Looking back; your updated Catalina water year and summer rainfall graphs

Let’s face it, for most of the people living in Arizona, their best years are in the rear view mirror,  as are mine  which were probably about 50 years ago…  Following that thought, let us not look ahead to further declines, but rather look back at the last water year for Catalina, ending this past September 30th,  and see what it says, if anything,  about the changing global climate we hear so much about:

Your Catalina water year history, compiled through 2008 by the folks at Our Garden there on Stallion Avenue off of Columbus where great, and fresh organic vegetables can be purchased every Wednesday and Saturday morning. Tell them Art sent you!
Your Catalina water year history, compiled through 2008 by the folks at Our Garden there on N. Stallion Rs.  off of Columbus  Blvd. where you can find  fresh organic vegetables every Wednesday and Saturday morning. Tell them Art sent you! Haha.

Can’t say I see too much going on here in Catalina so far; things seem pretty stable in the precipitation arena for the full water year’s rainfall.

I point out again, with great redundancy since I have pointed this out before,  that the Our Garden climate record started just as a monumental change in circulation patterns occurred.   Most climate scientists would attribute that to a shift as due to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation,  discovered by important scientists I know well, like Mike Wallace1, of the University of Washington Huskies Atmospheric Sciences Department where I worked for about 30 years, but in airborne studies of clouds.

The PDO shift, if that’s what done it, was a circulation pattern change  that brought astoundingly wet conditions to Catalina and the whole Southwest US, wet conditions unlikely to be seen in our remaining lifetimes, which aren’t that much longer anyway.

You may remember that bristle cone pine tree rings in California, analyzed by Haston and Michaelson in 1994,  found only one period in the last 600 years (!) that was as wet as the late 1970s into the 1980s there (certainly spilling into AZ).

Remember how the Great Salt Lake was filling up to record levels back in the 1980s?

And any long term resident here, like the ones that I have spoken to, will tell you about the days of yore when the washes around here were running all year.

Well, that wasn’t the norm. sadly.  They were just so lucky to have seen that era.

In weather, what goes around, comes around.  Count on it happening again at some point in the future IMO.  (Some climate changers might disagree with this assertion.)

How about our summer rainfall, June through September.  Well, here’s that graph, updated through this past summer!  Hope you like it:

Catalina Summer Rain, June through SeptemberNot much going on here, either.

Yesterday’s clouds–another day, another rainbow, of course.

Sprinkles of rain occurred off and on all day yesterday, but couldn’t muster even one hundredth of an inch of rain!  With a few exceptions, the clouds producing the rain weren’t too deep, though still icy ones, and pretty high off the ground, mostly above 8,000 to 9.000 feet above us, which doesn’t help.

First, a  rainbow shot:

4:20 PM. Maybe, following the example of the University of Hawaii (Rainbow Wahini), the Banner University of Arizona should call themselves the Rainbow Wildcats...
4:20 PM. Looking north toward the Charouleau Gap (on the right).  We have so many rainbows in Arizona, maybe, following the example of the University of Hawaii (Rainbow Wahini), the Banner University of Arizona sports teams should call themselves the “Rainbow Wildcats”…
4:42 PM. Here's a problem for a great shaft of rain, sloping tops of Cumulonimbus clouds. Don't see any shaft here, just rain. When tops slope like this, it indicates the updraft isn't very strong and the ice in the cloud is going to collect little in the way of "supercooled" cloud droplets, that would stick to the ice, eventually making it a graupel or soft hail particle, the kind of thing that our vertical shafts are largely comprised of aloft. Slopey tops mean not a lot of growth of the precip, more "stratiform" like rain with fewer is any pulses of big drops.
4:42 PM. Here’s a problem for a great shaft of rain, sloping tops of Cumulonimbus clouds. Don’t see any shaft here, just rain. When tops slope like this, it indicates the updraft isn’t very strong and the ice in the cloud is going to collect very little in the way of “supercooled” cloud droplets because the ice that forms is ejecting downstream from where the greatest growth would occur due to collecting cloud droplets, ones that would stick to the ice crystal, eventually making it a graupel or soft hail particle, the kind of thing that our vertical shafts are largely comprised of aloft.   Slopey tops mean not a lot of growth of the precip, more “stratiform” like rain with fewer is any pulses of big drops.
5:31 PM. Of course, still another rainbow. Notice how the colors are not as vibrant as some rainbows. This would indicate the concentrations of drops are less, and smaller than in the bright ones. So, not a lotta rain falling over there.
5:31 PM. Of course, still another rainbow. Notice how the colors are not as vibrant as some rainbows. This would indicate the concentrations of drops are less, and smaller than in the bright ones. So, not a lotta rain falling over there.
3:50 PM. Now here's a shaft with a real top, a pretty vertical one above it. There were a couple of these. Once again the spaces between the shafts lined up to pass over Catalina, rather than the shafts. The Tortolita Mountains got most of this one. I love these scenes, though, so many times resulting in disappointments.
3:50 PM. Now here’s a shaft with a real top, a pretty vertical one above it. There were a couple of these. Once again the spaces between the shafts lined up to pass over Catalina, rather than the shafts. The Tortolita Mountains got most of this one. I love these scenes, the backlighting, though, so many times they have resulted in disappointments.
4:01 PM. The "Torts" cleaning up with a decent rain as that complex passed over them.
4:01 PM. The “Torts” cleaning up with a decent rain as that complex passed over them.
5:19 PM. But even with a rain disappointment, we get to see these scenes here in The Heights over and over, again and again, to add to redundancy, We are so lucky!
5:19 PM. But even with a rain disappointment, we get to see these scenes here in The Heights over and over, again and again, to add to redundancy, We are so lucky!  The cloud line above the mountains would be Stratocumulus.
5:21 PM. Here crepuscular rays of sunlight produced by falling light rain diverge from the sun's position. Light from an "infinite" source is supposed to be parallel at great distances. This seems to prove that our reality, as is sometimes suggested by philosophers, is not what we perceive with our brains, and the sun is much closer to us and much smaller than generally believed by astronomers...
5:21 PM. Here crepuscular rays of sunlight produced by falling light rain diverge from the sun’s position. Light from an “infinite” source is supposed to be parallel at great distances. This seems to prove that our reality, as is sometimes suggested by philosophers, is not what we perceive with our tiny human brains.  These diverging rays demonstrate  that the sun is much closer to the earth and much smaller than generally believed by astronomers…  The true reality of life and the universe are sometimes  right in front of us.
5:37 PM. By this time, the crepuscular rays and the existential questions they raised were gone and reality was back to normal. Here a pretty good Cumulonimbus with a pretty vertical top and big shaft heads in the general direction of Catalina, once again raising hopes for measurable rain.
5:37 PM. By this time, the crepuscular rays and the existential questions they raised were gone and our perceived reality  back to normal.   Here a pretty good Cumulonimbus with a pretty vertical top and big shaft heads in the general direction of Catalina, once again raising hopes for measurable rain.  Instead, it faded to sprinkles and our total rain from them was only a trace.

The End

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1Well, actually we said “hi” in the halls once in awhile, I gave a talk in his class once, and, along with a bunch of Atmos Sci faculty, got to watch the 1992 New Year’s Day Rose Bowl mash down of Michigan for the Washington’s 1991 NCAA Division I fubball championship at his house.   He also mediated an authorship kerfluffle between Peter Hobbs and me.

 

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.