Not here, but they were there

7:12 AM. Action shot of bird with morning Altocumulus perlucidus translucidus.
11:50 AM. Clouds topping Samaniego Ridge. Get ready for sprouts!
12:38 PM. Amid the Cumulus “rubble” a glaciated top has emerged representing a Cumulonimbus calvus. Can you find it? Only the BEST cloud-maven juniors will be able to locate this tip of a tall cloud. Maybe you’ll get that special badge… If you don’t believe me that there was an extra tall top in this photo, you can go to the movies and see it here: http://www.atmo.arizona.edu/~leuthold/yesterday.mov.
4:23 PM. While it was pretty and placid here, ominous Cumulonimbus clouds pile up on the S-WSW horizon.
6:49 PM. Closer, spectacularly tall and pretty, but still over there, not here.
7:05 PM. Time to give up and go to bed. Finely granulated virga from Cirrus/Altostratus deck was a bit of a treat. Suggests tiny cells of rising currents within that layer that produced tiny areas of larger ice crystals now falling out after the “updraft” (maybe 1ft a minute) weakened. The crystals? Likely “bullet rosettes”, of course, to extend the guesswork.

OK, enough of yesterday, a bit of a disappointment unless you looked at the models and saw that there wouldn’t be much here.

But TODAY….oh my.  Those models have a MUCH more active day!  Be ready; have camera charged, video as well.  Don’t forget, you loggers out there, to note the time of your first Cumulonimbus sighting.

Keep track, too, of the excitement at the National Weather Service today.    They’ll be very worked up later on.

Should be a “fun” day with once again our very warm cloud bases (topping Sam Ridge now as I write at 6:02 AM) giving us, in essence a cloud travelogue to normal condtions in tropical countries near the Equator.

How much rain can fall from in these tropical boys?  As we saw two days ago, 2 inches in an hour can fall; three is possible.   2-3 inches in an hour?  Happens all the time in Florida in the summer.  And with our upper sixties and low seventies dewpoints this morning, we are one with them (taking into account our higher elevation).

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.