Eddy brings floods

The floods?  In case you missed it, here’s the CDO wash at E. Wilds Road yesterday around 5:30 PM:

Eddy?

As in “Cyclonic Eddy”, one that had a long history of mayhem and drought relief as far back as in southern Texas, before it worked its drought-bustin’ magic in Arizona yesterday.  Here’s the trail in the water vapor imagery (you will need a LOT of bandwidth for this satellite loop since its 204 hours long!)

Or, you could take my word for it that this drought buster “Cyclonic Eddy” spun up in east Texas in late June (the 28th).Then it wobbled around Texas, exiting around Del Rio bringing welcome rains there.   Then it ambled across northern Mexico toward Guaymas, across the Sea of Cortez-Gulf of Cal to southern Baja, before a weak Pacific trough altered its path and sent it speeding northward right over Tucson yesterday.  Its remnant is located over Flagstaff at 4 AM this morning, still racing northward.

So, with a flood of tropical air ahead of it, and Eddy to work with it, we got a sample of a day in Florida; unusually low cloud bases meaning the clouds are chock full of water, and Eddy helping to cluster them together into behemoth complexes, ones that released all that water here and there in long pounding rains.   There was even a waterspout-like funnel like the ones they see all the time in the Florida Keys!

What an amazing day.  Mr. Cloud Maven person took more than 200 photos because he was out of control; the “executive  function1” of the brain, that function that weighs whether impulsive actions are really that good for you, continuously being overridden by docu-photo impulses.  (For those of you more interested in how your brain works than in the clouds I am going to describe, you can go here (Executive function in the brain Science-2011-Diamond-959-64.) ((Now, this article is behind the Science mag “pay wall”, so you’ll have to have some loose change before you can read it; don’t read it otherwise.))  (((I can’t believe all the information I am giving you today!!!)))

Continuing….I don’t think in four years I have seen clouds as large as these blow up so early just anywhere they felt like.  Here are some examples, starting with the first amazing one (to me) because it was out over the flatlands, and yet HUGE for 9 AM in the morning!

Actually it was 9:33 AM. Still it was magnificent in its grandeur at any time of the day.
12:21 PM. Suspicious line of clouds develops S-W of Catalina. Whenever you see a line like this, something is going on, like a windshift below the clouds, causing them to be solid over a long distance.

 

 

 

 

12:35 PM. Suspicious line persists, clouds fattening up. Surely contain precip at this point, but no sign of a shaft yet.

 

 

 

 

 

12:36 PM. Wisp of shaft begins to fall from this spectacular line of Cumulus congestus.
12:38 PM. Bombs away. La Cholla and Moore Rd. crossing is going to receive 2.80 inches in the next hour!
12:42 PM. Shaft matures and widens rapidly. Continuous thunder heard, emanating from high in turrets that are converting into Cb calvus *bald” to Cb capillatus (with “hair”-fibrousness)l

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

12:46 PM. Now looking like something I would expect to see in the Phillipines. Gigantic rainshaft, arcus cloud beginning to form above the outflow winds.
12:54 PM. Shaft continues to broaden, and propagate outward toward Catalina! The rest is history and I am running out of room.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now for some 24 h rain totals for the period ending late yesterday afternoon when the rains had ended.  This from our Pima County Flood control folks and their many gages.  They love measuring rain!  Its great.

24h totals for July 4th, 2012

Also go here for even more rain totals!  From the U of A, these historic data for the 24 h ending at 7 AM today.

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By 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.