Morning thunder, evening thunder; 0.84 inches of rain, 1-2 inches in the mountains, with some of the most dramatic skies and shocking cloud changes ever seen (by me). “But, hey, enough of ‘me’, lets get on with the ‘shockumentary'”, as Rob Reiner might say.
Scene 1: Its morning. A horsey ride has been planned with an important, published friend. You’re thinking, “It will be good to be seen with someone important.” No one’s paying attention to weather. The weather is cloudy, quite nice really, but nothing threatening can be seen.
6:48 AM. Nothing to worry about really. Just a patch of Altocumulus castellanus. Quite pretty.
Scene 2. Heading out.
7:20 AM. Wonder what that is coming ’round the mountain. Probably nothing, though it is kind of dark over there. Cloud bases are lower, too. Desert’s turning a nice green now after the recent rains. Too bad there isn’t more rain ahead.
Scene 3. On the trails.
7:33 AM. Been on the trails for quite awhile, maybe more than 12 minutes… Cloud bases lower still, but, its probably just harmless, non-precipitating Stratocumulus. Nothing to be too concerned about, though the amount of water in the air must be prodigious today.
Scene 4. Ooops
7:43 AM. Rain and thunder approached rapidly. Note horse’s rear pointing in the direction of the storm (lower center right). As a horseman, you would know that horses often point there rear ends at storms, hard to say why, but its a classic sign that a storm is approaching from that direction, though you can see it yourself as well. Actually, we were fleeing like mad, embarrassed galore that cloud maven person did not look at radar that morning to see what was over the hill.
Scene 5. Dramatic skies and a few close strikes.
7:47 AM. Just about back, but LTG strikes getting closer faster.
The storm passed dropping 0.22 inches. And, compounding error, as we know, when potent upper air disturbances bring morning thunder and rain, its pretty much always the case that the rest of the day will be dry as a subsiding couplet of air follows a rising one, the the strongly rising couplet of air that forced our morning clouds and storm.
So, was kind of looking ahead to a disappointing rest of the day , but was thankful for the unusual morning storm.
1:49 PM. As expected, a large clearing occurred following the morning rain, and a few harmless Cumulus developed over the Catalinas.5:49 PM. A thunderstorm passes NE of Catalina, but like the day before, will likely only bring on “a mighty wind”, to quote Rob Reiner again, though a rain-cooled one. That will be nice.5:59 PM. Quite “histrionic”, but certainly won’t get here…..6:07 PM. Nice Cumulus congestus in foreground; giant anvil in back from the storm to the N-NE.6:10 PM. Nice scruff of Stratocumulus/Cumulus mediocris rides above the NE winds that blew out of the storm to the north. Certainly, these clouds won’t do anything. Bases disorganized, nothing congealing.6:17 PM. Huh. Bases looking a little better, especially back there over the mountains. Still, seems VERY unlikely anything will happen. Its late in the day, temperature falling…..6:31 PM. The larger base has crept closer to Catalina. But, as you can plainly see, its not doing anything, and hasn’t over the past 20 min or so, so you can pretty well forget that it will do anything. A few minutes later, thunder began to erupt from it. I could NOT believe it, as you were thinking as well. No sign of an anvil, ice, or shaft! Forecast of no rain going bad….very bad.6:34 PM. There it is, on the right, the emergence of the shaft from one of the smallest thundering clouds this writer has ever seen. Within a couple of minutes, Oro Valley below was not visible!6:40 PM. Looking at Oro Valley!6:41 PM. Looking toward Catalina, lower portion. Its gone. The visible sun shows that the intense rainshaft and cloud cover were quite narrow and limited.6:54 PM. Backside of first dump shown above. Magnificent!
But it wasn’t over by a long ways was it?
6:53 PM. A new, much larger, firmer base has formed in the same spot as the previous storm. And you KNOW its going to dump on us!7:01 PM. What a blast! This one brought pea-sized hail to the Sutherland Heights neighborhood.7:02 PM. Perhaps the shot of the day of the first evening blast as it moved over and past Saddlebrook.
Here they are. 6:32 PM yesterday, under an Atlocumulus opacus sky.
Thought maybe I would trick some moviephiles into sampling a cloudcentric blog, jack up my ratings through error. Well, “The Domes of Lemmon” COULD be a movie…maybe one about, Sara Lemmon, for whom the mountain is named for, maybe starring Madonna as the feisty young botanist. Well, maybe not “young”…
Notice, too, that I capitalized stuff in the title, which I usually don’t do because I don’t know any better. I think only connecting words like adjectives are capitalized in titles.
Lot of lighting yesterday, too. Some of it was pretty close to the house, within a few miles. Lightning, too; one strike within a couple hundred yards, probably on the power pole out there in State Trust Land.
You won’t have to go to New Mexico, Sonora, or the Indian State of Kerala to find great summer rain. According to this model output from last evening, its only a bit more than a week away!
The last time we saw a model prediction like the ones below, was for the 24 h ending today, made a whopping 12 days ago. When you consider the great rains we had ending YESTERDAY morning (2-7 inches in the mountains, and inch here in The Heights, that far out prediction was only a day or so off. So, there’s hope that the paucity of summer rain that has left our desert so brown will be rectified a bit more in the near future.
Below, from 5 PM AST obs, the WRF-GFS 12-h rain totals predicted for August 20 and beyond as rendered by IPS MeteoStar. Normally, these are pretty useless predictions, but since that last one with so much rain foretold was close to what actually happened, maybe there’s something to watch out for around the 20th.
Valid at 5 AM AST, August 20th. Colored regions denote areas where the model has calculated that rain has fallen during the prior 12 h. Blue indicates heavier precip than green.Hard to be bluer than this! Valid in only 288 h from now! Valid on Friday, August 21st at 5 AM AST.
Some recent cloud photos
12:46 PM, August 7th. Telephone pole was going down on Linda Vista due to this microburst outflow.2:45 PM, August 7th. The Gap gets shafted. Nice.2:55 PM, August 7th. One of the great cloud bases of our time begins to take shape UPWIND of Catalina!3:03 PM, August 7th. “So round, so firm, so fully packed”, as the cigarette ad used to claim. This is looking really great for Catalina at this point, might unload right on us!. I am sure I am reflecting the excitement you felt that day.3:03 PM, August 7th. “Droop, there it is“. A report from Birdman, Rick Bowers, indicated that 1.16 inches fell in just in this storm. over there on Trotter, south end of Catalina. Only 0.71 inches in the Sutherland Heights, but still great. Fizzlerama continued as the storm headed north toward Saddlebrook with less than 0.2 inches there.3:20 PM, August 7th. Visibility, for a few seconds, down to 1/8th of a mile in TRW++, wind gusts to 30 kts or so. Now this is exciting! Temp dropped from 97 F to 72 F! This was not quite the lowest visibility.After a night of intermittent rain and thunder, dawn yesterday brought this dump on Sam Ridge, where 1.06 inches fell in an hour, 0.51 inches in 15 minutes.
Have had little time lately, some problems, too, loading photos in WP, so that’s why. Looks like the next best chance for rain is Friday into Saturday. But you already know that from all the TEEVEE weather you watch.
The End.
From three days ago. Marana/west Tucson got shafted pretty good. At least an inch fell in the core of this beauty. This was after it looked like it was going to be a quiet day west of the Catalinas.
But likely, not excitement TODAY, July 27th. Hang on for a wild ride in the last three days of July, the 28th, 29th and 30th. There are no more days in July than that1. August looks pretty active for storms. So far we’ve haven’t even had an inch of rain in July! Awful. No re-greening of the desert, either, as we usually see by now.
In the meantime, nice sunset yesterday; not much else.
7:30 PM. Altocumulus and Cirrus spissatus.
The End, except for the next part, which I just thought of:
Educational module
Let us look at the rise of sea level we’ve heard so much about. Here’s the only measurement I have looked at whilst looking for something else, actually. I found it amazing so I thought I would pass it along. From Astoria, your last 100 years of sea level measurements:
100-years of Astoria Sea Level measurements. Sea level has been going DOWN! How could this be?
From this site: “The mean sea level trend is -0.27 millimeters/year with a 95% confidence interval of +/- 0.34 mm/yr based on monthly mean sea level data from 1925 to 2014 which is equivalent to a change of -0.09 feet in 100 years.”
Well, I have been “informed” by a Mr. Mark Albright, U of WA, Seattle, that the sinking tectonic plate under Astoria and offshore has more than accounted for the minimal rise in sea level associated with both coming out of the Little Ice Age and anthropogenic warming. Still, fascinating to find a location where sea level is sinking!
I think I would consider, in view of this info, moving from the Pac NW to avoid the inevitable Big One, that 8 or 9 mag earthquake that we know can happen in subduction zones…
From a single snap, this LTG complexity caught three evenings ago.This was taken seconds before the big flash, which kind of ruined the exposure when it happened.This last series of photos were taken the evening before. Kinda pretty I thought.
In other news…..
Record July rains are falling in much of the coastal and intermediate valleys of southern California as the pathetic remnant of once proud Category FOUR hurricane Dolores makes landfall there today. Places like San Diego have had well over an inch, unheard of in July. August, not so much, since tropical storm remnants have passed over southern Cal in a few Augusts. Remember August 1977, when two inches fell on LA due to a tropical storm remnant?
That also August deluge in Los Angeles, by coincidence I am sure, preceded the big Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) switch in which low centers in the Pacific shifted farther to the south beginning with the 77-78 winter and the Arctic warmed up. Wallace et al 1995, Science Mag, discoverers of the PDO, were claiming that the PDO shift had seriously muddied up the global warming hoopla of the time, suggesting caution in those global warming claims.
Nobody really paid any attention, since it was about to get even WARMER in the years immediately ahead, like in the 97-98 winter when a giant El Nino, like the one now out there, spiked earth temperatures to a record high of the time.
By the way, the phrase, “global warming”, has been supplanted by the phrase, “climate change”, one that has been bastardized from its original use since climatologists have always considered the phrase, “climate change” a temperature-neutral, precipitation-neutral, could-go-either-way one, but as you know today it is one-tailed; that is, “climate change” today has only ONE meaning by those (often non-professionals) who use it; that an anthropogenic WARMING of the climate is underway with its attendant effects on precipitation and life itself.
When the earth stopped warming some 15-20 years ago, the global warming phrase heard all over the media had to be supplanted with something else, of course. I laugh, bitterly really, when I think of award-winning science geophys writer, Richard Kerr, of Sceince Mag, who wrote an article in Science, quoting the Hadley Center and such, titling his 2009 article about the hiatus in the rise in temperature, “What Happened to Global Warming?”
Of course, today such a title would not be allowed in Science Magazine. But then, Richard Kerr could not have titled his article, “What Happened to Climate Change?” either, since climate change is always happening on this planet, probably the others like it.
Speaking of mud, or muddying things up, some scientists (Karl et al.) are now claiming (in 2015) there was NO HIATUS in the earth’s temperature; that its been rising all along! This astounding finding is due to some manipulations/”corrections” of existing data and use of African and other data not previously available. You can read about this in summary form: Lost and Found_Sci 6-5-2015
This made me feel sad for the great scientists of the day, like Susan Soloman and others, who have generated hypotheses about WHY the pause in the rise in temperatures has occurred, even publishing those hypotheses in high end journals like Science Mag or Nature.
Those folks are bound to be pretty embarrassed now since they may have been explaining nothing that was real. It doesn’t get more embarrassing than that; kind of like explaining N-Rays, that bogus radiation reported after the turn of the century by French scientist, Renee Blondlot, at Nance University (the “N” was for Nance). Man, was Blonbdlot embarrassed when American physicist, Robert Wood, went to France to see “N-Rays” for himself and found that they were imaginary and reported them as so1. N-Rays, though they had been “confirmed” in numerous studies, were soon gone from the scene, one of the greatest mass delusions known to science.
Was there REALLY no hiatus, that the Hadley Center in England, perhaps the foremost climate center in the world, was somehow misled when they were reporting a pause or hiatus in warming? One thinks that the Karl et al 2015 report will get a LOT of scrutiny. Stand by….
More TSTMS in the area today through most of the summer. Hope one hits here in the Heights. We’re falling behind our 3.5 inch or so average for July.
The End.
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1It was the story of American physicist, Robert Wood, as told in the 1982 book, Betrayers of the Truth: Fraud and Deceit in the Halls of Science, by William Broad and Nicholas Wade, that partially inspired your Catalina Cloud Maven.com to go to Israel in 1986 to see the clouds for himself since, in his experience after years of airborne cloud work at the University of Washington), the cloud reports emanating out of Israel were goofy, also the likely product of someone’s imagination. Those Israeli cloud reports WERE goofy as found by your author (1988 pub), and independently by others (U of Tel Aviv).
At 0.77 inches, and only 0.01 inches yesterday, Sutherland Heights is running a little behind our July rainfall average amount for the 13th of about an inch. But, we had an “above average”, really quite spectacular, long-lasting rainbow yesterday. Hope you caught it.
6:40 PM. Rain on mountains, sun breaking through. Get camera ready.6:43 PM.6:46 PM. Cam lens not wide enough to capture full glory of scene. Would never be as good as in real life, anyway.
6:47 PM. Lingered for about 15 min, too.
U of AZ mod run from 06Z (11 PM AST) calculates that today and tomorrow will be active late afternoon and evening thunderstorm days.
Hurricane Diary: Just formed Dolores just reaching hurricane stage today, winds of 65 mph or more. But, up, up, up, they will go!
“Just Another Day“, btw, one of the many great songs by Oingo Boingo, if you’ve ever heard of them. We’re not just about clouds here. Trying to broaden your pop cultural knowledge with distractions like this.
Yesterday was remarkable in how exact it was to the day before in clouds, but ultimately disappoiting.1 There was supposed to be more cloud action, shafting around, that kind of thing, but there wasn’t. It was virtually identical in every way, including having only two clouds that got high and cold enough to have ice in them. I am sure you recorded them in your cloud diary, and this will be a little tedious as a result, but….what the HECK.
Here is your cloud day for yesterday, focusing on the detection of ice in clouds:
1:15 PM. Not much going on.1:17 PM. Not much going on.2:44 PM. Not much going on, but nice cloud street.3:13 PM. Suddenly, an erection of cloud (center at top) shot out of the larger Cumulus mediocris/congestus. Would it form ice? I was thinking so, and with that, maybe a rain shaft that could disrupt the wind field and trigger more buildups. “Here we go,” I was thinking, as you were as well.3:14 PM, Looks pretty firm yet. No indication of ice. But definitely a few thousand feet higher and colder than the surrounding cloud.3:15:30. Beginning to soften and fall back! No sign of ice. Those ragged edges represent the intrusion of dry air into the cloud called “entrainment.” Entrainment is less as the cloud shoots upward and contains vortex rings. Worried now that this turret was not as high as initially perceived.3:17 PM. Stepping back and looking at the whole cloud, the top has been disconnected from the bottom by very dry air between where the top is now, and the lower part of the cloud. Entrainment has beheaded this cloud! And, no sign of ice…yet.3:18 PM. Not much good up there, with no body, but ice is now visible, and is likely forming, as more of the cloud head evaporates. See that faint ice veil below the head?3:21 PM. I am sure you can see the wisps of ice that this turret contained quite easily now. Ice won’t do much good being decapitated like that with no cloud body to fall through and grow.. “Decapitated.” Huh? Seem to be on a religious theme today. Must be due to that article I read in the Atlantic recently.3:30 PM. Twin towers, and like the one over Catalina, it faded into oblivion after getting a little higher than ours, forming more ice.4:13 PM. Ever hopeful, but no, never saw no ice from this tall boy, phrasing here mindful of that classic new old folk song, “Never did no wanderin’ ” by The Folksmen.7:26 PM. Nice storms elsewhere. Here, looking NE-E.
Today is another day. More hope for a shower late today or tomorrow, models say, then likely another dry spell as the summer rain season ebbs again for awhile until that possible super hurricane Dolores drags some moisture up this way. (Dolores, now just a tropical storm, was just born off southern Mexico near the coast. Will be interesting to see just how strong she gets.
The End
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1Some fans like to see misspelled words here. Amyone see that criminal who was sentenced to “life in person” as described in the AZ Star? That was pretty grate.
Won something of a cloud lottery yesterday. A trace of rain might have fallen only on ME…as a single rain-producing cloud went over my house. I felt pretty special. Here’s the story in photos:
3:17 PM. Just a cloud, Cumulus one you know, no ice around so no hope for some rain.3:23 PM. Ice overhead!! First ice of day! Can you find it? That’s why I am here, to learn you about seeing ice in clouds, my specialty.3:23 PM. Zooming on ice.3:24 PM. Going, going…..3:26 PM. Gone. All ice on the left.3:27 PM. Base and trunk of cloud approaching! Should be some drops any time! Note cloud street that this Cumulus is a part of, going over Pusch Ridge. This is a pretty common scene when the cloudy air is from the SSW.3:30 PM. Drops! Sparse large ones, representing soft hail (graupel ) or hail that’s melted on the way down. They seem to be falling only on ME! Had just predicted to wife that the fall of large drops was imminent! Remember, this kind of rain IS NOT DRIZZLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! End of educational module.3:31 PM. Drops falling in sunlight here through the trunk of the cloud; you could see them falling from probably 50 feet or so above you. Those little white specks in this photo are those drops. Click on this, then click again to see drops. Pretty cool, huh?
Today
Looks like an active photogenic one with dense rainshafts around. Lots of excitement for weather guys like me. Hope we get shafted reel good here.
In unrelated matters, an extraordinarily strong hurricane still set to develop off Mexico in the next few days. If nothing else, surf will be up along the coast of Mexico and southern Cal. Will let you know when the winds in it have reached 140 mph or more.
