High cold ones that are headed this way in a curvilinear path. Image was made at 5 AM AST, annotation later.
That means that a deep Altostratus overcast will be in place by tomorrow with a load of virga and sprinkles, not really much rain since the bases will also be cold and…high. Top possible rain amount from these high cold ones is a tenth of an inch, but more likely will be traces. Chance of a trace in the area? Oh, about 99% IMO.
But that’s not our full rain destiny.
On the horizon, only a week from now, is the likelihood of a significant rain. Check the models and the spaghetti:
Valid at 5 PM AST, March 16th. You don’t need the precip prediction for this day when the 500 millibar pattern is like this, the core of the wind at that level south of Tucson. Its not a sufficient criterion for rain, but a necessary one in the cool half of the year. (Only about 5% of the rain in TUS falls outside of this criterion in the cool half of the year.
Here’s the rain prediction which I have not looked at until posting now to make the point you don’t need to look at it:
Where the model thinks it will have rained in the 6 h prior to 5PM AST on March 16th. I hope you’re happy now.Valid at 5 PM AST March 16th. Blueish lines of cold and rain (546 decameter geopotential height contours) way down the Cal coast, and somewhat bunched (confidence indicator) for a major trough to affect all of Arizona, keep the current greening underway.
Would say the chances of measurable rain from this “incoming” are at least 90%; i. e., virtually certain. (Note that “virtually certain” is not the same as 100% certain, but its damn close.)
Problems with hoster and connections to hoster continue–must wait seconds to see what I’ve typed, then have to go back and correct the gibberish. So, not doing much as a result.
But here are a couple of cloud shots from yesterday anyway:
6:17 PM. Altocumulus perlucidus appearing to spread out, though likely a perspective tomfoolery. Thin Cirrostratus above.6:39 PM.
Addendum: Coupla of days ago saw the rare “Cumulo-cirrus” clouds, ones that appear to be Cumulus but are fakes, up at Cirrus-levels. You might call them Cirrus castellanus. I feel these are worth sharing so that the young cloud maven person doesn’t embarrass himself or herself when making a cloud call to friends and neighbors, as you would do. They occurred on March 7th between 11:30 AM and Noon. Can you tell, upon “zooming big” that these are mostly ice clouds? If droplets were present they were there for only a short time, thus (is that still a word?) indicating that these rag clouds were at very low temperatures.
Some sounding detective work below
The 5AM AST sounding for March 7th. The sliver of moist air at 16,000 feet above sea level is not deemed the source of those rag clouds.5 PM AST, March 7th sounding with writing on it.
Its not a review of a new Stephen King movie where people turn green after eating too many vegetables. Its a status report on growing grass as of yesterday from a hike.
Got pretty excited yesterday watching grass grow. Below, some exciting examples of growing grass, mostly from the flats around the Canada del Oro wash near the Catalina State Park entry building, in case you’re thinking about rushing down yourself to see grass grow. Some areas are not so far along (last photo).
Nice to see this eruption of green after our 2 inches or so of rain recently. Even saw a couple of poppies popping up by the entrance to the Park.
Chance of measurable rain here in Catalina? 100% (IMO).
While these photos popped in in a rather timely manner after changing ISPs, typing text remains an unsolved buggabo; must wait several seconds to see what’s been typed, making any writing, such as it is, a real debilitating slog. Thanks for sharing my pain.
The weather way ahead
Doesn’t look so great for more rain after this upcoming event. The ensembles (spaghetti plots) show the trough bowl we are in now retrograding to offshore of the West Coast. This will be great for droughty California, but downstream over the SW will be a ridge leading to a long dry and warm spell as this regime change takes place after our rain.
One branch of a seemingly bifurcated plume, spread north along the side of Samaniego Ridge. The other branch appeared to moved out of Tucson to Continental Ranch, “thence” northward toward the east side of the Tortolita Mountains. It’s happened before, but is pretty rare, maybe once a year occurrence.
(Took an hour for these first three jpegs to be uploaded to WP, btw.)
7:23 AM.7:25 AM.7:25 AM.8:16 AM. Smog plume at its maximum northward extend along Samaniego Ridge, Sutherland Heights area, before dissipating.7:49 AM.8:58 AM. Stratocumulus perlucidus races toward Catalina.7:59 AM. Altocumulus translucidus perlucidus undulatus, quite a cloud-filled mouthful.5:30 PM. This rain shaft is strong enough that one could suspect a weak Cumulonimbus cloud has erupted from the Stratocumulus.
Quitting here due to slower than dial-up service, hosting service, “godaddy” has confirmed its not them….
Have cameras ready for interesting clouds today as yet more storms approach. Winds at 500 mb (around 18,000 feet above sea level) are forecast to approach 100 kts by tonight (oops, TOMORROW NIGHT! Egad). With winds like that, likely will be some nice lenticulars around to add to your collection. Oh, I already see one downstream of the Catalinas….
Maybe some photos later if the upload problem can be resolved.
Its not resolved…. But, trying to look at the bright side, while this ONE photo was uploading, I got some more coffee, read a book (Cadillac Desert, Marc Reisner, and got a good start on, Mythical Rivers by Melissa Sevigny–both highly recommended for cloud maven readers.
6:27 PM AST last evening, though after the brutally slow uploading speed to WP, maybe its not the same day as I started this upload anymore….
Some more on the upcoming rain and wind event in the next 24-36 h:
From this keyboard, 10% chance of less than a trace (pitiful forecast), in other words, a zero from this storm, and 10% chance of more than 0.40 inches. The average of those two, which helps center a forecast in the forecaster’s mind, great or small, would be, say, 0.21 inches.
But the wind max during this storm event will be the most “interesting” part of it: 10% chance of puffs less than 35 mph, 10% chance of more than 65 mph , in this forecaster’s opinion. The average of those would lead me to think that very momentary gusts will reach 50 mph (averaging those extremes to center a forecast). So, the wind in the next 24-36 h is really the most interesting thing to keep an eye on; stuff will blow around, shingle fragments likely to come off. This is NOT a NWS forecast.
The End
——————— 1“Puffs”: almost instantaneous blasts of a few seconds.
Toot, toot, drip, drip. Rain fell on Catalina, Arizona, for the third day in a row, bringing our three day total, at least in Sutherland Heights, Catalina, to 2.18 inches, and over NINE inches at Ms. Mt. Lemmon, subject to quality control later.
Here’s a nice map, courtesy of the Pima County ALERT network, whom I haven’t actually asked to post this but you can go here and see it in the original:
The three day totals for the Valentine’s Day starting storm of February 14th, of course, through the 17th, 4 AM to 4 AM AST. The map has been enhanced with a total over that time period from Sutherland Heights for comparison.
Yesterday’s clouds
No photos, still suffering from WP or godaddy hosting chokehold. Even text takes seconds to appear! Worse than dial up. The above jpeg, just 1.4 mb, took several minutes to upload!
The weather way ahead and soap-boxing the erroneous, “warm temperatures” expression
While the NOAA ensembles let us (me) down in mid-January when it appeared that troughs would dominate in late January through early Feb (it wasn’t even close to that interpretation, and the first time I’ve seen those crazy plots do so badly, will go with them now and present a couple that strongly suggest the drought pattern has been decimated for Arizona and the Southwest; no more weeks of no rain or rain threats, with ridiculously warm days (note, not days with “warm temperatures”, a temperature is a unit of measurement, not a thing that can be cold or warm—-got it? Its the AIR that’s warm or cold, or a day, a month. What if, when a high pressure sat on Arizona, that I said we had really “dense millibars today”, to make a comparison showing how WRONG it is to say, “warm temperatures.” Its HIGH temperatures or LOW temperatures, etc. Tell your friends….
OK, will go through that bit more of uploading misery with these stupefying spaghetti factory plots. Inspect them and be happy if you like unsettled weather, storms threatening or actually occurring every few days. The first one is a week from nows, then ten days from now, and the last one two weeks from now. Exult over the troughulent regime we’re now in! Yay!
Note how the red and blue lines dip southward over the whole southwest US. That dip represents the location where upper air troughs will be occurring at this time. The red lines are more or less the periphery of the jet stream on the warm or tropical side, and the blue lines nearer the heart and cold side of the jet stream.
This “ensemble” approach, where tiny errors are deliberately input into the model data as the computer run begins is deemed one of the great advances in forecasting, this due to more powerful computers that can crunch so much global data so fast. There are always errors in the data, and we can’t measure the atmosphere over the whole globe in an instant, and this is a way of determing what the errors might do to the forecast. Heck, we don’t even know what the real errors are. So we input some and see what happens.
The greater the effect errors have, the more spread out and chaotic the patterns are. When the red and blue lines stay close together, it indicates that at least, tiny errors, don’t have much effect. Normally, after ten to 15 days, the lines are kind of a mess, with only general patterns discernible. (Sure is annoying typing and waiting seconds to see what it is you’ve typed!)
In last evening’s global data runs, the red lines in our domain stay pretty bunched up, indicating a strong indication of troughing over these next two weeks, even out to 15 days! So, cloud maven person is pretty excited thinking that maybe a wildflower or two can now pop up, and our spring greening will go forth.
Just yesterday on a dog walk to the Sutherland Wash, tiny plants were bursting forth from the ground. What a miracle that is. (The wash had no water in it.)
Sutherland Heights total as of 5:34 AM (tipping bucket): 0.90 inches! No way was this much expected from this keyboard. Looks like the rain is going to continue for a few more hours, too. Just terrific! Update: 1.21 inches in CoCoRahs gauge at 7 AM!
Catalina Area
0.87 Golder Ranch (Horseshoe Bend Rd in Saddlebrooke)
1.26 Oracle Ranger Stn approximately 0.5 mi SW of Oracle
0.94 Dodge Tank, Edwin Rd 1.3 mi E of Lago Del Oro Parkway 1.34 Cherry Spring, approximately 1.5 mi W of Charouleau Gap
1.38 Pig Spring, approximately 1.1 mi NE of Charouleau Gap
0.94 Cargodera Canyon, NE corner of Catalina State Park
0.79 CDO @ Rancho Solano, Cañada Del Oro Wash NE of Saddlebrooke
0.71 CDO @ Golder Rd, Cañada Del Oro Wash at Golder Ranch Rd
Santa Catalina Mountains
1.42 Oracle Ridge, Oracle Ridge, approximately 1.5 mi N of Rice Peak
4.06 Mt. Lemmon, Mount Lemmon
1.42 CDO @ Coronado Camp, Cañada Del Oro Wash 0.3 mi S of Coronado
1.02 Samaniego Peak, Samaniego Peak on Samaniego Ridge (looks low)
3.03 Dan Saddle, Dan Saddle on Oracle Ridge
2.20 White Tail, Catalina Hwy 0.8 mi W of Palisade Ranger Station
0.83 Green Mountain, Green Mountain
1.97 Marshall Gulch, Sabino Creek 0.6 mi SSE of Marshall Gulch
Let us look noew at the precursor clouds from yesterday:
Sorry, no images. It took more than 2 h to upload several images yesterday, and now, as also has happened since downloading the latest version of WP, several seconds before I see what’ve typed!
This has been going on for weeks and weeks, ending the fun in blogging.
Will be spending the next few weeks either moving to another hosting site, blogspot, or figuring out why WP has become unusable (again).
We often have phony dramatizations suggested by titles with exclamation marks, and frankly, today is no exception. I do like Cirrus, though. Hope you do, too.
Why like Cirrus1?
They provide a lot of nice sunrises and sunsets. EOM.
Example of a recent CIrrus sunset, FYI.An example of a recent display of Cirrus at sunrise.
Yesterday’s displays of Cirrus, ending with a scruff of Cumulus toward Pusch Ridge:
7:29 AM. Cirrus castellanus, or what we sometimes call, “Altocumulocirrus” because it looks so much like just Altocu.
At least 0.02 inches, as deduced from this keyboard–haha. Should be more than that, but, in a rain of drought, everything seems to work against getting a major rain. Raindrops will possibly begin as early as 12:02 AM on February 15th, though probably not. Maybe a day or two later if a tropical insertion of moisture around a low passes east of Catalina. In that case, we’ll have to wait for the Pacific polar air to reach us near the center of that upper low as it drifts eastward.
What is certain is that clouds will once again present themselves in great quantities over our skies in just a few days. The colorful sunsets and sunrises that visually spoil us with so much splendor will return, too, after being mostly absent over these past weeks of drought.
Blue, as in the 5520 meter height contour line as produced by a single run of the many NOAA GFS model re-runs with those little “perturbations” of the starting data. Below, our only hope for rain here in Catalina is if the model run with a 552 decameter height contour over eastern Pacific across southern California (see arrow) verifies. Its an outlier, a rogue, a voice in the wilderness, etc.
From the NOAA spaghetti factory based on the global data taken and perturbed at 5 PM AST last evening. The thin blue line to which the arrow points, would be a major, rain/snow producing trough. But since its an outlier from the other blue lines, representing the heart of the jet stream, its very unlikely to happen, even if it is produced by an actual model run for this date and time.
Some background and diversionary writing in excess; skip if busy
Now that we have more powerful computers, we can run the same model over and over again with very slightly different starting data and then see how the results diverge from one another in the days ahead. In the first few days to week of the model run, the various outputs are virtually the same because the starting conditions are tweaked so very slightly. This is chaos in action! And it makes sense because we measure everything perfectly in the atmosphere at the same instant. So, little errors abound in our starting data anyway.
Think of E. N. Lorenz, “Dr. Chaos”! In fact, he thought our existing atmosphere could shift into a pattern resulting in an ice age without any external forcing (oh, like an interstellar dust cloud coming by for a few thousand years, the sun dimming, etc.)
Pretty amazing thought when you think about it, which you just have.
Nobody really thinks that today, but he threw it out on the table in his seminole (haha) paper, “The Intransitive Atmosphere” back in 1967. He also wrote about that kind of thing in the 1968 American Meteorological Society Monograph, “The Causes of Climatic Change“, papers by 22 of the leading climate authorities of that time. (Based on a 1965 conference at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, located in “Potville”, CO (aka, Boulder-haha. But, they really do love their marijuana in Boulder…).
Strangely believe it, in a further diversion from current weather and a mea culpa downstream that maybe you won’t get to with a lot boring writing before it: not one paper in that AMS Monograph was about the climate effects of CO2! Talk about being asleep at the wheel! Wow.
Well, OK, you can’t blame them too much.
The earth’s temperature was slipping downward in those days, and while it was well-known that the effect of CO2 was to cause warming, it didn’t seem to be having enough effect to counter the cooling, and we were only just getting obs of CO2 from Mauna Loa. Sure, its kind of an embarrassing chapter of science, so your not gonna hear much about it from scientists; the monograph above is almost never cited, or course. We like to avoid mentioning embarrassing chapters.
I could name some others, in my specialty, like those cloud seeding experiments at Climax, CO, in the 1960s which looked so good, so complete, and fooled the National Academy of Sciences because it was really all “smoke and mirrors.” Or those in Israel in the 1960s and 1970s that fooled everyone for a long time, too, but, upon further review, were also “smoke and mirrors.” Yes, that’s right, there was a “consensus” of scientific opinion about the results of each of those cloud seeding experiments that for a time was wrong, as, to beat a dead horse, happened in the early 1970s concerning the prospect of “global cooling;” the preponderance of scientific thought was that an ice age was ahead (as indicated by a climate change conference at Brown University in 1972, the results of which were summarized in Weather and Climate Modification, 1974, Wiley-Interscience publishers, W. N. Hess, Ed. Hell, the earth was cooling, so it made sense at that time!
Pretty amazing when you think about it, which you just have.
We know better now. CMP, like most everybody else, is predicting warming dead ahead, only how much is in question.
Here, we address embarrassing chapters head on, if anyone is still reading, which I hope they are not. Check it out.
About 13 days ago, the NOAA spaghetti ensemble factory showed a result that strongly “IMI” (in my interpretation) indicated a vast weather change beginning at the end of January. Sure, it was WAY out beyond what we consider to be a reliable forecast window, and unprofessional to make a forecast that far in advance, that is, much beyond a week, but the signal, the bunching of lines was so great, I went for it anyway. I got excited and brought to your attention that a likely drought-interrupting weather change was to occur in 12-15 days from then, troughs would occupy the entire Southwest beginning at the end of January into the first week of February.
Its not gonna happen.
Cloud maven person was too confident in his interpretation of spaghetti back then, that a trough positioned in the SW was virtually in cement; it had to happen. I was so excited and so wrong, got carried away, like I did with Sharon so many decades ago, thinking we were surely going to be a couple. I was rongno then, too. Arthur Rongno…. Oh, well, we learn and sort of move on.
Oh, there could still be a major trough toward the 5-6th of February, but as the title imputes, we’re down to a single blue, a rogue contour produced by one of the many model runs repeating forecasts last evening with those little errors in starting conditions. the Lorenz model runs. 🙁 🙁 :{
