“Los Angeles” Catalina

Got a little homesick yesterday looking at the white sky, the barely visible mountains in the distance, like Twin Peaks, eyes a little teary, not from sadness so much, but from smog and smoke.  Grew up in the San Fernando Valley you know, Reseda.  Lots of smog there at times, though not as much as in Burbank, thank heavens, where it banked up against the San Gabriel Mountains.

Reseda, as you know is quite famous from the Karate Kid movie and was even mentioned by Frank Zappa in his Tinsel Town Rebellion album so I like to tell people that I grew up there, went to Reseda High School, played some sports. Maybe I should add a sports highlight to convince you that I went to such a famous high school, and maybe, too, mention that overpowering, incapacitating crush I had on Rozzi R. when I was 15 years old, since a story like that would titillate your interests more than a sports story, or maybe even stuff about weather.  I think I know the people who read this blog pretty darn well.

Below is that “nostalgic” LA sky we had yesterday, thanks to fires in New Mexico, the second one of the yellowish-orange sun typically associated with smoke particles.  Of course, the “white sky” is common on humid days back East, and in the global warming domain, is our friend.

Yes, that’s right, smog is our “friend”, because, as was likely yesterday, in spite of record heat, the temperature would have even been a tad HIGHER without that smoke layer!

In fact, one of the conundrums in foretelling climate in the coming decades, is how much smoke, our “friend”, will offset the warming due to trace gases like CO2.  Imagine, a world of never-blue-but-always-white skies and no more worries about global warming!

As the cliché goes, “Beam me up, Scotty” if such a world came to pass!  So, lets knock off the fires, all smog, in fact, and untoward gases!

  More clouds, less smog today 

In case you missed it, some sunrise Cirrus today!  Finally a cloud.  Who cares if its at 45,000 feet above the ground!  It shows there can still be humidity in the air.

Probably had some….OK, your guess… on the ice crystal type up there in those Cirrus clouds.

Yes, that’s right, bullet rosettes, would be an excellent guess, crystals with a solid “germ” center from which columns radiate outward like these ones below captured in Cirrus clouds over Barrow, AK, some years ago.

 

 Update on “dusty coolsnap”, foretold many days ago for around June 5th.

 Here, from the NWS Tucson, you will see that “dusty coolsnap”,  foretold by the models many days ago, has been evolving into “breezynotashotsnap”, if you can call that a “snap”, a word that implies more suddeness that what will likely happen.  Still, a trough brushes by to the north, just doesn’t have the amplitude it once did in the models; we’ll see only some moderation in temps.  How can they not “moderate” after record highs, so that was an easy thing for me to say.

Still no rain in mods for hereabouts, but some close calls from afternoon thunderstorms in New Mexico every now and then.

The awful indications is, just beyond a week from now, more record HIGH temperatures lasting for a few days!  Yikes.

The End


 

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.