Note redundancy in title. A “meteor” is already going down, so you don’t need the word “down.” Hahaha.
They were small drops, some were as small as drizzle-sized (500 microns in diameter or smaller) and too far apart to be called an occurrence of “drizzle”, but they fell throughout Catalina allowing Catalinans to register a trace of rain yesterday, a trace that was not predicted by the best model we have around these parts just hours before the “rain” occurred. It’s not clear what the benefit of a trace of precipitation is, but we are sure some ants and other insects were made quite happy yesterday as a virga from a higher level snowstorm spit out a few drops.
Drops that reach the ground in these kinds of situations are due to melted aggregates or clusters of single snow crystals locked together that most people would call “snowflakes.” Single crystals can never make to the ground on a day like yesterday. And, “yep”, that “fog” you saw drooping down on the Catalinas from time to time yesterday afternoon was due to light snow.
No Catalina, Arizona, rain in US mod forecasts through the next 15 days (!–just horrible) as the US models continue to evaporate rain chances on the 6th-8th. A few days ago the system going by then was supposed to bring a substantial rain to most of Arizona. Now its just a dry trough passage in the model, like at watering trough1 with a hole in the bottom. Phooey.
Oddly, the Canadian model, which first calculated a bust for rain here on the 6th-8th when the US model had lots, now has MORE rain in it near us here in Catalina on the 6th-7th than the lugubrious US model. The US model has NO RAIN whatsoever in the WHOLE State of Arizona ending on the morning of the 7th! How odd is that?
Below is the salubrious Canadian depiction for Arizona rain by the morning of the 7th, a rain that could be good for health of all of us and our desert:
Valid at 5 AM February 7th. The upper level trigger for clouds and rain, a trough, is already past us and in western New Mexico, but the Canadians believe that widespread rain will have occurred in Arizona as it went by during the prior 12 h ! See lower right hand panel green and blue areas; use microscope.
Its interesting how you still can remember with fondness those people who affected your life so much, even if for a short time.
Below, after an important aside, your cloud day picture jumble, one that began with a brief, but memorable sunrise “bloom”, and one that also ended with great sunset color on the Catalinas.
7:23 AM. Sunrise over the Catalinas.3:14 PM. Dog and virga.9:43 AM. A brief clearing of a couple of hours duration led to pretty scenes of Altocumulus floccus trailing virga. 8:21 AM. Altocumulus floccus/castellanus trailing long trails of snow virga trails.
5:57 PM. Color on the Catalinas.4:03 PM. Snow on the Lemmon.
The End.
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1Images of watering troughs, in case you’re from out-of-state and a city person and unfamiliar with western culteral expressions and don’t know what a watering trough is.
I’m talking about your clouds and weather day yesterday, and definitely NOT about someone whom I shall call, “Sharon1“, that happened to me 33 years ago and whose birthday was yesterday, Ground Hog Day, a day commemorated by a 1993 movie about a weatherman. Seemed “right”, too, to be a weatherman with a girlfriend whose birthday was on Ground Hog Day. I loved her so much! Was definitely in the first stage of the psychologist’s lab standard, the Passionate Love Scale2 ; euphoric when things were going right, and also a stage characterized by delusional and obsessive thinking. (Haven’t we all been there at some point?) Had a great sense of humor and playfulness about her, too. As it turned out, though, I wasn’t good enough for her. (I really wasn’t; she was a med student and all that; very brainy, so there was quite a mental contrast.)
Oh, yeah, NOW for the clouds yesterday on a cool day which is what I was talking about to being with; high only 55 F here in the “Heights”:
6:06 PM. Altostratus, of course, with slight virga consisting of very light snow. Too thick to be Cirrus. 3:18 PM. Altocumulus perlucidus. What the temperature? In the middle of the photo there’s an ice canal–hoped you logged it in your weather diary. That ice canal was caused by an aircraft passing through a cloud that’s well below freezing. The exact reason for the sudden freezing of drops in that cloud is still being investigated. However, when you see this phenomenon, an ice canal or hole punch cloud, I want you to FIRST think of ME, because our paper on this phenomenon was rejected twice back in the early 1980s before being published, and second, when you see this happen, estimate that the droplet cloud was probably at -20 C (-4 F) or colder. Yes, THAT cold and still composed of droplets! Therefore it produces a buildup of ice on an aircraft when one flies through it, but then the aircraft changes that by converting to ice behind it! How strance is that?. (I deliberately misspelled “strange” to see if anyone has read this far.)
Annotated version. 3:19 PM. Frosty the Lemmon. Good sign of rime icing on those trees up there. You see how frosty they look? Likely because of supercooled cloud droplets hitting the trees and freezing during all the low clouds of the previous day. Very pretty. 2:19 PM. “Angel’s hair”, Cirrus fibratus. The delicateness of those striations are amazing when you think that they are traveling in air moving at around 80 mph up there around 30-odd thousand feet above us.
Below, the predicted total rain in Arizona as this great trough goes by. NIL in Catalina! The map below is a forecast of all the rain areas and their amounts expected by 2 PM AST tomorrow afternoon. Fortunately, it has been, as in basketball, “rejected.” Read details in caption.
Expect a trace to maybe a tenth. No drop will escape my attention!
The End. I hope you’re happy now since I have titillated you with a personal story in a cheap attempt to raise blog ratings. Haven’t broke into the top 10 million blogs yet. But maybe if min is more like “Entertainment Tonight”, I make that breakthrough.
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BTW, if you haven’t heard yet: “Seattle Celebrate (sic) SB Win!”, a title and article written by a possible drunken AP writer after the SB, if you’re interested.
————– 1Defintely NOT a picture of “Sharon”, but its how she MIGHT have looked had she been in my Seattle living room with her son, New Year’s Eve, 1981. And, of course, I found someone I loved just as much later…
2Don’t believe me that such a thing exists? Read the first column of SCI CLIPPINGS CAUDATE OVER HEELS IN LOVE 001, no less. Probably goes farther in its discussion of these kinds of things than we really want to know about and how they came to know them…be advised.
Too dark for the best sight, our 14-year old flat-coated retriever mix dog, at first seeming to be walking slowly up the dirt driveway in back of the house with another dog. I could just make out two outlines. I wondered whose dog had gotten out and was in our backyard? Moving closer, I see that our dog is walking side-by-side up the dirt driveway, not with another dog, but with a javelina, like they’re buddies! Then two more javelinas came out of the brush to join the slow walk uphill forming a peccary herd containing a dog! After about 10 yards of this group slowly ascending the driveway toward me, the javelinas turned off into the brush. Too dark for photos; dang.
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Next, its raining in Tucson and I am eastbound on Prince Avenue about to turn left on to Oracle. I was feeling good that its raining downtown, and it was not just here in Catalina that rain had fallen. A car swerves across a lane in front of me to turn left on Oracle, and it turns out to be the best car ever evaluated by Consumer Reports! Its the all electric Tesla Model S!
I am not a car buff, but this was a very great sighting for anyone knowing much about the direction cars are taking! Its made by a tiny company in Fremont, California. No gas used of course, its not a hybrid; you have to find a charging station. But those stations are increasing pretty fast. You can go about 200 miles or so on a charge.
Anyway, if you have $90,000 or so, I think you should buy one right away. No, really. It would be worth it to be an “early adopter” and drive the market forward so that the price descends rapidly.
Yesterday morning in the rain, on Prince Avenue, a Tesla pulls in front of me! And, like me, they’re from Washington! From the “Not-taken-while-driving” collection; this photo entitled, “Tesla in the Tucson Rain,” yours for $11,000 due to rain falling in Tucson simultaneously with a Tesla Model S sighting, an extremely rare combination of sights that your friends will envy.
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Sports AND clouds….
The Seattle Seahawks are in the Superbowl today. The city where I worked is going bonkers over this because besides the team, they really like some of the players, like Russell Wilson whose really too small to be an NFL QB, and hasn’t been in jail ever. The entire city has come together, including liberals and conservatives to root on the Seahawks! Reminds one of the afterglow of the first Gulf War when Arab cars were sporting American flags!
Cells in the rain
7:50 AM. This well-defined rainsahft indicates a buildup in the tops above. These were the kinds of cells that moved over Catalina during the early morning hours. Likely would have looked like soft Cumulonimbus clouds if on top in an aircraft.
9:43 AM. Reflected light from the rain drops lingering on this blue palo verde gave it something of a lighted Christmas tree look.10:44 AM. As the sun launches convective currents and Cumulus clouds on a breezy day, and with some resistance to cloud top heights due to a stable layer, lines of clouds form, something we call a “cloud street.” This one came all the way from the Tucson Mountains to the SSW of us to just about over Catalina. When showers start to fall from clouds lined up like this (because the tops have gotten high enough to form ice), the downdrafts in those showers usually dissipate the line and it becomes pretty chaotic and broken up into cells, as happened over downtown Tucson later that morning.
5:26 PM. By late afternoon there were some fabulous lighting scenes under the Stratocumulus clouds on the Catalinas, here looking NE toward Charouleau Gap.
The weather ahead…
Looks like a minor rain in the works for Monday into Tuesday evening. Probably will begin in the mid-day hours and probably will only produce a few hundredths to a tenths is all here in Catalina. There’ll be more snow in the mountains, so that will be good to keep some of the creeks running.
The following storm, the one that looked substantial, has been diminishing in the model runs of the past day or so. Dang. The Enviro Can mod has given up completely on rain here in this trough that moves in on Thursday and Friday, the 7th and 8th. Then, voila, the US one began to follow suit, though showing a less bountiful rain, but at least still has some beginning Friday the 7th and then has it dribbling into Saturday, the 8th (this from the 11 PM AST global run from last night). Looking more like maybe a quarter inch of rain here in that one, but very dicey now in view of those Canadian calculations. Sometimes their model does better than ours.
Still looking like a LONG, warm dry spell after next Saturday….
Since the Big Bowl is just ahead, featuring our Seattle Seahawks, a team that played their games right near the University of Washington where I worked, it seemed like a good title, one that ordinary, football-loving peoples could identify with. But, of course, I am talking about “trough bowling” and the inclement weather that goes with them, right here in Arizona, not in New Jersey.
Models are foreseeing a spell of upper level troughs collecting in the SW US in the next week. In the map below from the NOAA “spaghetti factory“, you will see a great example of the best chance for a halfway decent rain in AZ as these several troughs march through, including one today (but too far north). All we get today is clouds, mostly middle and high ones, too high above us to rain on us, then later in the day, lower ones like Stratocumulus, but with tops too warm to form ice crystals, necessary for rain here in old Arizony even though it may look pretty gray at times.
Back to the maps….
In the map below, the red, yellow and gray lines all bulge southward toward the Equator in our area. The wind at this level (500 millybars, around 18,000 feet above sea level) travels along the lines going toward the SE off’n Cal, then bend back to the NE over Baja.
The air tends to sink and dry out in flow going to the SE, but tends to rise and moisten as it bends back to the NE. So, as troughs come and go, with the SW winds ahead of them pass by, there’s a chance for rain each time one goes by.
The third one that passes by, later on Thursday, February 6th, gives us the best chance for widespread rains, as foreseen for AZ by last night’s 5 PM AST model run.
How great would that be?
If you don’t believe me that widespread rains are forecast for AZ, you’ve given up on rain here after weeks of drought, I’ve added a map from last night’s model run. Its OK. I’m a weather forecaster and there’s a certain degree of incredulity, an aura really, that goes along with this occupation. We get used to it, kind of like economic forecasters do.
Valid February 6 at 5 PM AST. I’ve annotated it so you will know where Arizona is. Its shocking to me that I have to keep putting arrows on maps showing where Arizona is to my readers.Valid at 2 PM AST, Friday, February 7th, 2014. The green areas denote where the computer model thinks rain has fallen in the previous THREE hours. There are several maps like this after this one for 2 PM, ones that extend the AZ rain into early on the 8th. Who knows at this point, but maybe half an inch could fall here in Catalinaland. Hoping so.
Mods are grim after this storm passes on the 7th, with the jet stream staying north of us, maybe for the rest of February, and that means chances of rain are nil. No jet, no rain.
Oops, I forgot to show you where Arizona is….here’s that same map again.
Same prog, valid for 2 PM AST, Friday, February 7th, 2014. Recall that this storm has been predicted, more or less, for about two weeks, as has the pattern change.
The first real chance of light rains here is just ahead, that on late on MONDAY! Looks like only a tenth of an incher, though, right now.
BTW, poppies in bloom (!) are being reported by hikers here in the Catalina area. Wonder if this has happened before in January?
Looking ahead to rain and other weather mischief in the days ahead.
From the VERY latest WRF-GFS model run from the 11 PM AST crunch of global data involving billions if not trillions of calculations, so how bad can it be? We’ll see on the 27th or so (exact timing not so accurate).
Valid at 11 AM AST, January 27th.
In the meantime, the whole pattern causing extreme cold in the eastern half of the US, warmth and drought in the West is truly finished later this month. Soon after the map above, the whole collapses in on itself, as pretty much always happens to extreme patterns like the one we’re having now.
Desert marigold.
Take a look at what our generous mid-November through mid-December rains followed by warmth has done to our wildflower bloom this year. These shots were taken on a group hike into the Tortolita Mountain Park on the 16th, starting from the Ritz-Carlton Hotel and going up to the Wild Mustang Trail. If you want to see a spontaneous eruption of the “Ritz” in Russia1 by a “flash mob” go here. Proves that the world is completely different than it was during the Cold War, and global warming as well. You can see that its not that cold because people are out having a lot of fun and they wouldn’t be if it was really cold. The wildflower shots also suggest global warming has arrived here in Tucson as well, at least this year. They’re still waiting for it to arrive in Wisconsin I think.
Red tipped ocotillos in early to mid-January? Amazing.January 8th, on the way to Romero Pools in Catalina State Park. Never though I would see this so early in January.
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1 Let us not forget that Mr. Cloud-Maven person’s latest book was in Russian. Well, it wasn’t MY book, but all the photos, including the cover one, is from Catalina Cloud Maven! See below:
Published, spring 2013! Taken at Kwajalein Atoll AP, Marshall Islands, 1999.
7:16 AM. Altocumulus castellanus virgae. Has light snow falling out of it in tiny filaments, Aircraft measurements show that those filaments, snow fibers, that are falling out right below the base are only 10 to about 30 yards (meters) wide. “Floccus” would be OK, too. Notice that there are two turrets, one is older, has holes in it on the left, while the younger one on the right side looks more solid, firmer. The younger one has not yet formed a strong virga trail, but will as it ages. These are Cumulus to Cumulonimbus transitions in miniature and in slow motion.
Today’s sunrise of the day
7:20 AM. Altostratus.
About up and down…
That giant low pressure center, so needed by us droughty folks here in the SW, has materialized in the western Pacific, shoving gigantic amounts of heat and clouds poleward (up) toward Alaskans. We like to call them Eddy or Eddys; they keep the poles from getting too cold and the Equator too hot by shoving air around. This low in the western Pacific has forced a big northward bulge in the jet stream up that way where it had previously been pretty much a west to east flow. A region of higher pressure is created aloft when there are injections of warm air into the northern latitudes by storms1.
When air surges northward and builds a region of higher pressures in the jet stream like that, it buckles and turns southward on the downwind side of the high pressure (or ridge) almost immediately. In this case, and lucky for us, the buckle is toward the south over the western US and ultimately down into Mexico, but not too far, we hope.
What goes “up” in latitude must go “down”, more or less.
Surface weather map with satellite imagery for 11 PM AST last night.500 millibar map for 11 PM AST. Ridge pilling up in AK-Bering Sea, about to turn jet southward into the western US.
So, that inconsequential looking area of clouds and low pressure which appears to be jetting across British Columbia and Alberta in the first map, will suddenly begin enhancing and expanding southward, new low pressure centers will form in the Great Basin area. It will get windy here for a time. Very exciting.
I guess what I am trying to say, too, is that old timey weather folk like this writer would look at a map like these above, even without the satellite imagery, and think, “Oh, my”, “Change gonna come“, as Sam Cook so sweetly sang so long ago, a drastic change for the area downstream of the giant low and its heat plume.
Things are out of balance at this “map moment”; weather “Koyannisqatsy“, too much swirling low in the west part of the Pacific and strangely quiet downstream over the US at the SAME latitude as that giant low is reaching down toward out there far to the west of us. “This will not stand”, as someone once said about an invasion of a Middle East country. And the “quiet” in the West won’t stand, either. Balance in latitudes affected by storms is a key proviso of weather, a kind of conservation law2 we used to talk about a lot, and still do in undergraduate courses.
We could go back all the way to the Middle East to see the roots of the storm that blew up in the western Pacific. It was already a strong upper level wave that showed up in the Middle East as the snow situation there was beginning to take place. As a strong upper level feature, it was the trigger for the stupendous low that formed when it exited the Asian continent, found heat and temperature contrast that are the building blocks for strong storms.
The clouds and storm ahead
Models have been wetting it up more and more here, sometimes the US model have no rain at all as the trough and its clouds passed too far to the SOUTH of us. But lately, that US model has been increasing the amount rain here, not taking the low so far south. The Canadian model has had rain here in every run for days, so its been more consistent on this pattern, not taking the low too far south.
Valid at 11 AM Friday from IPS MeteoStar, December 20th. The colored regions are those in which the model has calculated precip over the prior 6 h. Note heavy band over Catalina! (Dried up a lot on the next run at 11 PM AST, though.)
Due to the variable nature of the precip amounts seen by the mods, you have to figure there’s an awfully wide range of amounts that can occur here in Catalina from a tenth of an inch on the bottom, to as much as .75 inches if everything goes really well. U of AZ mod will have more to say about this in the next 48 h.
Of course, as cloud mavens, we’re interested in the sky as well as the storms. Lots of precursor high clouds today again like yesterday, and if the usual trend continues, those clouds will lower some as the day goes on from just Cirrus, Altostratus, sometimes augmented by Altocumulus. These kinds of clouds can lead to some fantastic sunrises and sunsets, so have camera ready. You only have a couple of minutes to capture the peak of the “blooms.”
The End.
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1Remember, low density air (air filled with warmth and humidity), if deep, leads to a small change in pressure as you go up in the atmosphere, and so by the time you’re at 50,000 feet, you’re in a HIGHer pressure region than those regions where the air is not so warm. How odd. So surges of warm air and clouds from the Tropics build regions of high pressure aloft, and that’s what we’re seeing now.
In case you missed the pretty sights of yesterday:
7:05 AM. Sunrise on the Altocumulus. Two layers are evident.8:42 AM. Kind of blasé except for the rarely-seen-in-AZ (faint) halo. Altocumulus with Cirrostratus above.3:30 PM. Pretty patterns; Altocumulus perlucidus.
4:45 PM. Cirrus fibratus (not hooked or tufted at top) and Altocumulus (droplet clouds at right with darker shading). Lower gray portions beyond Pusch Ridge and extending to the horizon is probably best termed Altostratus.4:56 PM. Nice lighting on Samaniego Ridge.5:21 PM. Your sunset. Nice underlit virga (light snow fallout, likely single ice crystals, not flakes) from patchy ice clouds. Could be termed Cirrus spissatus or Altostratus, if you care. What kind of crystals, you ask or didn’t? Bullet rosettes.
The clouds and weather just ahead
Expect more Altocumulus, Cirrus, and Altostratus today, patchy and gorgeous. Would expect some nice Ac castellanus (one with spires) as an upper level low off Baja starts to move toward us. Some measurable rain likely tomorrow in the area, but probably barely measurable, maybe a tenth at most since it will fall from middle clouds with a lot of dry air underneath them. (Enviro Can mod still sees rain around here tomorrow.)
Middle clouds might get large enough to call the (small) Cumulonimbus clouds, with a slight chance of lightning tomorrow, Thursday, as this low moves up and over us.
So both today and tomorrow will have some great clouds!
WAY ahead; watch out!
After a quiescent period of gorgeous, misleading days, where the temperatures gradually recover to normal values and you’re gloating over the nice weather you’re experiencing by coming to Arizona from Michigan, blammo, the whole thing caves in with strong storms and very cold air heading this way.Yesterday’s 18 Z WRF-GOOFUS model run for 500 millibars (rendered by IPS MeteoStar), was, if you like HEAVY precipitation throughout Arizona, well, truly”orgasmic.” You just cannot have a better map at 500 mb for Arizona than this one from that run. That low center over California, should this verify, would be filled with extremely cold air from the ground on up, cold enough that snow in Catalina would be expected as it goes by. So, there’s even a prospect of a white Christmas holiday season. Imagine.
Valid 264 h from 11 AM AST yesterday morning, or for 11 AM AST, Saturday, beginning of football bowl season, which last until February I think.
Now will this verify exactly like this? Nope, not a chance. But, spaghetti tells us we’re going to be in the Trough Bowl, filled with cold air and passing storms beginning in 8-10 days from now. How much precip and how cold exactly it gets is unknown because these progs will flop around in positioning the troughs that head our way. There will be major troughs passing through, so while the amount of precip is questionable, the cold air intrusion is not. It was just so neat, exciting, mind-blowing to see that such a gargantuan storm has been put on the table for us in that 18 Z run.
Most likely subsequent model runs will take this exact map away, but then put something like it back, until we get much closer to verification day, the 21st. May even shift around on which day is the doozy, too, by a couple of days either side. Still, a really exciting period of weather is ahead.
This may seem odd, but one of the keys to our storms way ahead is the eruption of a huge storm in the western Pacific (and that storm is shown developing in the last day (144 h panel) of the Enviro Can mod.
———–dense reading below————-
That erupting, giant low pressure center will shoot gigantic amounts of warm air from the tropical ocean far to the north ahead of it in the central Pacific. That warm air shooting north, in turn, causes a bugle to the north in the jet stream, a ridge, which deflects the jet toward the north toward the Arctic. As the jet stream does that, there is almost an immediate response downstream from the ridge; the jet stream begins to turn to the south, developing a bigger an bigger bulge, or trough to the south. So, a jet stream running on a straight west to east path across the Pacific can be totally discombobulated when a giant storm at the surface arises and shoots heat in the form of clouds and warm air northward1. In this case, all of this takes place beginning in the Pacific in about 6 days, so that a sudden southward bulge, a buckling of the jet stream, due to that giant low in the western Pacific 8, 000 miles away, happens over the western US. And voila, our big cold and maybe our big storms, too. then.
1) I like to refer to songs about weather, though the musical references I’ve used are somewhat dated, as here, a song from 19th Century I think. BTW, tapping on the link above, you’ll see a guy riding a horse AND singing at the same time because he’s so happy, so it really fits the big western life we’re all leading here in old Arizony in the wintertime and seemed apropos. I wouldn’t recommend singing AND riding at the same time, however, unless you know you’re horse reel good. Might get spooked if it was you or me singing and not the cowboy, Gordy MacRae1.
BTW#2, if you watch that entire song link above, you’ll see whole crowds of people getting carried away with the State of OK at the end of it. But…you’ll also notice in that scene that there is a MOUNTAIN on the distant horizon in the background. I don’t think they were in Oklahoma for that song! So, maybe they didn’t really like Oklahoma as much as they claim in song…. Now, where was I?
Man, the clouds are going to be spectacular today, zipping along like a dragster on nitro! Expecting some real great lenticular clouds, those hover ones, downstream of the Cat Mountains, too. Lots of wind, as well, to add to the drama with a Big _Cold Front (B_CF) getting closer during the day, then passing us during the evening-overnight with some rain by morning. Likely to be a 10-20 degree F drop in temperature within an hour or less, as this real “bad boy” cold front and wind shift go by. Ely, NV saw a 56 degree drop in temperatures in 24h. We Need more rain; always. Cold? Not so sure about that. All in all, a “beautiful” day2 coming up.
How much rain here in old Catalina?
We’re on the edge of the jet stream up there, and you know what that means, on the edge of the precip, too. So, if you’re telling your friends how much rain you expect, and as a CMJ, they will expect you to comment on it, you’d best not go overboard and say, “a half an inch between tonight and Friday morning”; play it down some.
On the plus side, this is a storm type (flow pattern type, more westerly up there) that we Catalinans get MORE rain than surrounding areas, other than the mountains. So, on the edge means a low rain prediction; but the flow pattern suggests pushing a little on the greatest amount possible for an edge storm. Here’s the range I would tell you to say to neighbors:
Bottom (since it might miss), 0.08 inches (the “8” for faux accuracy); top, 0.50 inches (yep, has a high potential due to the storm type; that is, the angle of the winds impinging overhead on our mountains). Average of these guesses, which likely is the more accurate guess-amount, 0.26 inches.
Later we will compare the U of AZ supermicro Beowulf Cluster model prediction, one that takes our best model’s overall prediction for Arizona, the one WRF-GFS, and then breaks it down into our local areas better, like here and on the Catalina Mountains, because it uses much more detailed terrain. (Not available yet here at 4:45 AM–to Hell with it then!) ((Still not available as of 6:24 AM. It is finished..publishing now.))
There’s another cold blast on the heels of this one. Hits on the 8th. Poor TUS marathoners… ‘Nuf said.
The weather way ahead
2) With the upcoming storm and cold well in hand, that is, well described by our excited met men and women, both at the NWS and on TEEVEE, where in the latter case they make a LOT of money, really, its incredible how much (well, maybe not in TUS, but LA? Oh, my) Let’s see, where was I? Oh, yeah, I thought I would look WAY ahead, two weeks, which in weather model terms is like an astrologer looking through a telescope at the giant star, Betelgeus, its that far away in model prediction terms.
Still, I REALLY think you need to see this forecast even though its so far away because its pretty giant, too, in weather terms. If you’re too lazy to click on “this”, I have gifted you with the highlights below, highlights that might be the best forecast maps I have ever seen (again). Yes, to quote the song, “Everything’s (weather-wise) going my way.” ( “My way”? To Catalina, Arizona.)
Drum roll……
Well, there they are. I hope you’re happy now. Its quite an orgasmic sequence from a weather standpoint.
Why? There’s about THIRTY-SIX hours of rain in our area are foretold from these maps, 14-15 days from now! That last one has heavy rain throughout Arizona! BTW, I’ve posted them in sizes that are proportional to their credibility, thumbnails.
Now, since I’ve been learning you up on spaghetti, I’ll let you decide whether its a Big_Outlier (BfO). Take a look here and at where the”blue” lines are. They would have to be clustering down around Rocky Point-Puerto Penasco for this forecast to have any serious credibility.
Yesterday’s clouds
Cirrus ones. As always with our deep blue skies now days, so pretty up there. A few shots:
7:32 AM. Bunches of Cirrus spissatus.
8:01 AM. The ever-present, rarely seen Cirrus castellanus (bubble Cirrus lower center).
8:02 AM. Cirrus fibratus (long, more or less straight trails, at least from this overhead view).
5:26 PM. Subtle sunset color in Cirrus and in a distant Altostratus layer (deep ice cloud).
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1Not wearing a helmut, either, which is also a bad example besides singing while riding a horse.
2Words can mean different things to different people, and here, “beautiful”, as in the title, may not be the “beautiful” day you were expecting to be described.
WHAT a gorgeous day was yesterday! Perfect. No wonder the northlanders come here in their droves now! Its great to see (via the increasingly larger number of out-of-state license plates) all the people that want to be where I am already!
While waiting for the storms and cold air just ahead now, this cloud commentary:
Along with the pretty high and middle clouds was a rarely seen phenomenon, aircraft flying into those “supercooled” Altocumulus droplet clouds were converting them to ice in their wakes. These are similar to contrails, called by me, APIPs, Aircraft Produced Ice Particles. That’s right, your Catalina Cloud Maven person named that phenomenon, though its not a great name since it could apply to usual contrails as well. Modest brain strained hard, but couldn’t come up with anything better. So, given that background, he’s probably going to make a big deal out them when he sees one or two here.
Its rare because the Altocumulus have to be pretty cold, -15 C (5 F) or so and colder1, and at a level where aircraft are flying, usually in a descent or climb pattern to their normal flight altitudes up around the higher Cirrus levels (30-40 kft above sea level and at temperature generally below -35 C). Typically because of climbing or descending, the ice canals, or holes with icy centers, are short and small. Here are a few examples from yesterday, but you really want to look at the U of AZ timelapse movie to see a bunch of them going by in those pretty Altocumulus clouds and mackerel skies we had. Note that as cold as these Altocumulus clouds were, they were not producing ice:
12:21 PM. Ice strip produced earlier by an aircraft that flew through supercooled Altocumulus clouds. Usually these events lead to optical displays like this faint sun dog almost overhead. You have about 10 seconds to see it, but, of course, Mr. Cloud Maven person, on a hike with friends, was waiting for it to happen.
11:21 AM. One of many.12:19 PM.11:50 AM. Note Cirrus-ee part upper right.
And there were other fine sights! Look at this display of Altocumulus perlucidus undulatus, rippled mackerel sky:
11:12 AM.1:19 PM during hike with friends, not just people standing there as I walked by, in case you thought someone who would write like this and take cloud pictures all day might be a recluse and have no real friends. Shown are Bill and George, JoAnn and Vollie, admiring the Cirrostratus shield coming over the horizon. (I do see why you might think that, though.)4:42 PM. Day ended up with a great big halo; haloes are pretty rare here in the kinds of Cirrus clouds we get. More Altocumulus out there, too.
Weathering ahead….
Looks like cold spell will last, once underway, into the middle of the month. SNOW indicated HERE in Catalina-land on the morning of December 11th from a crazy model run based on last evening’s global obs at 5 PM AST yesterday. Here’s what that morning looks like overhead, at 500 millibars:
Valid at 5 AM AST December 11th. Thinking about making snowballs that morning. Also, in appeal to youthful readers, I have texted some here. Astonishingly deep cold air piles into Arizona, Those northlanders will be piling into their jeeps and heading home. Unfortunately, an examination of the reliability via the newly named, “Lorenz plots” from NOAA, show virtually no support for this “solution.” It appears, at least for the moment, dang, as a crazy outlier, likely due to some goofy error (s) WAY upstream somewhere. But, its fun to contemplate snowballs here in Catalina.
BTW, the local weather services all around the SW are already worked up over the coming cold wave and have issued Special Statements, quite fun to read because they reflect the excitement we weather folk are feeling now as we look ahead to wind some rain, and a big frontal passage followed by cold air. After all, the weather’s pretty dull here in SE AZy most days of the year, and by “dull” I mean that not much is happening except for pretty clouds and nice temperatures, a weatherperson’s “dull.”
The End.
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1 Yesterday afternoon’s Tucson balloon sounding which I forgot to look at until now:
Rawinsonde balloon sounding data from Tucson. Balloon launched around 3:30 PM local yesterday; rises at about 1,000 feet a minute.
Summary statement: Begins in 5-6 days in the northern US, then expands southward; goes on and on, like the discussion below, after that. Cloud pics WAY below the “novella” on spag plots.
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Our docile weather in the West for the past few months is about to end, as well as for those in the Rockies and Plains States. Wasn’t gonna blog on TG day, but looking at mods, and realized that I am the SAME person that I was as a 6-year old in Reseda, California, on January 10, 1949, that ran up and down Nestle Avenue knocking on doors to tell people it was starting to snow that afternoon (!), I realized that same “gotta tell ya” impulse lives on.
The trigger for THIS “gotta tell ya” is how bad the cold, snow, rain, and wind look for the western half of the US starting in about 5-6 days from now as cold air and storminess works its way south from the Pacific Northwest and Rockies at that time. I am sure you have heard something about this developing pattern already from your favorite media weathercaster, but I’ll try to take it a bit farther out in time, and tell you why I think you can do that in this case.
I haven’t looked at the models per se with the exception of the Enviro Can one, one in which the lasted posted output is at the start of this episode, but rather the excitement for Mr. cloud maven person was triggered by those chaotic looking, “errorful” plots we call spaghetti plots, “Lorenz plots”, if you will, posted by NOAA that tell us how sensitive a pattern is to small errors.
It seemed, too, like there was something to be learned from them, as well demonstrating a high confidence pattern of a severe weather pattern more than a week away. Many forecaster, maybe most, shy away from forecasts beyond a week because we know how often they are faulty. But there are exceptions and this is one coming up.
Valid at 5 PM AST, December 5th. This map shows a high confidence of a mammoth, cold trough at 500 millibars covering most of the US. Its “ginormous” as a friend used to say. You really don’t see anything like it, that is, like that black “quiet” zone extending so far south anywhere in the whole northern hemisphere!
OK, here we go.
Above I have added boxes in this plot to show you where the forecast is highly reliable and in another one, where its not. This is indicated by the bunching of those lines, height contours, the same ones, from many model runs starting with the introduction of slight errors. At first in these plots, with errors being tiny, there is no difference in them in the first day or two. But, as time goes on, the errors have greater impact. A metaphor: when you hit a ball off the tee, the error in the first inch of travel is nil in magnitude. But 5 seconds later? Oh my.
Here, the bunching of lines in most of the US is what got me going. Continuing the metaphor above, after 5 seconds and 300 yards of travel in this case, its analogous to 2 yards from the hole! In other words, the were essentially no effect of errors in the model runs; you slugged that golf ball perfectly.
But what does it mean, in terms of weather? That trough (the curved area where the “high confidence zone” is located, means a tremendous plunge of cold air into the West and Plains States. Don’t need to look at future maps to know this. You all know that a trough is a tongue, a wedge, of DEEP cold air that drags cold air at the surface southward on the west half of it, and drags warm air northward on the east side (in this case, toward the eastern US. The size of this wedge indicates a gigantic area of high pressure from the Arctic will be pushing DEEP into the West and Plains States as this pattern develops in the few days before December 5th.
Once established this pattern lasts for several days, a huge, deep and cold trough dominating weather throughout the US. And where the air masses clash at the ground presents ripe conditions for low centers to spin up, given a trigger aloft, like a traveling, much smaller wave in the jet stream where the lines are bunched.
Below, farther along in the sequence, these plots each one day later than the one above that illustrate how a confident pattern begins to erode. In this case, “uncertainty” in the central and eastern Pacific begins to spread eastward into our confident pattern; the blue lines start to go goofy (highlighted by boxes):
Last, here is the plot for 15 days (360 h) out in which those little errors have had their biggest effect, really done a number (haha) on the forecast confidence game, everything’s pretty unreliable except maybe in eastern Asia and the extreme western Pacific, and along the East Coast.
But, even with all of this chaos below, we can see that the model still thinks a trough (a bend in the contours to the south) will still be present in the mid and western sections of the US. Since we know that weather, once changing into a new pattern likes to stay in that pattern for weeks at a time (with brief interruptions), a reasonable forecast for December would be colder than normal in the Southwest and West overall, and in the central US, while its warmer than normal in the East, particularly the southeast US.
Precip? Always more dicey than temperatures, but CM is going with above normal in the interior of the West and in the Southwest, near normal to above normal here in SE AZ. Remember while reading this, Mr. Cloud Maven person is NOT an expert in long range forecasting, like for a month, and, he likes to see precipitation in the desert, and those wildflowers that follow. (“Truth-in-packaging” clause.)
In a couple of days, the Big Boys at the CPC, that is, the NOAA Climate Prediction Center, will be issuing their temperature and precip forecasts for December. It will be interesting to see what they make of these patterns, combined with other factors like sea surface temperature anomalies and northern hemisphere snow cover.
BTW, with a pattern like the one coming up, snow that falls during the storms is going to remain on the ground for long periods due to the lower than normal temperatures, those that snow cover helps to maintain (strong feedback loop, as we would say).
Your clouds of yesterday
If anyone is still with me, you had your Altostratus, your Altocumulus, and some Cirrus. Here they are:
8:31 AM. Altostratus, an ice cloud consisting of single crystals and snowflakes. Slight falls of snow (virga) can be seen at the bottom, that rumpled look. WAY too high above the ground to reach it, estimating 18 kft here.
3:41 PM. Altocumulus perlucidus (left), opacus center and right where they get solid. These clouds are comprised soley of liquid droplets; no virga is showing for one thing, and the greater detail, sharper edges goes with a droplet cloud composition. Droplets are almost always in far higher concentrations that are ice particles in clouds, thus, they have sharper edges. 5:22 PM. Pretty nice sunset, Altocumulus overhead left; in the distance Altocumulus floccus with heavy, funnel-looking virga fall, and extreme distance, some following Altocumulus castellanus, no virga yet.
5:24 PM. Close up of prior scene. Last row visible on the horizon is a nice little row of Ac castellanus.
