Its not often that you fall in love….

but when I saw this map this morning,  I loved it immediately, and so much; at first sight.  I wasn’t going to blog today, but when I saw it, my whole life changed.

Valid the day after Valentines Day.
Valid at 5 AM AST, February 18th. I have never loved a map so much. Sure, its not raining yet in Arizona, but the portent of a happy, rainy life together, this trough and me, is HUGE. It was born only last evening from the 5 PM AST global data crunch from our best model, the WRF-GFS, too. Here, presented in all of its beauty, by IPS MeteoStar, a Division of Sutron Corp..

Sure, the flaws will come out later as the next stage of love evolves;  we all know how it goes, but I can say I truly am now in that first stage, that “obsessive-delusional” stage we’ve all been through,  when that mousy gal over there suddenly becomes EVERYTHING, and is PERFECT!  How did you not see her before!!!  There’s no room in your mind for anything but her; its like a sci-fi movie where alien has taken your mind over.  Yep, “been there, done that.”  Wrote some bad poetry, too, part of the insanity that is love.

Its the same with this map.   I’ve been waiting all my life for a map like this, well, at least since I moved to Arizona from Seattle.

Look, too, there’s no flow in the Gulf of Alaska, its all down off Baja, and its so STRONG and BEAUTIFUL!  How can you NOT love a map like this!  I just can’t consider that maybe its not real, that she won’t be like her majestic presence here, storm royalty,  on February 18th….

This would be such a big weather love storm for us, and without even looking further there would be a big, powerful low at the surface, too.   She’s not going to be just a shallow upper air disturbance, like some can be, but a real amazon up and down the whole atmosphere.   Inches of rain would fall again in the mountains in AZ, maybe here, too, if she comes to us like this.

In conclusion,  a sing along for you, “I’ve been waiting for a map like you to come into my life1.”

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In the meantime, the models have been coming up with a repeat of the bizarre-in-the-first-place sequence where a low nearly goes over us, sits to the SW of us, then comes back over AZ as we saw near the end of last month.  This one is not so strong as last month’s, nor as wet, but still likely to produce some scattered light rains here beginning on the 12th, lasting all the way through to the 15th since its wobbling around so close to us.  Likely things will be somewhat different than shown here.  A few days ago, all of this action took place east of us, and then the models began creeping the whole sequence westward until we got in the rain zone.

2015020400_CON_GFS_500_HGT_WINDS_180
Moves down from the north across eastern Cal.  Valid Feb 11, 5 am AST.  Hasn’t rained here yet.
Sits and spins mode.
Sits and spins mode, Feb 12th, 5 AM AST. Light showers move into southern AZ.
Moves up and back over Catalina.
Moves up and back over Catalina, Valentine’s Day.  Showers continue in the area.

The End,  of the “Love Storm” blog

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1Please modify the words in that song to those above to fit a weather context.

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.

2 comments

  1. just tell me it will be nice weather late in the month when I am there to watch some soccer. Wanna throw a baseball around some?

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