A historic 7-days of weather; another real cold episode ahead

“A historic 7-days of weather”  or “An historic 7-days of weather”?   Check this grammar site out, in case you were wondering,  like this English language buffoon was.  There must be simpler languages I can learn…

Check out the national records that fell during the past seven days here.  You can view them here, but its best if you go to the original site and poke around.  Pretty amazing week.  You should feel pretty bad if you didn’t set some kind of record where you are, somehow got left out. Also, maybe I should check for locusts and big earthquakes…in case things are coming to an end overall.  Just kidding, astrocatastrophists, thermageddonites (warm and cold ones1), etc.

record events 7 days

Interestingly, he sez, this was all foreseen in the models more than a week out, mentioned here, and the reliability of that severe weather pattern buttressed by those crazy looking NOAA generated “spaghetti-Lorenz” plots that Mr. Cloud Maven person often displays that evaluate the degree of chaos out there by running models over and over with DELIBERATE little errors.  Imagine, how bad things would be if we did that, added deliberate errors to everything we did every day that added on top of the inadvertent ones:  “I think I will err today by putting too much electricity into my computer, modify plug to fit in a 220 receptacle, plug it in, see if it runs faster.”  In a way, those crazy plots are doing that to see how much things change with errors we know about (since the obs contain errors that we don’t know about).  So running the models with little errors is to see how robust a forecast is.

The weather ahead

Enviro Can GEM mod is seeing more rain in AZ late Wednesday into Thursday than our WRF-GFS, so I like it more than our own and it would behoove2 you to check it out for yourself to see if I am lying again.  Still, its a slight upper level storm that drifts in from the southwest from off Baja.  There will be great middle and high clouds no matter what happens.  Rain extreme amounts are wide, zero (USA WRF-GFS) to a tenth of an inch here in Catalina by Thursday evening.  Would fall from mostly mid-level clouds showing virga first.  Best estimate, therefore:  0.05 inches.  Oh, well, SOMETHING is in the works.  You can see it spinning around out there off Baja here from the University of Washington Huskies Weather Department.

The weather way ahead

Check this out, you Lorenz plot expert.  I went crazy when I saw this, really points to a great chance for a substantial storm on the 20-22nd.  Need more rain for those spring flowers!

Valid at 5 PM, December 20th.
Valid at 5 PM, December 20th.

 

Above is an example of a strong signal for a big, cold trough 10 days out, something like we in the West have just experienced, though probably not “historically cold”  not quite as cold as the present situtation all over, and along with that, another great chance for  a good rain here in Catalina.  As we say, CMJs,  “Tell your friends.”  Your favorite weather person should be all over this by now, going “deep”, you might say, with his/her audience giving them a brain thump.

Not real happy, though,  about another round of low (properly, not “cold”) temperatures.

Your clouds today?

Cirrus-ee ones, maybe heading into thick ice clouds we call Altostratus.  Get camera ready for great sunrises and sunsets over the next couple of days.  Could be extra spectacular.

The End, of the excitement for today.

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1During the global cooling hysteria (hahaha, sort of)  during the late 1960s and early 1970s, my Department Chairman at San Jose State, Dr. Albert Miller, who smoked a lot and died when he was 54 years old, suggested to me that we put soot on the growing Arctic ice pack to melt it off and increase the amount of sunlight absorbed at the ground to ward off global cooling.  If the earth’s snow cover go too big, it was posited at that time, it might cascade into a complete glaciation of the earth due to feedbacks caused by too much reflected sunlight by the increasing snow cover.

2Interesting that an expression seeming to pertain to perissodactylas (hooved critters, i. e,. ungulate mammals) is used in conjunction with advising people to do something.  “Behooved”?  Could be, but isn’t, put on hooves?  Try not to think about this all day so that the work you have to do suffers.

Temperature records, yesterday’s cloud, and “Phil” or maybe, “Wanda” just ahead

Temperature records have been falling recently, lots of them, you can see them here.  This is what the “lobes of anomaly” at 500 millibars and the circulation patterns associated with them did over the past three days.  A lot of the cold ones were in Florida, as you will see.  Too bad for those people in Florida who went there instead of to Arizona to escape winter cold.  Their whole spring break vacation was probably ruined, if its spring break now.  The Arizona Chamber of Commerce should be advertising heavily in Florida right now!  “Sad about being in Florida on your vacation?  Well, its not too late to come to Arizona where its warm, not cold!” (We won’t mention our recent snow, of course.)

Yesterday’s cloud

Being cloud-centric, thought you’d want to see it1.

2:23 PM.  Cumulus humilis.
2:23 PM. Cumulus humilis.  Kind of cute, sitting there, trying to be the best it can be.

 

The storm ahead

Seems to be getting bigger in the Canadian model as time goes by, and so I thought I would allude to that before you even read what I was going to say with a fatter sub-title having color, one then filled with portent.

This Storm (yes, that’s right, I’ve improperly capitalized the word “storm”; I do a LOT of improper things with language here) is now going to be so great it may get its own name, like “Phil” or “Wanda.”  Years later:  “Remember how Phil saved our spring vegetation back in ’13? Put a dent in the drought we were having?”

Check the load indicated in the Enviro Can mod below, those accumulations expected by 5 PM AST, Friday, March 8th.   This is stupendous.  Notice the Canadians have gone from the usual green, maybe a little yellow, to seeing red in the amounts of precip for this storm.  I was beside myself when I saw it, because when you live in a desert, you kind of expect storms to become less rather than more in the models.  Should be some thunder in it, too.  This will be a real chance to get above normal rain here in Catalina for the month of March (1.46 inch average) in one load spanning two days. Notice, too, how the whole Southwest benefits from this Goliath.  Will it be a trillion dollar crop-saving storm like the one at the end of January?  Might be, since crop-saving rains move out into those droughty areas of the Plains States, like Nebraska.  Hooray!  Literally millions of people will be made happy by this storm!

Also, when you have a great storm, meteorologists like me become important, too, and so a great storm is great for us since we might dominate the news, not just be an itty bitty after thought.  Our favorite expression:  “The one behind this one is even BIGGER.”

Unfortunately, there is no storm after this one, so let’s hope we get all that it can be from it.

In fact, as an impersonator of a true scientist, I have to report that the USA! WRF-GFS model makes this only a million dollar, oh, maybe a billion dollar storm (might not get its own name).  Much less precip is indicated in our models, ones based on the SAME data as that in the Canadian model below, that from last evening’s global observations made at 5 PM AST.  Not even going to show that output.  Not happy.

Still sticking with 0.25 inches as bottom of this storm (bad things happen to it) and 1.00 inches at the top (that is, ten percent chance of less; ten percent chance of more, as perceived from this keyboard).  Best guess median of these: about 0.60 inches, or about the same amount of liquid as the historic snowstorm produced on Feb. 20th.

Still looking forward to this.

Ann for March 8, 5 PM AST 00_054_G1_north@america@zoomout_I_4PAN_CLASSIC@012_096

The End.

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1 Testing 1-2-3.  There was some Cirrus, too, visible in the photo, and several other Cu humilis, along with their little brothers, Cumulus fractus.