I don’t know. Got burned last time because of overconfidence in spaghetti assessment, so being more circumspect seeing the same strong signal ahead in that stuff today. Here’s NOAA’s best spaghetti from last night (leftovers) for you this morning:
Valid for 5 PM April 8th. Means it will be cold for April. Some rain? You would think so, but then again, we live in a desert and its hard to have rain in a desert, especially in April, May, and June. How will I make it? I need some motivational rain for blogging! See how the red lines dip halfway down Baja! Even a few blue ones in the Southwest indicating this could be a very cold event for April.
Cirrus to pass over Catalina today!
Its not like the space station, or Comet Panstarrs, but as a CMJ (cloud maven junior) you should pretend to be pretty excited anyway. That’s all we got for awhile. That exclamation mark should be treated as like a cup of coffee, should get you going, excited about anything.
An example of yesterday’s sunset Cirrus/Cirrostratus:
6:51 PM yesterday, in case you weren’t looking, though to me, that would be quite odious.
That title is so TEEVEE: “Stay tuned for ‘Jeff’s’ forecast at 11 PM (6 hours from the title announcement) to find out.” So silly. Yet, when I look deep inside myself, I find I wouldn’t mind saying things like that if was making a LOT of money to say things like that, like those TEEVEE people do. TEEVEE people making a LOT of money, its unbelievable really, how much they make, and pointing that out is kind of a theme here. Always has been, and its not just because I am not making any money myself, though it might be.
For vocational guidance purposes, for the reader considering a career in meteorology, I introduce the following graphic:
This graphic1 was based on a 1980s story in the San Francisco Chronicle about two TEEVEE meteorologists for KGO. The main guy made $400,000, and the weekend guy they had just pinched from another station for fill in and weekends, $225,000! It was forwarded to me by my mom who apparently wanted to make me feel bad about being in research at the University of Washington.
Oh, yeah, the answer to the title question?
Yes.
Let us begin and end our discussion with spaghetti:
Valid for 5 PM AST Sunday, March 31st
You can see a big trough is guaranteed here this day (and will be affecting us the day before, March 30th). Look at how the red lines cluster over northern Mexico. That means it a very confident forecast, say compared with that just east of the Hawaiian Islands.
Then, WAY out there…..
Another moderately confident rain from a trough is foretold for April 5-6th. This trough has a trajectory more or less straight out of the Pacific, and would have more tropical air in it compared with the one shown here in spaghetti.
The End.
——————-
1Like all political cartoons, a certain liberty has been taken with the facts. Today you would likely have to have a DEGREE in meteorology to even work at a TEEVEE station in Pumpkin Corners, Nebraska.
An example of taking liberties with facts for humor is this classic insight into President Reagan’s brain from former University of Washington student, and Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist, David Horsey:
Mr. Reagan did not believe that California was that big in size, so we know that’s one thing wrong.
2:11 PM. Cirrus uncinus march in tandem across the NW sky.2:19 PM. One Cirrus uncinus element playfully mimics Comet Panstarrs, trying to get in on some of the publicity: “I can be a comet, too!”
Cirrus get this way after an initial “formation burst”, often like a bunch of porous tiny Cumulus clouds with very slight updrafts, maybe centimeters (inches) per second. But those there is enough structure/variation in those tiny updrafts that some of the ice crystals that form get larger than most and begin to fall out. These bursts of formation, from vertically-pointed radars, are usually in a thin layer of air that has no wind shear, that is, the layer is moving at the same speed over a thin depth. So the clouds that form in this “mixed out” layer, are vertical.
However, when the largest ice crystals settle out, they usually encounter layers of air where the wind twists in direction and it loses some velocity compared with the thin layer in which the clouds originally formed. So, those lonely larger crystals get left behind. And they usually fall into drier air and gradually start getting smaller, the trail of the uncinus flattening because they can’t fall so fast as they get smaller. Its kind of sad when you think about it; getting left behind, withering away, usually all the way to nothing at all, being vaporized. We used to sing about being vaporized during the Cold War, or at least, the band X-15 did there in SEA, an anti-“pop” band.
Below, a Cirrus formation burst. Look at how they look like tiny, porous Cumulus clouds:
2:39 PM. Cluster of new Cirrus elements appears–could be termed Cirrus floccus maybe. Some fine trails are already beginning to emit from these elements (center where its starting to look like chicken scratches. The youngest burst is in the upper third of the photo.
The weather ahead
NOAA’s not helping out with any green rain “pixies” (aka, “pixels” in model forecasts) in southern Arizona through the end of the month. That’s really sad. However, there is a close call on the 28-29th. It will get windy. and much cooler at that time.
Any blobs of anomaly in the US future again? They’re back! Happen around the 25th (as rendered by IPS MeteoStar):
Valid on March 24th, 5 PM. The warm and the cold exceptionalism at 500 millibars, almost always together as a couple.
So, while we’re complaining about another March heat spell, the folks back in the East, and especially the southeast, will be complaining royally about how cold it is for late March. Few will be happy.
Spaghetti virtually confirms this pattern. So, let’s say you have a brother and his family living in Asheville, NC, maybe he’s a retired policeman or something, you’ll want to call him and advise him of some cold air ahead, as an example of taking action on the weather ahead you’ve just found out about…
Lotta high temperature records falling in Arizona lately, info courtesy of U of WA Husky researcher, Mark Albright’s web page here.
Arizona daily record temperatures and precipitation
SXUS75 KPSR 150830
RERPSR
RECORD EVENT REPORT
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE PHOENIX AZ
130 AM MST FRI MAR 15 2013
...RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURES SET AT PHOENIX AND YUMA...
A RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURE OF 95 DEGREES WAS SET AT PHOENIX AZ
YESTERDAY. THIS BREAKS THE OLD RECORD OF 91 SET IN 2007.
A RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURE OF 96 DEGREES WAS SET AT YUMA AZ
YESTERDAY. THIS BREAKS THE OLD RECORD OF 95 SET IN 1934.
$$
SXUS75 KTWC 150104
RERTWC
RECORD EVENT REPORT
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE TUCSON AZ
535 PM MST THU MAR 14 2013
...RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURES SET FOR THURSDAY MAR 14...
LOCATION RECORD OLD RECORD
TUCSON INTL AIRPORT 92 87/2007
BISBEE-DOUGLAS AIRPORT 85 83/2007
KITT PEAK 71 71/1972
PICACHO PEAK 90 90/2007
$$
SXUS75 KPSR 150013
RERPSR
RECORD EVENT REPORT...UPDATED
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE PHOENIX AZ
0511 PM MST THU MAR 14 2013
...RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURES SET AT PHOENIX AND YUMA...
A RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURE OF 95 DEGREES WAS SET AT PHOENIX AZ TODAY.
THIS BREAKS THE OLD RECORD OF 91 SET IN 2007.
A RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURE OF 96 DEGREES WAS SET AT YUMA AZ TODAY.
THIS BREAKS THE OLD RECORD OF 95 SET IN 1934.
$$
SXUS75 KFGZ 150057
RERFGZ
RECORD EVENT REPORT
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE FLAGSTAFF, AZ
556 PM MST THU MAR 14 2013
...RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURES FOR NORTHERN ARIZONA ON MAR 14 2013...
CITY (PERIOD OF RECORD) NEW HIGH PREVIOUS RECORD/YEAR
PAYSON (1949 - 2013) 78 78 (TIED) IN 2007
PRESCOTT (1899 - 2013) 77 77 (TIED) IN 2007
PRESCOTT AIRPORT (1948 - 2013) 79 78 IN 2007
SELIGMAN (1905 - 2013) 81 81 (TIED) IN 2007
THESE RECORDS ARE PRELIMINARY PENDING OFFICIAL REPORTS.
$$
CO
SXUS75 KPSR 142314
RERPSR
RECORD EVENT REPORT
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE PHOENIX AZ
0414 PM MST THU MAR 14 2013
...RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURES SET AT PHOENIX AND YUMA...
A RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURE OF 93 DEGREES WAS SET AT PHOENIX AZ TODAY.
THIS BREAKS THE OLD RECORD OF 91 SET IN 2007.
A RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURE OF 96 DEGREES WAS SET AT YUMA AZ TODAY.
THIS BREAKS THE OLD RECORD OF 95 SET IN 1934.
$$
SXUS75 KTWC 140034
RERTWC
RECORD EVENT REPORT
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE TUCSON AZ
534 PM MST WED MAR 13 2013
...RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURE BROKEN AT THE TUCSON INTL AIRPORT THIS
AFTERNOON...
A RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURE OF 89 DEGREES WAS SET AT THE TUCSON
INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT TODAY. THE OLD RECORD OF 88 DEGS WAS SET IN
1989.
$$
Here's what a giant blob of anomaly over the West looks like;
not sure I've seen one this big before, kind of a "planet out of control" map:
The height anomaly pattern at 500 millibars for 5 PM AST yesterday. They don’t get bigger than this. To reach the height of the 500 millibar pressure level you have to go up in a hot air balloon higher than usual because the pressure doesn’t change so rapidly when you go up in a hot air balloon and its hot (air has lower density). But, its cold in New Hampshire, too cold for late March so perhaps we can take some solace in that as part of another “warm in the West, cold in the East” pattern. (See low height anomaly off New England coast.)The green line is “climatology” at 500 millibars. Note how that green line bulges southward in the Southwest indicating a prevalence of troughs at this time of year. We have the opposite now, but its fading fast. Look at how the yellow and green lines are out of phase.
The weather ahead
LOTS of troughs in our future once this bag of hot air over us dissipates, but not one of those troughs is far enough south or strong enough to bring rain over the next two weeks. Ugh. Our best chance for anything still remains around the 21st–a trough in the area guaranteed, but only the thermometer will get a workout from it, cooling off from the warmth of the previous day, likely some noticeable wind, as per usual in the spring with trough passages.
So, that’s about it for weather, thermometer getting some work, the anemometer some, too, but not your rain gauge. Oh, me.
However, with approaching troughs, there’ll be some nice Cirrus clouds and with them, occasional nice sunsets and sunrises in the days ahead.
Yesterday, that is. It felt like I never left. Only 49 F here; was 55 F in Seattle yesterday.
But the main thing that made it seem “so Seattle” was the persistent low Stratocumulus overcast, almost no sun whatsoever, and a little rain. We picked up another 0.03 inches in a couple of morning episodes of R– (an old weather texting1 shorthand for “very light rain”) to bring the storm total here to 0.55 inches. Of course, the best part of that overcast was that it allowed the ground to be damp for another day, helping the spring grasses and wildflowers by keeping the soil moisture in the soil and not flying away under a hot sun. The worst part of the overcast that lasted almost all day, was that Mr. Cloud Maven person had the day completely wrong–thought it would break open in the afternoon to “partly cloudy” and so he was as gloomy as the sky. You see, as a weather forecaster, you can’t even really enjoy a nice day if you didn’t predict it. Had some sad 75 F days in Seattle when I only predicted 69 F; everybody having summer fun but me.
Enough nostalgia, here are the clouds, even if you have no interest in seeing such boring clouds again:
6:56 AM. Interesting little punctuated lenticular. Mr. “CMP” has just finished his long blog and thinks the sky will break open in the afternoon. Hah!
8:00 AM. Stratocumulus tops Samaniego Ridge–with the turrets, you might lean toward adding the descriptor, “castellanus.” Note blue sky here, if you didn’t see any at all yesterday. No precip evident.8:02 AM. Looking north toward S-Brooke. Fine shafts of precip emit from Stratocumulus clouds indicating those regions in the cloud where there was more liquid water at one time, that is, where these clouds are humped up like those Sc clouds on Samaniego Ridge in the prior photo (the precip from those clouds may have been out of sight). But, was the precip shown here due to ice or the colliding drops process? I wasn’t sure at this point. You see, after a storm, the clouds can be real clean, almost oceanic-like meaning they have LOW droplet concentrations, and when the droplet concentrations are low, the drops are usually larger and can get to sizes where they can stick together when they collide (think 30-40 micron droplet diameters). You probably don’t have a clue about those sizes, but it sounds great if you see rain like this and tell a neighbor that, “those clouds might have drops larger than 30-40 microns in diameter near cloud tops.” Instant neighborhood expert!
8:06 AM. Then the clouds to the west of Oro Valley and Catalina began to produce fine precipitation and advance on Catalina. How nice. Definitely was looking like a true drizzle event (caused by colliding drop rain formation process), at least to me at this point. That process is a rare event in AZ when very light rain or true misty drizzle (tiny drops, close together) forms like that. Usually our clouds have too many droplets from natural and anthropogenic sources and the cloud droplets stay too small to collide and stick together, instead bumping around like marbles with all the surface tension they got. And then because they’re all tiny, they don’t have much impact when they hit, there’s not a lot of velocity difference like there would be in a cloud with a broad droplet spectrum, the kind of spectrum we see in “clean” clouds where drops bigger than 30 microns are a plenty. Note trails of precip coming down in center. BTW, to go way off topic, to distract from how bad my forecast was, in “hygroscopic” seeding, particles like salt are introduced at cloud base to encourage the formation of rain through this process in polluted Cumulus clouds. Worked in Saudi, based out of Riyadh, winter of 2006-07, flying in a Lear jet, helping to select Cu for random seeding using that methodology2. Our office at the government met building, I recall, was cleaned by the “Bin Laden” group. Hmmmm. Maybe its a common name there, to go even farther off topic.10:09 AM. So Seattle! (Have to make up for that last bloated caption.)4:49 PM. And that’s your entire day.6:27 PM. Sunset tried to do something. But, like the day, it was like that sugar icing on a stale dried out cinnamon roll, just didn’t quite make it, though cinnamon rolls are quite good as a rule.
Today’s clouds
Some residual small Cumulus, maybe clumping into a larger group this morning for a bit, which you would then refer to as Stratocumulus. Should gradually diminish in size and coverage until almost completely clear in the afternoon. Expect a north wind in the afternoon, too.
The weather ahead
There isn’t any, well, not right away, but WAY ahead….
Chances for rain begin to pick up after the 19th as we enter the “zone of curl”, “cyclonic curls” in the upper atmosphere with a lot of “vorticity” in them again, with temperatures falling back to normal values. Pretty tough to have warm weather for long at this time of year in AZ. You see, its troughs like to “nest in the West” in March, April, and May, even when they’re not strong and far enough south to bring rain, maybe only wind. Its a climo thing, and it causes many areas of the West to see an increase in precipitation in March from February, and also halts the rapid rise in spring temperatures (especially in Seattle, hahahaha, sort of).
This because the global circulation pattern, responding to the climb of the sun in the sky and warming continents in the northern hemisphere, those forces acting on the position of the jet stream, and weakening it here in the NH (northern hemisphere), is changing the jet stream pattern so that storms begin to move southeastward from the north Pacific across the Pac NW into the Great Basin area in the spring, bringing cold north Pacific air into the West. There was a great report about this phenomenon by old man Bjerknes out of UCLA with his Ph. D. grad student, Chuck Pyke, back in the mid-1960s. Pyke was a UCLA sports nut, BTW, to add some color to this account.
We won’t see that “trough in the West” pattern for awhile here in our “oasis of warmth” now about to begin, but count on it returning, as it appears to do late in the model runs from last night. Climo is forcing it.
The End, except for footnotes.
——————————————- 1Yeah, that’s right. Weathermen, as we would say it then, were way ahead of their time, “texting” each other long before kids thought of “texting.” You might write a weather friend, if you could find one: “We had a TSTM to the S with FQTLTGCCCG ALQDS last night for a few H. MVD N.” PIREPS, SIGMETS, too, were all “texted” and texted by teletype! Tell your kids.
2Was under the aegis of Research Applications Program (RAP) at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, CO. Money was good…though not nearly as much as you would make as a TEEVEE weather presenter (hahaha). I was a post retiree guest scientist for RAP NCAR. Clouds could be real bumpy there in Saudi, thought I was gonna die once as bottom dropped out of the Lear going into Cumulonimbus at night that one time. Pilot liked to cut it close between the hail shafts and the rising parts of the Cu with little or no precip, using his aircraft radar. But sometimes, it was a little too close…and we got into the shear zone between a strong updraft and the downdraft.
This is so great, today’s badly needed substantial rain for our Cal pops and other wildflowers, now beginning to bloom. You may have seen some poppies along North Oracle Road in the past week.
Here is the current radar and cloud situation from IPS MeteoStar (loop is here). You can see three rain bands, very similar in configuration to the historic snowstorm of February 20th that also had three bands. What’s potent and interesting is that the lead band with precip just to the west of us (passing over Ajo at this time). That cloud band is usually just that, composed of thick, middle and high clouds (Alstostratus/Cirrus/Altocumulus) without any precip or just virga. And its usually also followed by the “clearing before the storm”, the ones that lead on many occasions to those super spectacular sunsets before the surge of low clouds and precip. You can see that “clearing before the storm” aspect in southwest AZ in the image below.
But, as you can see, THIS cloud band “before the storm”, has developed some rain. So, in this case, we have a chance to pick up some light rain before the major bands arrive later in the day. You can also follow the progress of the storm on those great WunderMaps here. Might be on this site ALL DAY.
4:10 AM combination satellite and radar, the best on the web IMO.
Here, too, is the University of Washington’s 500 mb map for 5 AM AST this morning showing the flow at about 18,000 feet above sea level. You can see the three bands here, too, and a fourth taking shape in the center of the low, now off southern California. You will see that the strongest winds at this level are over Tucson now, meaning rain is imminent, and it is. Already had a trace, a few drops fell at 4:06 AM. Expect lightning in AZ today, maybe around here, too, with the second or third bands.
Here’s the loop U of AZ weather department’s mod output from last night’s 11 PM run, which gives you an hour by hour account of the storm over the next two days. While the main bang is today, a lobe of cold air aloft follows it and scattered light showers continue into tomorrow. What will help Catalina’s rainfall is that the wind will be more westerly rather than southerly at cloud levels during and after the storm, which means they will pile up on this side of the Catalina Mountains the best, and which should do better than other areas. The U of AZ mod knows something of this, and you can see the precip in the panel below extending from the Catalinas toward the west and over us. Its due to this frequent occurrence during and following storms that really boosts our winter precip totals over surrounding areas of similar elevation.
There are a lot of parameters available from this output. You can look at the whole range of them here.
Valid for 3 AM AST tomorrow morning, March 9th.
Yesterday’s clouds
It was asserted yesterday that there would be some Cumulus and Cirrus by Mr. Cloud Maven person.
Here they are:
4:16 PM. Forecast of Cumulus cloud(s) verifies! It was small, but great.6:10 PM. Cirrus creep underway from the west.
Sure, it was clear practically the whole day, and some people might complain that they got eye strain looking for Cirrus and Cumulus clouds during the day…. But then, you can find people who will complain about anything.
Its not about hairdressing. Its about the “curl of the low” and its jet stream configuration, as shown here by here (IPS MeteoStar):
Valid for Wednesday, March 20th, 2013. Want to see if anyone reads the captions.
Oh, shoot, this is for a storm and cold blast about 13 days from now! (Secretly, with the storm tomorrow so well predicted at this point by all—might as well show you that it might not be the end of March storms.)
OK, lets try again to get a more timely forecast map:
Oh fer Pete’s Sake. This is valid for 256 h from last night, or the morning of March 18th! But we’re in the curl AGAIN!
Oh, shoot, this ones for 256 h or almost 11 days from last night! What is going on here?
One more try for something relevant, well. its all relevant (suggests we’re in the “trough bowl”:
Finally, valid for 11 AM AST tomorrow morning, this from last night’s WRF-GFS run.
Maps look kinda similar don’t they? Hence, talk about the “bowl” phenomenon where troughs “remember” where they’ve been like your horse does, and they know where they should be. There’s a long fair weather gap between the one tomorrow and the ones later; don’t get fooled by thinking winter’s over.
This last one for tomorrow suggests the rain is either here or imminent at 11 AM AST as the jet core at 500 millibars, is already deployed to the southeast of us by that time. The timing of all of what happens tomorrow is pretty good for rain amounts since with the chilling air aloft (making it easier for air to rise from near the surface), the cold front will blast across Catalina in the later afternoon. This means that the little heating that we will get tomorrow, limited by windy conditions and clouds, will work to plump up the Cumulonimbus clouds in the frontal band–oh, yeah, there should be some, and that means what?
Graupel (soft hail)! Shafts of them, here and there in the frontal band. The presence of graupel, and it’ll be bashing snowflakes and ice crystals on the way down (the latter can’t get out of the way fast enough) means the clouds will get “plugged in”, electrified, due to those collisions because they generate electricity and lightning is virtually certain in AZ tomorrow. Talk about excitement! Cbs, graupel, lightning, a strong frontal passage, strong winds, and a greater than 100-200 percent chance of measurable rain in Catalina! It doesn’t get better than that!
This pattern also favors better accumulations of precip here with the winds being more southwesterly to west at cloud levels. Amounts? Mod, the very excellent U of AZ mod run indicates Catlania-ites will get around half an inch! I am so excited since this is close to the median amount (0.60 inches) forecast from this microphone two and more days ago! Something must be wrong! Here’s the AZ cumulative precip map for Arizona. Look at all the precip in the State, about an inch and a half of liquid expected on top of Ms. Mt. Lemmon! This is going to be so good for our drought.
Valid for 3 PM AST on the 9th. Most of this falls on the 8th, but passing showers add that bit more into the 9th.
Yesterday’s clouds
They were great, such as they were, and before leaving for NM and points east. Take a look:
6:56 AM. I wanted to hug these little Cirrus uncinus clouds. So cute, just trying like anything to make a little snowstorm to water the ground. Just look at those long tails!
7:47 AM. Then you got to see a Catalina lenticular cloud. How nice was that? Note parhelia on the right.8:04 AM. A nice, patterned Altocumulus perlucidus translucidus.
All in all, I thought it was quite a good day for you. As usual, thinking about others here.
Today’s clouds
Today we’ll likely see some precursor Cirrus, maybe a flake of Cumulus here and there. I will predict more clouds, if necessary, as they occur.
First, a water year (Oct-Sept) update. You won’t like it:
One caveat about February’s total: It might be as much as 0.25 inches higher since a good bit of snow during the historic February 20th storm probably did not get into the Davis Vantage Pro gage located some six feet above ground level where wind raises havoc with snow measurements in particular. Gauges day had more all around mine. You can go to the U of AZ rainlog.org home, plug in the date (in this case the 20th, and see what other folks had compared to the crummy 0.52 inches the gauge here got following the meltdown. Generally, while there are a couple of goofy obs on the rainlog site, the amounts around here were 0.70 to 0.90 inches. Thus, our February 2013 total is more likely around 1.20 inches, not 0.95 inches as shown in this graph. Dang.
Here’s the March daily measurable rain climo:
Current and just passed weather
Traced last night, I’m sure you logged it. Drops were falling, pretty big ones, at 2:42 AM. Only lasted about a two minutes. If you want to see what happened in radar and clouds, go here. Shouldn’t be surprising that it traced here given all the virga, and isolated spots where drops were already hitting the ground last evening.
Here are some shots after I got back from PHX-Anthem late yesterday. Some drops hit the window, too. First, I thought I would share with you a wildlife response to coming changes in the weather, something you’ll begin to notice as you traverse the long road to cloud maven juniordom. Here, shelled creatures demonstrate a preoccupation with the sky over due to increasing Cirrus cloudiness in Anthem, late on March 2nd, the day BEFORE all the heavy virga. Its something to note when these creatures do this. They are telling you something about the coming weather. Well, anyway, that’s what you should say when you see this turtle formation; your neighbors will then think you’re some kind of turtle “whisperer” AND a weather guru all in one.
At the Anthem Community Park: Wildlife shown here were clearly becoming increasingly concerned about the thickening cloud cover late on the 2nd.
3:53 PM. Tentacles of virga from deep Altostratus clouds reach down toward the Tortolita Mountains.5:53 PM. Altostratus with virga and mammatus (left side), a term reflecting certain female mammalian characteristics. As I have reported here in the past, some of the female grad students at the U of WA weather department were offended by such nomenclature, asking why such clouds couldn’t have have been termed, “testicularis” (quite an unseemly term, really) and drew lines through a label of a wall print of “mammatus” on a fifth floor hallway. The culprit was never caught, and the “graffiti” was never removed. Makes you realize the kind of issues that budding, bright female meteorologists at the U of Washington are thinking about. BTW, this also demonstrates that the notion of “mammatus/testicularis” are always associated with, or indicating a thunderstorm, is quite goofy.6:30 PM. Had a late “bloom” as a distant hole in the overcast let the sun under light our Altostratus clouds with virga. Only lasted a few minutes. Nice.
The weather ahead
Of course, the big media weather stars with their gigantic salaries are all over this next storm, I am sure. Its mind boggling how much money they make having fun with weather on TEEVEE…
Here’s is the latest forecast from our friends in Canada, most of whom want to live here in the good ole USA!; that’s why the entire population of Canada is so clustered near the US border. You can feel them up there (hahah, I like to tease my Canadian relatives):
Valid for 5 AM AST, Friday, March 8th. “Vorticity maximum poised to strike AZ from low over central Cal. “Vorticity maximum”? Cloud and weather maker. There’s some writing on this; hope you can read it.“Bee” sting! LOOK at all the precip indicated for AZ! THis is so great, one of the great model forecasts of our time, well, this winter anyway.
Range of amounts with this next storm: I think in view of the wetting up of the models, I too, will wet it up. Bottom amount, almost surely in the bag, 0.25 inches now, up from 0.10 inches. Top? Wow, in view of passage of this system in the afternoon, you have to think about enhanced convection, thunderstorms here and there, and with those, and luck, the top has to be around 1.00 inches now. Notice how similar the track of this in the Candadian model is to our historic Feb. 20 storm, one in which amounts over half an inch to an inch were the norm. Can’t wait to see this go by, no matter what!
Well, here it is, the NOAA Catalina spaghetti output for March 8th, 5 PM AST, hold the sauce:
The 564 decameter height contours for 500 millibars over Catalina and environs (in the center) on March 8th at 5 PM. The yellow line is the 5 PM AST model prediction, and the gray pixel in the lower left corner is what’s left of the same contour (after I cut and pasted) yesterday’s 5 AM AST prediction. They were pretty much showing the same thing.
The plot at left, with likely a Guinness record for a long, thin caption, pretty much guarantees a big trough of cold air here by then, another door opens into winter, which seems to be gone right this moment, and, being March, you might be thinking, “la-dee-dah, no more winter here in southeast Arizona.” But as I often point out to my reader, and while trying to be a bit delicate about it, “You’d be so WRONG! I can’t even describe how WRONG you would be!” So keep that balloon-like parka ready, heck, there could even be some snowflakes with this.
And, of course, I am a be little disappointed, well, royally, because you should have seen this coming in the red dot-plot at left for Catalina on March 8th already, and I wouldn’t have to admonish you again. Oh, well.
BTW, the “red dot” is a baseball term used to describe the appearance of a slider coming at the batter–there’s a red dot in the center of the ball caused by the spin and where most of the red lacings appear to be concentrated because the pitcher had to grip the ball a certain way. Seen’em, at one time. Of course, you wouldn’t remember the great pitchers like Lee Goldammer of Canova, SD, or Dave Gassman; the latter amassing over 4,000 strikeouts in South Dakota summer baseball league play. It was a big story in the Mitchell Republic–they keep track of that stuff there (amazing and charming). Lee Goldammer pitched a DOUBLE header and his team won the SD State Tournament back in the late 1960s. (All true!) You see, Lee Goldammer struck me out on three pitches in 19721. Man he was good! I had hardly gotten to the plate, and I was walking back again!
Had a nice sunset a couple of days ago, some pretty Cirrus clouds again. Where I’m from (Seattle), Cirrus and sunsets are generally obscured by Stratus, Stratocumulus, and every other kind of cloud imaginable so that you don’t see them often because those clouds extend for thousands of miles to the west where the sun is setting.
6:28 PM, February 27th, not last night.
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1I was working that summer for North American Weather Consultants as a “radar meteorologist” in Mitchell, SD, directing up to four cloud seeding aircraft around thunderstorms. But when it wasn’t raining, I could play baseball for the Mitchell Commercial Bank team. The project was under the aegis of the South Dakota School of Mines, was statewide in 1972. Unfortunately, for the people on the ground, one of the aircraft was seeding a storm in June of that year hat dropped 14 inches of rain in the Black Hills, and the ensuing flash flood took over 200 lives. “Hey”, it wasn’t one of my aircraft. Ours were in the other end of the State.
Cloud seeding was absolved in the disaster, which was correct; the weather set up that day did it. No puny aircraft releasing stuff could have had any effect whatsoever. However, had that 14 inches filled a dry reservoir to the top and saved a city from a water famine, what would the seeding company have claimed in that case?
I know. It happened when I worked a project in India, the water famine there making the cover of Time magazine in 1975. The reservoirs in Madras (now, “Chennai”), India, where I was assigned by Atmospherics, Inc., as a “radar meteorologist” whose job again was to direct a seeding aircraft around storms, were at the bottom, just about nothing left, when I arrived on July 14th, 1975.
But on the third day I was there, July 16th, 1975, a colossal group of thunderstorms developed over the catchment area of the Madras reservoirs and, naturally, our one twin-engined Cessna was up seeding it. It was my job to see that we had a plane up around the thunderstorms.
Five to 10 inches fell in that complex of thunderstorms with tops over 50,000 feet, and there was a flow into the Madras reservoir (oh, really?) for the first time in the month of July in about 14 years. July is normally a pretty dry month in the eastern part of India, with Madras averaging just over 4 inches, only a little more than we do here in Catalina in July. The main rainy season in Madras is October and November, during the “northeast” monsoon. This is what those giants looked like:
Looking west-northwest from the Madras International AP at Meenambakkam, India, 1975.
But as a meteorologist, I saw that a low center had formed aloft over southern India, weakening the normally dry westerly flow of the “southwest monsoon” across southern India after it goes over the western Ghats. This weakening allowed the moist air of the Bay of Bengal to rush westward and collide with that drier westerly flow and set up a “convergence zone” where the two winds clashed and the air was forced upward forming huge, quasi-stationary Cumulonimbus clouds.
Below, what I look like when I am in India and starting to be skeptical about this whole thing, “Is this going to be another cloud seeding chapter like the one in the Colorado Rockies, to graze the subject of baseball again?”
First row, 2nd from left. Our pilot sits next to me.
As before in Rapid City, the weather set up the deluge; no aircraft releases could have made the least difference in such powerful thunderstorms. While the leader of the seeding project did not take credit for the odd flow into the reservoir that July, it was pointed out to the media, without further comment that, “yes, we were up seeding it.”
The odd storm with that comment, sans a description of the weather set up that did it, made it too obvious to the uninformed that seeding had done it. The Indian met service was, of course, outraged, and did their best to “fill in the blanks”, but the sponsor of the project, the Tamil Nadu state government, was unconvinced because it was obvious to them what had happened, and, after all, it was what they paid for!
I had already been disillusioned while working as a forecaster for a big, randomized cloud seeding project in Durango, Colorado by 1975, and this project was to add more “fuel to the reanalysis fire” that I was later to be known for. (hahaha, “known for”; I was despised in some quarters for checking their work after they had published it and it was being cited by big scientists, and I mean huge, like the ones in the National Academies, but like you when you thought summer was here NOW and there would be no more cold weather, THEY were so WRONG! I can’t even describe how WRONG those national academy scientists were, like the ones in Malone et al 1974 in their “Climate and Weather Modification; Progress and Problems” tome.) ((I knew they were wrong because they talked about clouds and weather associated with cloud seeding experiments in the Rockies, and I was seeing how at odds those clouds and weather was with the way it had been portrayed in the journal literature by the scientists who conducted the precursor experiments to the one I was working on in Durango.)) (((Wow, this is quite a footnote, if it is still one.))) ((((Still worked up about that 1974 National Academy of Sciences report, but don’t get me going on the 2003 updated one, which they botched royally, including not even citing the work I did correctly! How bad is that??????)))) As the title of today states, “seeing red.”
The reason for going to India in the first place was that it had been indicated in our peer-reviewed journals that randomized seeding in Florida, that clouds like ones in India, had responded to cloud seeding. Besides, I had an ovwerwhelming desire to see giant, tropical Cumulus and Cumulonimbus clouds up close! BTW, the Florida results fizzled out in a second randomized phase.
It was hard to see all the smoke around yesterday morning after the two previous stunning days with high visibility. I was thinking I had never seen so much smoke in Catalina as I saw yesterday morning. Here is some photos of that awful event:
7:56 AM. Heavy dark smoke layer evident to SW. Some Stratus clouds also were present.
8:40 AM. Normally, in my experience here, such smoke is husbanded to that region south of Pusch Ridge. But no, not yesterday, its HERE! What an awful view this was!8:45 AM. In this photo not taken while driving1, you can see that there are TWO plumes the lower one drifting south from the area of the Golder Ranch-Sutherland Wash development of expensive custom homes, some of which might have been burning wood for heat, or something else woody, while aloft is a second, separate plume. I could not tell where the higher one came from, even in this time lapse from the U of AZ. Note how in the movie the Stratus clouds in the morning change direction in movement. The movement at first is from the west-northwest (left to right), and those clouds contained the higher smog layer. So, could it have been from PHX??? ———– 1Smokey the Bear reminds drivers that only you can prevent smoky, well, a lot of it anyway.
In the afternoon, the smog was gone, mixed through a greater depth, the layering destroyed by the convection, those rising currents and compensating downward ones, that cream any morning layering. The dilution effect, and it also could have been that the aerosol load (smog) decreased with time, made things look much more clear. To this eye, there was still a lot of smog present, just diluted in the space between the ground and the bases of these small Cumulus clouds shown below. Still, there were so many pretty scenes on this horseback ride with a friend that I took more than 100 photos! Some water was present in some of the little washes, always nice to encounter, and some vividly green spots of of emerging growth (shown last).
The final point worth mentioning for pedantic reasons, is that yesterday afternoon’s TUS sounding indicated the same cloud top temperatures as the day before, about -12 to -13 C. Yet, there was no ice dropping out of those clouds. The day before, with the SAME cloud top temperature, ice and virga were widespread.
What’s up with that?
Ah, the complexities of ice formation in clouds!
When clouds are small and have a lot of droplets per liter in them, likely hundreds of thousands yesterday, given all the smog around, the drops end up being especially small because so many form on some of the smog particles (called “cloud condensation nuclei”).
In repeated flights at the University of Washington, we found that the resistance to form ice is dependent on not just on temperature, once thought to be the sole controller of ice formation, but droplet sizes in clouds as well. Small droplets sizes in clouds meant they were less likely to form ice, given the SAME cloud top temperature. Altocumulus lenticularis clouds are the poster child for ice formation resistance in clouds with their tiny drops, often having to be colder than -30 C before ice forms. On the other hand, clouds in the pristine Arctic around Barrow in the summer time, over the oceans away from continents, and in deep, warm based clouds even polluted ones, form ice at temperatures higher than -10 C when the drops in the clouds are large and have reached precipitation sizes (more than 100 microns in diameter to millimeter sizes).
So, it seems likely that yesterday, our shallower, pollutted clouds had smaller droplets in them than those deeper, less polluted clouds of the prior day in which we saw so much ice form in the later afternoon with about the same cloud top temperatures as yesterday. It is also the case, that when clouds are in large patches as they were the day before, that ice formation has more time to take place, and that, too, may be a factor.
Complicated enough? Yep.
2:52 PM. In the Catalina Mountains on the back from the Deer Camp trail. Cumulus humilis dot skies. No ice evident.
2:18 PM. Cumulus humilis sitting around over Sutherland Heights, and the Oro Valley
The weather ahead
After another round of cold, this one dry cold just ahead for us, the heat is on by early March, and along with that heat in most of the West in early March, likely record cold in portions of the East. Check this 500 mb map out for the afternoon of March 2nd, produced by last night’s WRF-GFS model run at 5 PM AST, rendered by IPS MeteoStar:
Look at the size of that cold trough and low center! Huge!
That isn’t the only weather news ahead, cold in the East, warm in the West in March. Our upcoming cold shock that hits on Sunday, is caused by an unusually powerful upper trough that dips down into Texas after it blows by us, then roars northeastward across the South on Monday and Tuesday. Expect to read about godawful tornadoes in the South on Monday and/or Tuesday.
