Likable model runs continue; one of the best overnight!

Tired of being dry?  Tired of having dry washes?  Tired of seeing dust raised on your gravel road?  Maybe too much dust on your late model car?  Maybe you’ve been thinking about wanting some more humidity and cloud cover with RAIN to make to make you lose that feeling of fatigue and boredom?  Well, then this model run’s  for you!

Yes, that’s right, Hilary will cure your blues and blue skies!   Yes, that’s right no more fatigue, lack of interest in life, and overall dullness due to too much sun and blue sky with last night’s model run!   See below, from IPS Meteostar:

Only 108 h (morning of October 1st),  top panel.  Hilary (small purple blob and low pressure) is cruising into central Baja, and some rain has already spread into AZ.

Second panel, valid in 144 h, valid for Sunday afternoon, October 2nd, a tiny purple blob can be seen over my house here in Catalina, SE Arizona. How great is this?  Lets hope nothing changes in these model runs for the next 144 hours!  (Technical Note:  that’s not possible, but to HELL with that anyway! )   This model output looks great now, and it’s what I want to believe will happen.  Maybe I just won’t look at the later model runs; HELL they go back and forth anyway on Hilary and where she will go.)

Lastly, there are some cloud shots below with a bit of science, mostly from yesterday.

Now even yesterday, some rain “appetizers” were around by evening.  I am sure you noticed.  Now its gonna take a coupla days for this to “develop” and this wetting will be due to the remains of Hurricane to tropical storm, Hilary, there down Mexico way right now.  According to the word on the model street, Hilary crashed across mid-Baja while turning toward the northeast and then goes over my house as a rain blob in 144 h 12 minutes (hahah), or in normal speak about six days from now (see below).  Still dicey that far out, but its what to believe in.

In the meantime, some of yesterday’s surprisingly (to me, anyway) active Cumulus clouds, beginning with a baby cloud over Charoleau Gap, NE of Catalina.  Since it was before 11 AM, this was a sign in the sky that we were going to have an active day of Cumulus clouds, ending with a nice sunset with a mixture of Stratocumulus, Cumulus, and shallow Cumulonimbus clouds, the latter responsible for the light rain off to the south and west of Catalina shown in the second two photos.

Technical information:   The first cloud photo was taken on Sunday, not yesterday, Monday as it is written above, but there COULD HAVE BEEN a cloud like that yesterday and so I used it anyway (haha, sort of).

Second with areas of rain dropping out of these higher based clouds (14,000 feet or so above sea level, 10-11 Kft above ground level) and with base temperatures of about -5 C (23 F), it was actually SNOW falling out of these clouds right at base, melting into rain below that.

Quiz:  How cold were cloud tops to produce virga/snow/rain this thick as you see in the second two photos?  Probably lower than -20 C (-4 F).  At say, -15 C (5 F) there almost certainly would not have been this much “stuff” coming out.  This assertion from your writer and self-proclaimd “expert” in ice formation in Cumulus clouds (“hey”, I got journal pubs!)

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.