About real clouds, weather, cloud seeding and science autobio life stories by WMO consolation prize-winning meteorologist, Art Rangno
Cbs off early and often yesterday
Day went pretty much as planned for us by the models, with Cumulonimbus (“Cbs”, in texting form) clouds arising early and often, moving in from the SW, more of a fall pattern (which is approaching too fast for this Cb-manic person). If anything, those clouds arose earlier than expected with dramatic morning results;
But those storms that got here divided as they approached The Heights yesterday; cell cores went right and left with places like Black Horse Ranch down by Golder Drive getting 0.53 inches, and a place in Saddlebrooke, 0.94 inches yesterday, while we only received 0.23 inches.
Seeing this happen in real life was tough. Still, there was a last rain burst after only 0.14 had fallen that was really great as the sky began to break open and the sun was almost out when it happened. That last parting shower dropped a final 0.09 inches in just a few minutes. So, maybe we were a little lucky.
BTW, you can get area rainfall from the Pima County ALERT gauges here for the past 24 h. And, also, from the U of AZ rainlog network here. USGS. Coco. NWS climate reports. (Editorial aside: (earlier cuss word, “dammitall”, has been removed)—WHY don’t they gather all the rain reports into one comprehensive site???!!!)
The End
Oops today is supposed to be drier witih isolated Cbs, more tomorrow as moisture from TS Lowell leaks into AZ.
The extremely strong hurricane that forms after TS Lowell is sometimes, in the mods, seen to go into southern or central Cal (!) as a weak remnant circulation or stay well offshore, as in the latest 11 PM AST run from last night.So, lots of uncertainty there. Check out the spaghetti below for the bad news:
—————————–Historic footnote—————————— 1“TIme to be distracted from the task at hand…. “Generally”, of course, is a fudge word. For example, in the tropics, it was learned back in the 1960s that rain fell as hard as it could about the time the tops reached the freezing level, and before ice had formed. Didn’t rain any harder even if the tops went to 30 or 40 thousand feet! These results were confirmed in aircraft measurements in the Marshall Islands, oh, back in ’99 (Rangno and Hobbs 2005, Quart. J. Roy. Meteor. Soc.).
Some of the biggest rain drops ever measured (5-10 mm in diameter!) were in clouds in the Hawaiian Islands whose tops that had not reached the freezing level–see Bob Rauber’s 1992 paper in J. Atmos. Sci., with Ken Beard, the latter who tried to get rid of intercollegiate athletics at UCLA when he was there in the turbulent late ’60s, as did the present writer at San Jose State (a story for another day). But then, BOTH me and Ken went on to become science weathermen, not the radical kind of Weatherman, i. e., those under Bernadine and Bill, because we left our radical roots and reggae back behind in the ‘1960s, 70s, and/or 80s (well, maybe not reggae…)
Author: Art Rangno
Retiree from a group specializing in airborne measurements of clouds and aerosols at the University of Washington (Cloud and Aerosol Research Group). The projects in which I participated were in many countries; from the Arctic to Brazil, from the Marshall Islands to South Africa.
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