Here from IPS Meteostar, a favorite place to look at weather, this.
Valid only 12-13 days from now, July 9th at 5 AM Local. Heavy rain (blue region) shown for SE Arizona during the preceding 12 h ending at 5 AM! (More simply: “overnight.”
Sure, could be illusory as we know, but it does demonstrate that we are deep into the summer rain season by July 9th, as predicted by the seasonal outlook from the U of AZ. After the past desiccating months, fingers crossed.
Also, let us consume some spaghetti to see if there is any truth to this rain at all:
Valid July 9th at 5 AM Local
Yes! I love spaghetti! Upper high in correct position for good rains here, around the Four Corners area (area lacking lines), so that heavy rain COULD actually happen!
BTW, hope TV Weatherman George comes back. He is very, very good. I know I tease about TEEVEE weathermen, but maybe its only jealously, and also I don’t think I could do their job, too much (non-atmospheric) pressure! I might say something awful, in a happy talk context:
“Too bad about those people in that plane crash, but, ‘hey’, how about those Wildcats!”
No, it really does take some real explanatory and graphics skills to do TV weather these days, plus be likeable on top of those. George has those skills and attributes.
7:01 PM Virga from Altostratus clouds is illuminated by the setting sun.
Took time out from a bazillion chores concerned with moving to a new house here, and other doings for a U of WA archive project to savor another great sunset here in Catalina:
The weather way ahead
Before looking ahead, look outside now (6:20 AM) There are some gorgeous patterns in Altocu and Cirrocu!
The models have gone real bad on us, taking away rain that was once predicted here in early May. Sure, its unusual, but it could have happened. Now its pretty much gone (for now).
In the meantime, sometime very unusual is forecast for the central and southeast US. Can’t remember seeing a pattern like this so late in the winter where in really cold upper low center just goes down to Natchez, MS as in this loop. Lots of low temperature records likely to be set for early May if this pattern comes to pass.
Valid for mid-day, Tuesday, May 7th.
This continues a trend, too, this spring of well below normal temperatures in the Plains States in the middle portion of this forecast loop. They had one of the coldest springs ever in the northern Plains, and the latest measurable snowfall ever just happened in Wichita, KS. Just yesterday, the latest freeze date in the 91 years of records was established at Wichita Falls, TX, when the temperature dipped to 29 F, nine days later than any prior freeze day.
Here are some additional details, as provided by climate issues troublemaker Mark Albright, former Washington State Climatologist, and friend, who has been complaining lately that if these were high temperature records, they’d be all over the news, but low ones get swept under the media rug.
Here’s Mark’s statement from a few days ago:
“The coldest baseball game in major league history was played yesterday in Denver where the game time temperature was 23 F. It breaks the record set just last week in Denver. You can watch the video here to see the conditions at Coors Field.
“This story echoes my thoughts exactly. Why aren’t we hearing from the news outlets about the historic spring cold wave gripping the US and Canada in 2013. When it was warm last year we heard all about it.
In Fargo ND 45 consecutive days (10 March – 23 April) have passed without a single day of above normal temperature. In fact, they have yet to record a temperature warmer than 43 F this year through the 23rd of April. March 2013 averaged -10.5 F below normal and April 2013 is even colder at -12.6 F below normal so far in Fargo ND. This sets up a major risk of severe flooding in a week or two when the Spring thaw finally arrives.
Unusual cold has also been seen in interior Alaska where Fairbanks is running -14.9 F below normal in April 2013.”
While it will likely be getting warmer over the next 100 years, we seem to be afraid of reporting low temperatures and cold; that is, while it gets gradually warmer, we seem to be afraid or mentioning that weather will be pretty much doing what its always done, being abnormal a lot of the time, too. Even I get worked up if I think there is a news bias against reporting cold air! It ain’t right.
In the meantime, before taking a hopeful look way ahead; wind and dust. Today begins the well-forecast model trough and low event from more than 10 days ago for the 17th, except its happening on the 15th and 16th. It means afternoon dust and wind, wind and dust, followed by unusually cool air on the 17th. No rain likely in this one, though, like the last dust event; just some scattered Cumulus on late on the 16th and 17th.
The weather way ahead: After the dust, idle speculations of distant rain
There’s a tiny low now east of Hawaiian Islands, that, models say, will dawdle around out there for awhile, but also be drifting eastward eventually, not being picked by the jet stream and Nike swooshed to the northeast as most such lows would be. Just continues along at low latitudes until reaching us late on Thursday, April 25th. Here it is in the NOAA spaghetti plots. It would be astonishing if this itty-bitty low gets here, but, here’s the hopeful sequence in “spaghetti.” This is only brought up because its the first model rain that has shown up for southern AZ in a long, LONG time.
Valid last evening at 5 PM AST.Five days from last evening,Valid at 5 PM AST. Thursday, April 25th (00 Z 26th in Central Universal Time). Note the green CLIM line, bulging toward the Equator where it crosses northern Baja. This means over the decades, there is a tendency for a trough to be in our area. This MIGHT explain why the chance of rain here in Catalina, while small at the end of April, does not decline during the last week or so.
In case you don’t still don’t believe me, here’s a colorful model loop showing that this is supposed to happen to that low east of Hawaii. Further support can be seen in some green pixelation over Arizona from IPS MeteoStar’s rendering of our WRF-GFS model, our best, for the amounts of rain in the 12 h ending on the morning of the 26th.
I hope you’re happy now.
The End.
PS: Pretty happy myself, after learning through a bz website that this blog has value! How much? TWENTY-FIVE US dollars! Thanks tremendously to both readers!
The clouds yesterday were supposed to be “splotchy”, big clearings between interesting middle clouds like Altocumulus with long virga strands. Instead there was a vast coverage of Altostratus opacus “dullus” with long streaks of virga, with a few drops reaching the ground here and there but not here. There was some mammatus-t clouds, too. Also, the end of the clouds didn’t get here until after nightfall, not in the afternoon as anticipated from this keyboard.
The result was a much cooler day than expected, too. On TV, they were talkin’ low 80s for yesterday, a reasonable expectation given “splotchy clouds”, but in Catalinaland, it only reached 73 F under the heavy overcast. Very pleasant for being out-of-doors.
Oh, well. Maybe I’ll try building model airplanes and talk about those instead. Or make up historical anecdotes that aren’t true, mixing characters up from different eras and see if anybody notices. Now that would be fun! (Naw. Too silly.)
Here’s your day, beginning just before sunrise when some fabulous, fine-grained Cirrocumulus clouds came over top:
6:31 AM. Finely grained Cirrocumulus (Cc) top of photo, line cloud would also qualify as Cc, though the granulation is larger, still not large enought to be Altocumulus. With a little imagination, the top center cloud appears to be hanging down like those house Christmas lights.Also at 6:31 AM. Here are your splotchy clouds. I can’t believe how good the forecast is going after an hour! There some much ice in the center cloud that you’d have to call it Cirrus spissatus, but an hour ago it was likely an Altocu cas, or floccus, one at very low (not “cold”, to be proper) temperatures.
7:41 AM. Clearings between clouds disappearing! Passing by, and from a thick Altostratus opacus cloud, a display of mammatus/testicularis left center (trying to be even-handed here in cloud nomenclature).
Also at 7:41 AM. More mammatus-t over there, too. My mind has kind of drifted off to mammatus now. Quite nice dispay here. Note: Not associated with thunderstorms, as some urban myths have it. Look, I’m trying to make a dull day interesting. Its hard.1:04 PM. Line of heavy virga from what else, Altostratus opacus, tops at Cirrus levels. Chance of late sun pretty much gone by now. BTW, if you saw a time lapse of mammatus-t clouds, you would see that the “upside down Cumulus turret” look (as in the prior two shots), open up to fibrous little shafts like these.6:50 PM, just before Husky softball defeated No. 2, ASU last night in Tempe, the heart of devil-land. Good sunset, not great, as backside of Altostratus (As) clouds finally comes into view on the horizon. The lower cloud specks at the base of the As layer are those comprised of droplets, not ice, as is the higher As. This shot helps show how different in appearance clouds of the two phases, liquid and ice, are. When they’re together, mixing it up, we call that a “mixed phase” cloud. Because there are so many particles that droplet clouds can form on (typically, in continental settings, there are hundreds of thousands per liter) those clouds have more detail and the drops are too tiny to fall as precip. In the higher Altostratus layer, the concentrations of ice particles that comprise it are probably only in the tens per liter, and those ice crystals/particles are far larger than the droplets in droplet clouds. Most of the ice particles in the As, therefore, are settling downward, evaporating. However, all ice clouds can produce light precipitation to the ground, one of the THREE ways we get precip out of clouds; all ice, mixed phase, and all liquid processes. (Some textbooks I’ve seen only talk about the latter two, BTW.)
If you want, you can go to this loop from the U of WA Huskies Weather Department here and see how the little splotchy cloud thing with that passing upper trough became a big fat thing as it came by. Also in this retrospective, you should examine the U of AZ Weather Department time lapse film. You’ll be amazed at all the stuff going on in a day that looked pretty dull all in all. Also, at the end (after 5 PM AST) you’ll seen the winds aloft change completely in direction as the backside of the trough, the clearing side, approached. I saw stuff I didn’t know was happening. You’ll also see how the mammatus pouches, if I may, open up into fibrous virga. Thank you, U of AZ Weather Department, for posting these great instruction films!
Not expecting clouds for most of today, but will likely see a couple of Cirrus streaming in from the NW late.
The weather ahead
Still no precip in sight, unless you consider lithometeors a form of precip, dust accumulations, that is, such as we had a few days ago. Half inch (of dust) I predicted wasn’t that bad (hahahah). Dust accumulations expected now on the afternoon of the 16th, and again on during the afternoons of the 25th and 26th of April.
C-M alive, local, and… finished with the dust report, now back to the studio.
Wasn’t going to blog, gets boring after a while with only dry conditions ahead, but then saw this and got pretty excited, as you will, too. Might not need that extra cup of joe to get going today.
Its valid for Wednesday, April 17th, at 5 PM AST. Pretty cool, huh?
Its unusual to see a strong signal 312 h from the model start time as here, but especially so as we get later into the spring when the jet stream is slowing down all over the northern hemi and the troughs in it smaller, spaced more closely together, slower moving, too. (Summer is really goofy in that regard.)
Here, both the 00 Z (yellow lines) and 12 Z (gray lines) model runs in the past 24 h are indicating a big fat trough in the Southwest, and the bunching together of the red lines suggest a lot of confidence in that forecast. It would mean another real chance for rain here near this time, plus or minus a day or so.
The weather just ahead, Monday
In the meantime, our very next big trough, cold slam, and stupefyingly large low center, one that explodes from a tiny “Tonopah Low1” early on Monday morning, to one whose circulation extends from southern California to Missouri, virtually covering the entire western US! In spite of its gigantic extent, it still looks dry here, any rain accumulation here very “iffy.”
On the other hand, a half inch of dust accumulation is quite likely since it’ll be darn windy that day, dramatically windy. Likely to see more than 40 mph here in Catalinaland and visibility noticeably reduced in dust later on Monday.
BTW, its quite normal for low centers that are weak over the ocean to erupt into deeper lows as they move inland, during the spring. Just the opposite happens during the deep winter period when ocean lows move inland and weaken or die over the cold continent because they lose the temperature contrast that drives them. In the spring, the warming continent is “food for lows”, like spinach for Popeye (you remember Popeye, don’t you?). Ok, then in more modern terms, like that Hulk guy that got so gigantic when he got mad or something. That’s what happens in the spring to little lows and their troughs when they move inland, especially into the warm Southwest from the Pac NW.
The great news here, and I am so pumped about it, is that this giant low will be a whopper in terms of precip for so many droughty areas of the mountainous West and the central and northern Plains States. Check out the Canadian model here as an example of what’s coming to the Plains States. Just what the weatherman ordered. I’m sure it will make the news.
For reference purposes, a before you, if you will, here is the awful drought situation from the drought monitor folks in Lincoln, NB, in the central and Southwest US as it stands today:
US drought status as of April 2, 2013. Ugh
Yes, this Monday’s low will be a billion dollar baby for some. And here’s where storm chasing is truly fun because of all the happy people you’ll meet in the rainy areas, not like those storm chasers who relish seeing tornadoes and destruction, as might happen farther to the south in Texas and across the South2.
Yesterday’s clouds
Cirrus, thickening into a dull, kind of lifeless layer of Altostratus by late afternoon and evening, the latter a deep all ice cloud; no opening in it to the west for a great big sunset, nope, just gray all the way. Staring with sunrise:
5:59 AM. Cirrus/Cirrostratus over Samaniego Ridge.10:41 AM. Cirrus fibratus (the thicker patches might also be termed spissatus, but who cares? :}) There also appears to be a high thin layer of Cirrostratus. There are definitely multiple layers where clouds are located.6:08 PM. Altostratus opacus. Note the mottled look due to virga, demonstrating that its a precipitating cloud (light snow); just doesn’t get to the ground
Today’s clouds
We’ll see the end of our pretty Cirrus and Altocumulus clouds that we have this morning by mid-day to early afternoon. Enjoy them now. Might get a good sunrise bloom here in a few minutes, too. Hope so.
————— 1Usually located on top of Tonopah, Nevada
2 “Truth-in-packaging”: Mr. Cloud Maven person chased Hurricane Carla in 1961, one of the 20th century’s greatest, ended up in Seabrook, Texas, near Galveston, and let us not forget the song about Galveston (has some wind in it) as a kind of distraction, so he’s being just that tiny bit hypocritical here.
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…
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.
