and a nice sunset

Pattern clouds: Cirrocumulus undulatus in odd, parallel lines. I had not seen parallel lines like this before. Fragments of Altocumulus are also present.

Though only a few drops hit the ground here in Catalina, the day ended with a pretty sunset. This marked the third day in a row where large Cumuluonimbus clouds cells at least an inch of rain in southern Arizona, but we got missed, something that also happened several times in early August.

Some of the moisture doing this is from old, former tropical storm, Elena, particularly the moist plume that resulted in yesterday’s pretty pattern clouds shown in the first photo. Check the moist plume (whitish stream) from her here.

Looking ahead…..

While Elena was a bit of a disappointment as far as producing rain here in Catalina, her lower level moist plume too far to the west, a sibling storm is arising off Mexico, one that the models (hah!) as they did before, have calculated will cause a renewal of our summer rain season; showers are foretold for several days beginning around the 3rd as that storm trudges up the west coast of Mexico toward Baja. You can see the storm and the showers here in this rendering of the WRF-GFS model by IPS MeteoStar. Remember those green areas on these maps are those in which rain is foretold to have fallen in the previous 6 h (later in the run, in the prior 12 h). There is a LOT of green over SE Arizona after the showers begin to occur by the afternoon of the 3rd.

As is commonly heard these days from people concerned about drought, “think green”!