You have to see this for yourself, from IPS Meteostar! Its unbelievable. The National Center for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) and its “zuperkomputors” have blessed us in their billions of calculations with not one, not two, but four-five days of rain in the next 15 days! FOUR different storms (!) bring rain and snow to AZ ! I am so happy! I am tired of dust here in Catalina land! Two of these events, the storm late today into tomorrow, and the one on Monday, are pretty much “in the bag”, so at least two storms can give us something in the way of rain.
The following two, storms three and four, are “out there”, November 12th (Saturday), and the last, WAY out there, also on fubball day , Saturday, November 19th. These last two, both depicted as major storms, are of course, dubious and lots of things get falsified in the model predictions that far in advance. The highs and low pressure areas are almost never where they are predicted to be that far out. ONLY if a bunch of ensemble runs shows the same thing can we weather anticipators have any confidence that far out. Remember the big, bad storm of January 2010 in which Cat Land got almost three inches in 48 hours? Well, that storm was predicted consistently in “ensemble” runs, where slight modifications of starting conditions usually produce lots of different outcomes one to two weeks in advance. But with that huge storm, the ensembles were not so scattered all over in their predictions; they were all saying a giant low was to strike the California coast and go into Arizona. So in THOSE cases, the “signal”, the upwind pattern is so strong that the storm keeps appearing in nearly the same place in those “ensemble” runs even when there are “tweaks”. Believe me, that usually doesn’t happen, but it gave us a lot of warning about that “Frankenstorm” as someone called it. These ones for us, confidence not so great.
OK, back to the present: STILL, to see storms even show up in the models, combined with these first two storms “bearing down” on us (didn’t an Arizona football coach say something about that?), makes you think that the climate pendulum may be finally swinging back into a wet, cold regime here in AZ after so many droughty months and winter seasons (except for the winter of 2009-10).
Of course, if you and that other person who reads this blog knows anything at all from it, it is that I get overly optimistic when rain is predicted, and now that excitement that I have has led to a a bit of hyperbole regarding the end of the Arizona drought. I am SICK of drought and so I like to say it looks like its going to end; to HECK with the La Nina down there in the eastern Pacific (specifically, “region 3.4” of the Pacific, as La Nina acolytes know about) and those droughty predictions for this rain season! Here’s where “region 3.4” is in the Pacific, FYI.
Science note: People like me is why we have double blind randomized trials in our experimentation to prevent people from seeing only what they want and biasing outcomes of experiments, if even inadvertently, and with really good intentions. (You can do that with evaluations of people, too–hahahahaha, sort of).
————————————
Cloud scenario today:
And with today’s strong storm rapidly approaching, and tremendous influx of mid and high moisture beforehand with near 100 mph jet stream as low as around 20,000 feet, we should see some great Altocumulus lenticularis clouds, and maybe some delicate Cirrocumulus clouds with finely granulated patterns before the cold front gets here today. In plain language, it should be a fantastic day to look up in the sky and see lots of interesting patterns. They will change by the minute. Some examples of what I hope to see today in the “pre-storm” stage, the first Ac len, the second Cc. And, there’ll be wind here at the ground later today, gusts likely to momentarily hit 40 mph this afternoon on our Catalina hill tops.
Have a nice cloud day! And talk to you tomorrow morning in the rain.
The End
