It was a great day to hike to that wash, too. Began with a nice sunrise; missed the nice sunset, darn. Hope you didn’t.
But the highlight of the day was seeing that water was still running in the Sutherland Wash, some eight days after our great snow. Like so many things that happen to meteorologists, I didn’t expect it.
Your cloud day yesterday
Was an interesting day because at times it looked summer-like due to Cumulus formations over the high terrain, Kit Peak to the Catalinas. The scenes below are mainly from a hike1 out to some native rock etchings.
7:22 AM. Sunrise Altocumulus.10:38 AM. Petting zoo. I wanted to hop on this cow and ride it so bad! It seemed so docile. Wanted to just how riding a cow would feel like, have a new life experience. Didn’t seem to mind the several of us going by.10:42 AM. Glinting rocks through the Tucson smog layer. Yep, it rounded the corner and trucked on up along the Catalinas, kind of like our Stratus fractus does on some days. Mixed out later, of course, as Cumulus clouds ate some of it.
11:07 AM. Its always so special to see water in our washes. This scene just due east of the “brown house” and before the “Rusty Gate” heading up the east side of the hills. Pretty regular equestrian crossing point. The water was gone some few hundred yards farther downstream.12:09 PM. Nice display of Altocumulus perlucidus, while the summer-like scenes began to emerge. Note the Cumulus congestus forming over Kit Peak on the horizon, center. Pretty exciting to think of summer already!12:53 PM. This pretty summer-like scene out there on the trail just behind the Old Lloyd Golder Ranch. The small Cumulus clouds were even streaming off from the S and SSE just like they do so often in the summer! There are some Altocumulus perlucidus clouds above them.The grasses along the washes are already a few inches high! Nice to see that green coming along so well after 3.82 inches of rain in December (rainlog total that assigns the 7 AM measurement to the prior day since 0.96 inches was measured on Jan 1. Usually its put on the day of the measurement.)12:31 PM. Due to the wetness, Seattle-like mosses are beginning to appear. Got a little homesick there for a second. Expect mushroom hunting to be a big tourist industry later this winter in Arizona as more storms line up for us.2:23 PM. Cumulus pile up into the Altocumulus layer above, helping to enhance it. Didn’t see any ice or sign of precip coming out of these clouds, though was watching closely as I am sure you all were, too, for a “first ice of the day” report in your cloud diary.
Detecting ice module below. I hope most of you logged this as your first ice sighting of the day.
4:08 PM. Whilst scouring horizon to horizon, saw this gem at last: ice! What, you can’t see the ice? Too far away? See the following photo for zoomed version.4:08 PM. Zoomed shot of glaciating complex of Cumulus, some virga, light rainshower below it. Still can’t make it out? See next shot with annotation.Tops, from TUS sounding perhaps briefly as cold as -12 C before subsiding to lower, warmer levels. Almost certainly a case of “ice enhancement” or “ice multiplication”, a situation where there are many more ice crystals in a cloud than can be accounted for by ice nuclei, solid substances on which ice crystals form.
While waiting for still more rain, The End.
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1Two of the people I was hiking with are very important meteorologists; faculty members at big universities with big Ph Ds, Wikipedia pages, give lectures all around the world about what they know. While I myself am not important, if you can align yourself with important people, befriend them in some way, and then go on to tell your friends that you have befriended that kind of person and do things with them, YOUR own mediocre life seems greatly enhanced. Let us not forget the guiding words to a peaceful, successful life as told to us in “Deteriorata.”
From yesterday’s 18 Z, or 11 AM AST WRF-GFS model, this behemoth. Seems to be reaching up to grab something! Millions of square miles affected! This is the SAME giant storm you saw predicted in an earlier prog and displayed here yesterday from the prior evening’s run, just more ominous-looking here in the run some 18 h later. Will it happen? Comes and goes in the mod runs, but “spaghetti” hedges it to happen, at least some rain.
Valid on January 21st, at 11 PM AST. Regions of color denote those areas where the model has calculated that precipitation has fallen during the prior 12 h.
In the meantime, we received 0.09 inches here in Catalina/Sutherland Heights last evening, another shot of rain, with more little systems like that one predicted to affect us during the coming week. If you were watching, you saw that you could see blue sky on the NW horizon while it rained steadily, most of the day to our S. Go here to get the Pima County ALERT totals, the greatest about a quarter to a third of an inch.
Cloud bases were pretty high all day, around 11,000 feet above sea level (8,000 to 9,000 feet above ground level). Some boring photos:
1:31 PM. A rain band from mid-level clouds makes it way slowly northward toward Catalina. Altocumulus opacus to the north of the raining cloud; the precipitating cloud farther south is Nimbostratus (few know that the official cloud folk label “Nimbostratus” as a middle level cloud).Winds blasting out of a strong high pressure center in Texas pushed into Tucson, pushing the “usual” city effluent west and northwest into portions of southern Marana and the Continental Ranch development where snowbird and iconoclast climatologist, Mark Albright lives. Today’s word game is, say “iconoclast climatologist” three times as fast as you can.5:11 PM. Both sides of this cloud mass were visible near sunset, the clearing to the northwest beyond the virga can be seen here on the horizon while at the same time to the SSW, you could see the clearing on the south side. Really thought the chances of measurable rain here had ended at that time, but maybe, since 0.09 inches fell later in the evening its not good to say that, make you lose confidence in the things you read here.
In our last chapter, we saw that photos, perfectly fine ones here on the computer, were ending up corrupted when they arrived at WP for some reason. Unlike many computer problems, re-booting my own computer did not cure it. The next best thing to do, of course, is to wait and see if it just goes away2. And today, waiting has seemed to have cured the problem, since all the test photos up loaded got in OK. Check below.
Looks like our thick mid-level clouds overhead now have enough depth and moist air below them to drop measurable rain over the next 24-36 h. Will be happy if we get 0.10 inches here in Catalina. U of AZ mod total (last night’s 11 PM run) for here is more, 0.10 to 0.25 inches category, even better.
Some January 1st, 2015 snow photos. 3 inches total; 2 inches depth on ground at dawn (due to melting and settling).
Sunrise on the Torts (Tortolita Mountains)Overcast Stratocumulus, looking toward the “Arctic” Mountains of Catalina.Sunny highlight (maybe could be a brand of lemonade)January 1st snow photo test to see if uploaded photos are OK. Charouleau Gap in the distance.A classic, an “Arizona Christmas tree”, a “teddy bear? cholla cactus covered in snow.
OK, one more…. So far so good, suggests file corruption problem, wherever it came from, has been rectified somehow.
An Arizona winter scene. Will it snow again this winter? Check back in May. Hell if I know.
The weather way ahead
Ignoring the very light, sprinkly rains1 in the area now, ones that won’t amount to much, and since seeing predicted rain for us in the models is something like a little Valium for you, I thought I would post a couple of recently predicted Catalina rain boppers.
Valid Saturday, Jan 17th, 2015.Valid Wednesday, Jan 21st. Wow, what a storm! Look how big the area of precip is!
Of course, if we got all the rain forecast in the medium range, 10-15 days, that the models predict, we could grow pineapples and mangoes here without irrigation, so you have to keep that in mind as you look at these maps.
HOWEVER, CM, your own Catalina Cloud Maven person, DOES think that substantial rain from one of these is ahead for us, even if they come and go on the model runs.
Why?
Those “Lorenz plots” from the NOAA spaghetti factory. Of course, you knew I would say that, because you would say that, too.
Those plots are indicating a great chance for troughs in the lower flow band of the jet stream to be here in the Southwest in the middle to latter part of January. So, its not certain, but you lean that way. This is something you’ll also want to pass along to your less weatherwise neighbors today. To be wise in weather is to be great in a small way.
The End
PS: 3 F now in Asheville/Fletcher, NC, where bro lives. Man, they got kudzu there, too. How bad is that?
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1“Showers” is not the correct terminology for the of rain we have in the area right now. “Showers” of rain are marked by sudden changes in intensity since they are associated with cumuliform clouds that vary greatly in the horizontal, while light rain that changes intensity gradually falls from mostly flat or stratiform clouds that change gradually in the horizontal.
2I think it was Bob Metcalf, the inventor of the ethernet, who said:
The total was likely more, but at 3:30 AM it was 1.5 to 2 inches in the deepest spots, and likely had melted down to those levels overnight. One report, down Swan and Golder Ranch Dr way, was 3 inches on a deck after midnight! And its so pretty with all the Christmas lights around!
What a great rain and snow storm, too! It fell so gently, and at the same rate, R- to R– (“light rain”, and “very light rain”, as we used to code it) for a total of at least 0.59 inches–some snow in the gauge has to melt before the final total is known. While it seems a little high, the Bridge at Golder Ranch Drive and the CDO wash is reporting 0.98 inches!
Here’s the unusually steady way that our rain/snow fell. Normally a storm system is composed of “rainbands” with higher intensities, and lower intensities, or even no rain in between them (see Elliott and Hovind, 1964, Journal of Applied Meteorology) if you think I made that up for some reason.
All of the high gauges had snow, and the snow has clogged the gauge so that there are a lot of bogus zero or tiny amounts in our mountains. It would appear that the liquid water totals will be an inch or more when its all melted and gone into the gauges today.
Yesterday’s fast moving middle and high clouds; about 100-120 mph with delicate patterns
In case you don’t believe me, here is the text version of the TUS sounding at 5 AM AST, yesterday morning, December 31st, last year. I thought maybe seeing some numbers would do you some good. Remember what Lord Kelvin said: “He whose knowledge cannot be expressed in numbers has but a meager, insufficient kind.”
Also, Kelvin-Helmholtz waves1 are named after the famous physicist; the surfers at The Mavericks, and other big wave locations like to see giant K-H waves roll in and break.
72274 TUS Tucson Observations at 12Z 31 Dec 2014
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PRES HGHT TEMP DWPT RELH MIXR DRCT SKNT THTA THTE THTV
hPa m C C % g/kg deg knot K K K
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Begin 100 mph winds at these levels (444 mb, and 6525 meters) where the Altocumulus/Cirrocumulus were and over 120 mph where the Cirrus was (289 mb, and 9551 meters). The “82”in the first line is the wind speed in knots, which is 100 mph.
OK, images being corrupted again as they are imported into Word Press, something that started a few days ago. You can see the corruption by the linear shadings in these first two photos
Quitting here. This is pretty frustrating when you put in so much work trying to be silly, but at the same time also want to have great, and interesting photos!
May resume blog someday when this problem is fixed.
Just cold ahead for the next 24-48 h followed by a nice warming trend. No rain now in sight over the next two weeks, outside of a few mountain snow flurries tomorrow. “Trough Bowl” seems to be shifting eastward, which means repeated cold snaps east of the Rockies. It be replaced by a humping ridge over us, something that means the storm track is bumped up to the Pac NW and northern Cal.
The End
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1K-H waves:
Taken by the author a long time ago at Seattle’s Sandoval Park.
First you had the rarely seen “Aircraft Produced Ice Particles” (APIPs, or “High Temperature Aircraft Contrails” (HTACs) in supercooled Altocumulus in the afternoon. Contrails were being produced in clouds that were “only” -20 C to -30 C (-4 to -22 F) and aircraft contrails were thought to be impossible at those temperatures, but rather, only at much lower ones, below -40 C (-40 F) or so.
Then, just after sunset, the heavy layer of Altocumulus produced a sun pillar! I was out in Saddlebrooke having dinner with friends after sunset, so had to leave dinner for about ten minutes, but I was so excited for you that I had to see it for myself, too. Since it would have been obscenely rude to tell my dinner friends the true reason why I left, when I got back after many minutes I told them I had to pee, and that seemed to go over pretty well I thought1.
Below, a coupla shots of that sun pillar I got while “peeing” on your behalf:
5:33 PM Gently falling pristine2 hexagonal plate ice crystals, falling face down from mostly supercooled Altocumulus clouds, produce a sun pillar. This site says that sun pillars are typically seen with Cirrostratus clouds and I have not photographed ONE due to Cirrostratus clouds myself, but rather ones like this falling from……yes, that’s right, Altocumulus clouds having just a bit of ice in them. How funny is that?
5:33 PM. Closer look as it fades. Note the small liquid water mammatus bubbles upper right. Mammatus in liquid clouds is also pretty rare since they are downward moving puffs of air and droplets evaporate much faster than do ice crystals. Mammatus is nearly always restricted to ice clouds for this reason. Was also wondering if my oversize salad and hamburger had been served yet.
Let us look at our sounding and see if we can see how cold those Altocumulus clouds were:
Tucson sounding launched from our U of AZ around 3:30 PM yesterday. The arrows denote the likely heights and temperatures of the Altocumulus we saw, somewhere around -20 C (-4 F) or -30 C (-22 F) for both. Hard to tell which layer was the one the aircraft were flying in, but the colder the supercooled cloud the denser the ice trail. So…..since they were dense yesterday, CM is going with the one at -30 C. Yes, that’s right, liquid droplet clouds can exist at -30 C, full reasons not known, but indicates a lack of ice-forming particles up there. But, it can also happen at the ground, too, in fogs.
Here are some of the magical, rare scenes from aircraft making ice canals in those very cold supercooled Altocumulus clouds:
2:25 PM. Ice canal over Boot Barn down there on Oracle somewhere.2:29 PM. Contrail castellanus (that row above the pole)? Had never seen anything quite like this before. Going crazy over sky phenomena now. Word Press, as here, is corrupting some of these images; can’t fix it so far.2:50 PM.
3:51 PM. Just above corrupted part of this file–I’ve given up trying to fix it in WP, is an aircraft streaking through this Cirrocumulus/Altocumulus deck, and an ice trail will form. How can you tell that that aircraft is IN the cloud and not above it? Look for different movement between the contrail and the cloud. If they are moving together, its usually the case that the aircraft was in the cloud. The aircraft is in the cloud at left.3:51 PM Close up. Very excited that a trail would develop. You almost never see the aircraft leaving the trail like this; you see the trail after the aircraft is long gone.
Skipping to the chase, as hard as that is to do, this trail really lit up as it got to the 22 degree point from the sun, where mock suns and such happen, producing a rainbow of colors due to iridescence, a rainbow producing by very tiny ice crystals in this case, of the order of a few microns in size.
3:55 PM. Started to glow a little orange here.
3:55 PM. Close up of the feature event. Was turning brighter colors as the seconds went byStill 3:55 PM. Going from orange to blueish.STLL 3:55 PM. Color fades into white as this icy contrail in the Altocumulus raced eastward. More WP corruption here, too. Think I’ll quit! Just too much time to do this to have this kind of crap happen! Sorry, having little baby tantrum now.
Guess about today’s clouds
Maybe a few Cirrus, patch or two of Cirrocumulus, and likely lenticular clouds, particularly off to the north.
The End
The big storm everyone’s talking about?
Oh, yeah, baby, its still comin’, begins on Wednesday, New Year’s Eve in the afternoon, continues for about 24 h off and on.
Bracketing possible precip totals: still 0.25 inches on the bottom (10% chance of less), 1.50 inches on the top (10% chance of more). Average of those two often brings the best estimate, which would be about 0.87 inches, somewhere in there. You know, when you deal with wobbly cut off lows, you just can’t be real confident in how much rain they’ll bring. However, it looks like the north part of the State will get the brunt in snow, which will be great for the water situation.
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1It would be fun to hear what your excuses were as a “CMJ”–Cloud Maven Junior, if you were in a similar predicament last evening and HAD to see that rare sun pillar, rather than meet new people at dinner who wouldn’t be able to understand you anyway because you are compulsed like that; leave a great dinner to go outside in cold air to take cloud photos.
Well, nobody really understands a CM.
I remember in grammar school and Junior High in Reseda, CA, when kids teased me on clear days , saying, “Hey, Artie! Is it gonna rain today?” Then they would laugh at me for being a CM before I even answered the question, knowing all the while what the answer was going to be. Still, out of civility, I would answer them: “No, we’re having Santa Ana conditions now and it can’t rain for at least five days”, but they would still be laughing in the midst of my explanation about why it wasn’t going to rain. Kind of a sad scene when you think about it, that is, how mean kids can be to kids who are different. Later, when I became a pretty good athlete, they liked me, which shows how important athletics is over knowing stuff, and helping you “fit in.”
2 “Pristine” means that can’t be gunked up by having collected cloud droplets on their faces because then the optics, like sun pillars, mock suns, that kind of thing can’t happen if the crystals are messed up with droplets on them or a lot of extra hexagonal arms sticking out of them, as in bullet rosette ice crystals.
Map of the 500 millibar height contours (~18,000 feet above sea level pressure) for 5 PM AST yesterday when we were in the apex of a big trough with a minor pulse of curly air (vorticity maximum, to provide some verbal obscuration for the layman, and for laywomen, for that matter) that was approaching. That minor pulse , toward Vegas, was helping to produce a blob of clouds and light snow showers in the northern third of AZ yesterday. The next storm is that bend in the contours.winds off SE Alaska. Will drawn down cold air behind it across the whole US. Some low temperature records likely to be set in the western US, though not here.
What is interesting to cloud maven person, in looking back retrospectively at yesterday, is that he has never seen a big trough like this that is SO DRY that not even the smallest of Cumulus clouds formed here in the area. Not ONE! It sky was so completely clear from horizon to horizon in the afternoon that it was truly astounding to CM.
Such a cloudcast humiliation (recall that C-M foretold of Cumulus that would develop and fill in, producing virga, and a few light showers in the area), of course, provides a learning opportunity, a chance to move forward, and as such, is truly WELCOMED by the persons working in science. :{
So, we have seen the rare time when, with a 500 mb jet core south of us, that it does not circumscribe enough moisture for even a %#$! Cumulus fractus. Therefore, we have seen that a jet core south of us is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for precip in the area, something we learn every so often here. (More than 95%, but not ALL, of the Nov-Apr precipitation at TUS falls with the 500 millibar jet core over or south of us.)
It is also evident that CM did NOT believe model runs that had little or no chance of precip and decent clouds around. Very bad, a sign of unhumble thinking, possibly arrogance.
What’s ahead?
Well, as everyone knows, a major precip situation is building up for Catalinaland on December 31st through January 1st , as you saw from the Weather Underground’s forecast, one derived from our latest computer model run. In that you saw that a little SNOW is also forecast for here! Nice, for a few hours afterward that is. Get cameras ready. Precip seems guaranteed here. Bracketing amounts, should be at least 0.25 inches (things really go badly), and 1.5 inches as a top possibility.
The high end forecast by CM, whose recent diminished credibility should probably be taken into account, is due to the possibility the main rainband in the system might stall for even just a few hours longer than currently forecast. Typically, rainrates in the band are “moderate” here, technically defined as 0.10 to 0.30 inches per hour. So, you can easily see that if the main rainband hangs on for just a bit longer than currently forecast, totals will climb rapidly.
And, this is a slow moving, major system by the time it gets here. Exciting days ahead!
From two days ago, I thought I might fill in some of the photos from a Christmas Day hike into the Samaniego Ridge foothills that some reason WordPress had problems with:
At the well-known watering hole called the Cement Trough.Water ran in every crossing of this tributary to the Sutherland Wash, on that hike on the Baby Jesus Trail though the wash itself was dry.A lady bug? Wow, completely unexpected on Christmas Day, 2014.Flowers like Desert Marigolds are still found blooming in some locations, though these are not them. I’d tell you what they were if I could remember, flower book loaned out.
The End
The End
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1They have nothing to do with the 1960s-70s radical folk with a similar name.
Friends, arriving this afternoon from Seattle for a sunny and warm couple of vacation days, will find that Catalina weather today is exactly like the weather they left in Seattle; poor Tommy and Patty.
Clouds will fill in as the day goes on, becoming pretty cloudy at times, especially in the afternoon hours. They will starting to ice up, too, and you know what that means; they’ll produce virga and light showers in the area, with breezes and a high of only in the low 50s.
Be sure to record the first sighting of ice in clouds today. Will be a nice test for you, and a great ob in your cloud diary.
Still expecting a pretty major storm next week.
Got 0.12 inches in the gauge last evening.
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In the meantime, meet members of the former Cloud and Aerosol Research Group at the University of Washington, Professor Peter V. Hobbs, director.
Tom, who arrives today from Seattle, was our group’s software engineer at the University of Washington. He was kind of recluse we learned after he was hired. Liked to have a lot of high vegetation around his desk in our lab where me and a grad student worked. However, unlike a prior software engineer, who was also brilliant like Tom, Tom really never fell asleep at his desk that we know of.
“Jungle Tom”, our brilliant software engineer in the Cloud and Aerosol Research Group at the University of Washington. I hope you can find him.
Our first software engineer was Doug, shown meditating below.He was great! Worked long hours that often took their toll in the daytime.
But, not to demean “Doug” whatsoever, who truly WAS brilliant, and his software helped enormously to grease the wheel of our group’s aircraft data analyses, and who also made a lot of money when he joined the then fledgeling Microsoft in the early 1980s, took his job especially seriously, He liked to let people know how seriously, and exactly how much he loved working with computers. And he dressed to show it.
Software engineer, “Doug” arriving at work one day.
Cloud and Aerosol Researcher, “Stan”, monitoring cloud particle data on a flight over the Washington coastal waters.
It was a fact, that as I got embedded into perhaps the best Atmospheric Science Department in the world, I also learned that science draws “unusual”, maybe even quirky folk, and “meditating” while on the job, perhaps “awaking” with new, substantive realizations of relationships, or ways of presenting data, was pretty common, not just with Doug:
Graduate student, Stan, monitoring flight data in a cold front over the Washington coastal waters.Cloud and Aerosol Research Group flight engineer, “Jack, ” responsible for seeing that the instruments were functioning properly..
But there were other quirky characteristics that turned up, like “Germophobe John”, shown below, who actually shared my lab room for many years:
Germosphobe “John” at work. After awhile, of course, you don’t notice these quirks, although the rustling of plastic all the time was annoying when he working.Aerosol expert “Dean” we’ll call him, who worked down the hall was an asymmetric dresser, and took great pride in that. It was also a way that he got people to talk to him when they came over to point out that his clothes weren’t buttoned correctly. Dean was a leader in the sartorial rebellion of the day.
Then there was that one guy who worked as part of the flight crew who specialized in looking like John Denver, and liked to come in to work in the morning and report that someone on the bus he rode thought he was John Denver. Seemed to get a lot of satisfaction out of that, which in retrospect is kind of sad when you think about it.
One of the CARG team members who took pride in being mistaken for John Denver. We in our Group remember how sad he was when John Denver died in a home-built plane crash.
Me? I was pretty normal, really not too much affected by the various quirky people around me. From those halcyon days, a selfie:
The author, Arthur, in the early 1980s. I suppose the double pair of glasses was somewhat unusual, but other than that, I was fine. I suppose I was mad about some stuff in the domain of cloud seeding, maybe a little of that showing here.
There was some thought, however, that any quirkiness that was exhibited in our personnel might have been due to the various cancer-causing chemicals we worked with, one of which was Formvar, used to capture images of ice crystals that would hit the liquid Formvar on movie film rotating in the arm of a probe that stuck out of a pod, or a glass slide that stuck out a hole on a stick in the plane. In both cases, the crystal would hit the liquid Formvar, which would dry VERY fast, and then the impression of the crystal would be left in the plastic Formvar.
Below, “Diana”, and “Brad”, a brilliant grad student, at least before he started working with Formvar, examine a jar of the smelly stuff.
“Diana” and “Brad” , flight crew members, examine a jars of Formvar and maybe trichloroethylene used in conjunction with collecting ice crystal images while in flight.
Yesterday’s clouds
7:37 AM. Hope you saw this anomaly. The linearity suggests this line of mammatus was ice generated by an aircraft.
9:23 AM. Altostratus with puffs of new cloud forming on the upstream edge. What would those separate tufts be called. I don’t know for sure, maybe, Cirrus floccus or castellanus. Sure looks like Cirrus uncinus before it turns gray toward the east.
11:06 AM. Moisture below the level of the earlier cloud begins to arrive, showing up first as a lenticular cloud in the lee of the Catalinas.
1:01 PM. Before long, clouds at different levels began to appear. Here, two layers of Altocumulus the main one above a lenticular one.
3:53 PM. This was about an hour before virga and falling snow began to obscure the tops of Samaniego Ridge and Mt. Ms. Lemmon. Here the streaks, crespuscular rays, are NOT caused by precip, but rather dust
Some additional scenes from a 4 h yesterday into the Sam Ridge foothills:
Stuck here, might reached a limit, can’t seem to add photos, and there are too many already.
Like scientific opinion1, climate change happens. You may not know this, but only 15,000 to 20,000 years or so ago, a blink of an eye in light years, the earth was gripped by an Ice Age. No “hockey stick” handle back then! Snow and ice piled up over a kilometer deep on top of the Space Needle in Seattle. And the polar ice cap extended to places like Cahoga Falls, Ohio, while burying the Great Lakes, which didn’t exist.
NOW, of course, we’re in an “Interglacial” period called the Holocene, where its nice and toasty, for the most part, the way we like it as a people. Really, human beans do not like Ice Ages; they can really die off in a hurry2 and have to repopulate themselves afterwards! Well, I suppose that part might be fun.
The forecast models are foretelling something in the way of a flashback in the way of a pressure pattern over nearly ALL of North America that might well have been the average pressure pattern day after day during an Ice Age (there have been many), the last one, at its peak, not surprisingly, was called, “the Last Glacial Maximum.” I’d call it that, too.
Here are a coupla panels from the venerable Enviro Can computer model with its FOUR panels of weather. Take a look at the pressure patterns in the right side panels, you may have to use a magnifying glass, both showing the predicted sea level pressure pattern. These forecast maps are astounding to C-M and will, therefore, be likewise to you, too: a high pressure area so expansive with cold dense air that it covers millions of square miles, even more in square kilometers, maybe billions, since the kilometer is a smaller Euro unit of measurement that makes everything seem farther away when you’re driving to someplace and the distance is in Euros. (hahaha, just kidding folks).
Valid Monday, December 29th at 5 AM AST. Giant high pressure cell has formed in the Canadian Northwest Territories, and its leading edge is affecting the US from COAST TO COAST! I am pumped, don’t high pressure regions this big this too often in NA. In eastern Asia, e,g, China, where all our stuff is made, and Siberia, this big a high is SOS in the wintertime. So, we’re seeing a bit of eastern Asia wintertime conditons, too.
Valid just 24 h later, 5 AM AST, Tuesday, December 30th. Temperatures in some mountain valley locations in MT could be as low as -60 F. NE flow aloft, behind the upper low, will provide exceptionally dry air above the surface layer, and that will allow whatever “heat”, and we use this word, advisedly, to efficiently escape from the surface after nightfall. So, clear skies, dry above you, no wind (as in a valley) down, down, down plummets the temperature.
So, we have an historical treat coming when the average temperatures every day in the US were 15-20 F lower during the Last Glacial Maximum! (Ugh.) The oceans were at lot smaller then, too, because a lot that water was piled up on top of the Space Needle, etc.
You might have noticed in these panels that the Ice Age-like conditions are plummeting rapidly southward, and big trough is starting to curl over the interior of the Pac NW. Yes, since we are still in the Trough Bowl, that curling air pattern, containing frigid air is headed toward Arizona, and will be here or not in early January.
Why a bifurcated statement?
Models are confused. Two model runs, only 6 h apart (5 PM and 11 PM AST last evening have the low center aloft for the SAME time, January 1st at 5 AM AST over a) Pebble Beach Golf Course, Carmel, CA; b) over Gallup, NM! How funny, outrageous, and frustrating is that? See below:
Valid at 5 AM AST, January 1st, New Year’s Bowl Day. With the amount of cold air with this system it would likely be snowing in lower elevation places north of SFO. Also, it would rain on the Duck-Seminole bowl game in Pasadena, CA.Also Valid for January 1st at 5 AM AST. But which one will be right?
========Learning Module=================
But, we are “gifted” with an opportunity to learn about chaos in the atmosphere, aren’t we, that is, those times when little errors can lead to huge differences in future states.
So, to resolve this weather conflict, and lose a few more readers, we go to the NOAA spaghetti factory, and examine the “Lorenz plot” for this time period and see which one is looney:
Valid 12 h before the maps above, New Year’s Eve, December 31st at 5 PM AST.
Well its pretty obvious that the goofy one is the one having the low over SFO and vicinity. Most of the circulation pattern has a center in Arizona somewhere. But this interpertation means that extremely cold air is likely to invade at least the northern half of Arizona as January begins. The good side is that there would be substantial, and later, reservoir filling snows in the mountains, and a good chance of substantial rain here in Catalina as the year begins.
The end of maybe solving a prognostic conundrum.
Today’s weather
Well, its all “out there” by your favorite weathercaster, and they all do a pretty darn good job, and so no use hacking over what’s already known by everybody except to say that the jet streak at 18,000 feet (500 mb), that core that circumscribes precip from no precip areas during our winters, passes over Catalina (our area) around 5 PM AST according the latest model run.
And that’s, too, when the models expect the first rain around Catalina to arrive. As before, this ain’t gonna be too much unless we get real lucky, top amount likely below a quarter on an inch between 5 PM today and the end of possible showers later tomorrow afternoon.
And of course, there’ll be lots of wind, maybe gusts to 40 mph today, a windshift to the NW here when front goes by overnight, with a temperature drop of about 10 degrees almost simultaneously. Expect a frosty Lemmon on Friday morning when the clouds part.
The interesting part is that echoes and clouds will appear out of nowhere as that big trough expands southward, cooling the air aloft, allowing cloud tops to rise to ice-forming levels. Also, if you go there now, you will see giant clear slots between those middle and high clouds that passed over last evening until right now (Ac castellanus visible to SSW now), and a tiny band in west central Arizona, and the echo-producing clouds in the NW part of the State. Those unstable-loooking clouds will be gone soon.; they’re more from tropical locations.
Keep an eye on that little band in the middle; it may turn into a bona fide rainband as clouds add onto it, widens and thickens. That’s probably what’s going to bop us this evening with rain.
Expecting to see a nice lenticular cloud downstream from the Catalinas today. They’re common AHEAD of the jet core since the air is much more stable then, resists lifting and so you get cloud pancakes that hover over the same spot. How you log them if you see any.
Will we see our usual, “clearing before the storm”? This is when middle and high clouds depart, there’s a big clearing followed by an inrush of low, precipitating clouds. Not sure, but will look for it if that little band of middle clouds ends up as only that as it passes by today. The invasion of low clouds would follow that. Too much speculating today!
Yesterday’s clouds
3:42 PM. Cirrus fibratus thickening to Altostratus toward the horizon, invade sky as big trough approaches, upper ridge skiddadles.3:50 PM. Looking at Cirrus and CIrrostratus advancing over the Catalinas.5:20 PM. Your yesterday’s sunset. Heavy ice cloud shield advances on southern Arizona, Cirrostratus with Altostratus in the distance, the thickening NOT due to perspective. Hope you caught that.
Finally, the End. I’m sure you’re glad, too, if you got this far!
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1Remmeber back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when it was widely believed that a new ice age may be at hand because the earth had been cooling off for a coupla decades? It was also being pointed out that an ice age could onset in a hundred to a few hundred years from past ice age onsets! Yikes. Scary times on earth then when the Beatles were popular.
2Of course, if you were to die in an Ice Age, you might end up being well-preserved and then people would see what you looked like, the hair style you had, tattoos, etc, as we’ve seen with a few dead people that have been found from those glacial times. I guess that’s something positive to say about cold times.
Well, fountains spray water, and storms spray water (and snow) on the ground, so quite an unexpected confluence in descriptions, comparing fountains and storms.
That’s right, three storms are shown in the model run from last night. They been kind of coming and going, the model generally clueless about what’s really going to happen here, especially with California gully washing rains from the lower latitudes, that then affect Arizona.
However, they’re BACK, those gully washing rains in southern Cal, beginning around the 6-7th of Jan. They used to be exceptionally ferocious and floody in the WRF-GFS and came in on Rose Bowl day, that day when we were all dreaming of Ducks floating around in Pasadena. California Dreamin’, as it turned out. The floods now showing up would only be ordinary ones, at least to start.
But, “hey.” enough said about California! What about us?
A little snow overnight or the following morning after the day after Christmas. That would be the 26th. Precip amounts have to be light, since the trajectory of this cold storm is completely over land, but then that helps keep it cold, though I am not in favor of cold.
Amounts, again; Since its marginal to begin with; 0 to 0.25 inches max in melted snow water, if it snows.
Then what?
Next, on New Year’s Eve, the model, as rendered by IPS MeteoStar, erupted with this Arizona “fountain” number 2:
Valid at 5 AM AST. Jet core is already south of us, brown and reddish area, so it on the verge of raining here at that time.
But, as you know, when a low is predicted to be by itself, as in this case, the prediction is “iffy”. But, lows like this one, should it verify, bring the longest duration of rains and snows to Arizona, i. e,. are fabulous drought-denting storms because they move very slowly when out of the main flow. In fact this one would take more than 24 h to go by! You’d be looking at somewhere in the neighborhood of a half inch to an inch of precip here in the Catalina area.
Below, “fountain” number 3 “in preparation” as we say about our manuscripts, sometimes ones that never materialize in a journal, as it is with some of these storms the model predicts.
Truly, I say to you1, this is what dreams are made of for a southern California precipophile; get the sandbags out! Years of below normal rain, rectified! Drought busted! Let’s see what drought bustin’, mutton bustin’, cow-punchin’, drought stompin’, calf ropin’, hornswaglin’, storm herdin’ map really looks like:
Valid at 5 PM AST, January 5th. Drought bustin’ portent all over this map!
Don’t even need to show what happens after this, “Juicy” out there mixes it up with some Arctic air and is slammed into southern Cal with Hawaiian-like dewpoints and rain. Just like calf ropin’. That cold air and upper jet extruding offshore will “rope” Juicy in. Lotta “warm rain” involved, too, that type of rain that forms without the need for ice.
While Juicy loses some water and some punch after southern Cal, it would still be a big rain producer in Arizona, particularly the northern half. We would likely be just inside the edge of the southern edge of this. Still, we have to be glad for the State as a whole as our water situation would vastly improve with these storms, especially storm fountains 2 and 3.
Valid at 5 PM AST, Jan 5th. Looks pretty damn good for breakthrough flow to “the other side”, from the central Pacific to the West Coast and Great Southwest, wouldn’t you say? Note the bunching of red lines from the east Pac into Arizony. Chances better than average that we’ll see this break on through to the other side, Doors, 1967.
Standing by for snow and rain…. Sincerely, standing by for rain, C-M.
Yesterday’s day in contrails
Pretty upset yesterday as contrail after contrail formed and floated over Catalina. I don’t mind contrails when I’m flying somewhere, never even think of them, but when they foul the natural sky, I am livid.
Fortunately, the air got drier up there and contrails were rare after 10 AM. I can hardly stand to post this, but will for the sake of documentation so that you may be outraged as well. NIMB!
9:21 AM AST. Barrage of contrails fouls natural sky. Hope you’re mad now.
We hope this barrage was mainly due to those exceptional jet streams winds rushing down from Canada into the interior of the Southwest toward New Mexico causing airway contrails to shift over us.
Exceptional?
Some winds between 30,000 and 35,000 feet were clocked at over 200 mph! Great if you’re going from Seattle to Albuquerqueque, but not so great if you’re going the other way.
The End.
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1I had a sudden urge to say, “hypocrites!” just then for some reason. Crazy.
2″Spaghetti tasters”…. Made me wonder what happened to that great underground/alternative music band, The Oil Tasters… Remember their big hit, “Slit Chapped Lips“? Great example of what the 80s underground music scene was all about, that raw, exploration of different sounds, the overall contempt for “pop” music, the kind that makes a lot of money, like that produced by the Four Aces, etc.
(Can’t find that song about chapped lips on YouTube, its that good!) ((Later, found it!!))
((Can’t believe that I have touched the entire extrema of music in one blog, from the Four Aces on the left, to the Oil Tasters on the right, and everything in between; i.e., The Doors, 1967!)) (((Just shows you how deep your music knowledge can go; can it get any broader3?)))
3I remind the reader that if humor like this is not your cup of tea, nor the personality I effect here is also not, that my offer to stop blogging for a million dollars is still on the table.
When one first encounters this title with its unexpected play on words, we wonder what the author had in mind. Of course, most of us know that at Christmastime, we are often regaled by a Christmas tune called, “Frosty the Snowman1“. But here, we are surprised as we continue reading the title that instead of encountering the word, “snowman,” we encounter the word “Lemmon!” Hah!
What is meant here? What is author trying to tell us? Perhaps the word, “lemon”, has been misspelled. But if so, why would a “lemon” be frosty? Perhaps there was a cold spell in Florida and the author is harkening the reader to a long ago memory. Or, perhaps misspelling “lemon” was a literary device to emphasize that word in an eccentric way.
Yet, upon further investigation, we find that the issue is more complexed than first imagined. We find that there was an art teacher, nurse, and eventually, a self-educated botanist from New England, Sara Plummer Lemmon, who, with her husband and another worker, hiked to the top of the Catalina Mountains right here next to us, and while doing so, they logged the vegetation that was unique to the area. In their excitement when reaching the top, they named that highest peak after Mrs. Lemmon.
So, what does this piece of history add to our literary dilemma encapsulated in the title?
Perhaps Mrs. Lemmon did some work in the field of glaciology as well, hence, the word “frosty” as a possible hint of that work. Yet, upon investigation, we find no mention of work on ice crystals, hoar frost, nor glaciology not only in the work of Mrs. Lemmon, but neither in the work of any the team that mounted what is now known as Mt. Ms. Lemmon. We add that the note that the Lemmons, J. G. and Sara, were on their honeymoon at this time, historians tell us. Perhaps there is another avenue we can explore due to that latter element.
Could it be, too, that we are missing a characterization of Ms. Lemmon by our author? Perhaps she was shy, seen inadvertentlhy as “cold” by some, or was not particularly interested in the physical advances of her husband, J. G. The word “frosty” alert may be alerting us those possibilities.
Ultimately, we remain perplexed by this title; it forms an enigma that may never be confidently resolved.
But then good titles, and good books, are supposed to make us think, try to imagine what the author is telling us through his/her use of metaphor and other literary devices, and this title has done that.
We, of course, reject the most plausible, superficial explanation, that the author’s play on words was merely describing a local, snow and rimed-tree mountain named after Ms. Mt. Lemmon, as in the photo below. No, Occam’s Razor, the idea that the simplest explanation is usually the best one, will not do.
4:43 PM. Those trees are rimed, like the airframe of an aircraft that collects drops that freeze and cause icing. Here the wind blowing across the mountain top, and cloud droplets that were below freezing, hit the trees and froze over a period of many hours, creating this scene. Its not snow resting on the branches. That would’ve blowed off in the strong winds up there.
———End of Literary Criticism Parody Module———-
There was a rousing 0.24 inches of rain yesterday! Our storm total has topped out at 0.89 inches!
In other photos from yesterday:
9:42 AM. Altostratus translucidus again, with a few scattered Altocumulus cloud flakes, but this time with bulging Stratocumulus topping Samaniego Ridge, giving portent of a good Cumulus day if the As clouds will only depart and allow a LITTLE warmth. They did.
10:24 AM. Before long, cloud bases darkened here and there, indicating mounding tops above a general layer, and with the low freezing level of about 7,000 feet, the formation of ice and precip was not far behind.10:51 AM. Mountain obscuring showers were soon in progress due to both a little warming, but also because of a cloud energizing swirl in the upper atmosphere that passed over us at 1 PM AST. Did you notice that windshift aloft as that bend in the winds went by up there? You probably noticed that it was no dice, er, no ice, after 1 PM as the mash down of air that follows “troughs” did that very effectively after 1 PM.
10:52 AM. As the clouds (weak Cumulonimbus ones) broke, there was a fantastic rainbow for just a seconds to the north, landing on my neighbor’s house. It was even better before this, but was slow getting to the camera! Dang.
10:54 AM. “Pictures a poppin’ ” now as breaks in clouds allows those fabulous highlights of glinting rocks and scruffy Stratus fractus or Cumulus fractus clouds lining Sam Ridge, those highlight scenes that we love so much when the storm breaks. And these scenes change by the second, too!
11:00 AM.Also 11 AM. Out of control with camera now…..
11:12 AM. Meanwhile, back upwind… This line of modest Cumulonimbus clouds fronted by a weak shelf cloud roared in across Oro Valley to Catalina. What a great sight this was since now there was a chance of some more decent rains! Before long, the rains pounded down, puddles formed, and another 0.18 inches had been added to our already substantial total of 0.65 inches.
12:01 PM. But that wasn’t the end, was it? Before long, a heavy line of Cumulus and weak Cumulonimbus clouds formed again to the southwest and drenched Catalina with another round of rain, this time, only 0.06 inches. And with it came the End. This line of showers was spurred by that upper level wind shift that was going to occur over the next hour.
1:01 PM. Sometimes those clearing skies, the deep blue accentuating the smaller Cumulus clouds provide our most postcard scenes of the great life we have here in the desert.2:13 PM. While it was sad looking for ice in the afternoon clouds and finding none, the scenes themselves buoyed one. The instability was great enough that even brief pileus cap clouds were seen on top of our Cu.2:21 PM. Pileus cap cloud (right turret) tops honest-to-goodness December Cumulus congestus cloud. No ice nowhere.
2:28 PM. And if the sky and mountains splendor isn’t enough for you, then consider our blazing fall-winter vegetation as evidenced by a cottonwood tree in the Sutherland Wash,’ that yellow dot, lower center. We have it ALL now!2:48 PM. And, as the cloud tops are kept low, we get those fantastic, quilted, richly colored scenes on our Catalina Mountains we love so much. Here, looking toward Charouleau Gap and Samaniego Peak. I could show you so many more like this from just yesterday!
5:08 PM. Even our lowly regarded teddy bear chollas have luster on days like this, the weak winter sunlight being reflected off its razor-hook-like spines, ones that many of us know too well.
5:12 PM. And like so many of our days here in old Arizony, closed out with a great sunset.
Possibility raised in mods for giant southern Cal floods, maybe some flooding in AZ floods, too
Something in the spaghetti plots has been tantalizing as far as West Coast weather goes. They have been consistently showing a stream of flow from the tropics and sub-tropics, blasting into the West Coast. Recall that yesterday, that tropical flow was so strong and so far south, that at least one major gully washed was shown to pass across central and southern California on New Year’s Day, but weaken and shift to the north of southern AZ after that.
Well, my jaw dropped when this model run from yesterday at 11 AM AST came out, re-enforcing, even raising the bar on flooding, in central and southern California, and with those stronger storms, the possibility of flooding and major winter rains here in Arizona was raised. The severity of the pattern shown aloft is not one I have seen before, and for that reason alone, might be considered somewhat of an outlier prediction, one really not likely to occur.
Now, while there is some support in this model flooding “solution” in the spaghetti plots, the main reason I am going to present a series of what a disastrous Cal flood looks like is just FYI and how it develops. The closest analog to this situation was in January 1969 when a blocking high in the Gulf of Alaska (GOA), forced the major jet stream far south across the central and eastern Pacific on several occasions producing disastrous floods in southern California in particular, where one mountain station received more than 25 inches of rain in ONE DAY!
Also that blocking high in the GOA in Jan 1969 also forced unusually cold air into the Pac NW, where Seattle (SEA-TAC AP) accumulated 21 inches of snow over the month, still a record.
Here we go, in prog maps of our WRF-GFS rendered by IPS MeteoStar:
In the Beginning, the blocking high, shunting the jet stream to the south and to the north takes shape in the GOA. Note low far to the south between Hawaii and southern California. Get sand bags out now! This is for 11 PM AST, 28th of December.
24 h later:
Valid at 11 PM AST 29 December. Southern Cal flooding underway. Cold air pocket in Oregon has slipped southwestward helping to energize the lower band of jet stream winds by bringing cold air out over the ocean. The greater the temperature contrast between the north and the south, the greater the speed of the jet stream between the deep warm air to the south, and the deep cold air to the north. Note, too, high is getting farther out of the way in the Gulf of Alaska.
The situation continues to strengthen, and leads to this Coup de Gras, 11 PM AST January 1st. A system this strong barging into southern Cal is mind-boggling, and this panel is what brought this part of the blog, to show you what a devastating flood in that area would look like:
Valid at 11 PM, January 1st. In my opinion, I doubt the Rose Bowl game between the Oregon Ducks and Florida State would take place in Pasadena, CA, if this were to transpire.
Now for AZ. Here’s the prog for 12 h later, 11 AM AST January 2nd, Cactus Bowl Day in Tempe, AZ between the Washington Huskies and the Oklahoma A&M Aggies, to continue with sport’s notes here. Rain would be expected for that game should this pattern persist:
Valid at 11 AM AST, January 2nd. This is an unbelievably strong wave that has roared in from the lower latitudes of the Pacific. While it rushes through Arizona in a hurry, heavy rains, and some flooding are likely should things transpire like this.
Now for a gee-whiz, scary analog….one from WAY back in the winter of 1861-62 when the situation decribed above was likely very similar to what it was in that terrible flood; severe cold in progress in the Pac NW, as it would be in the upcoming situation; a tropical torrent raging in from the Pacific. This 1861-62 flood episode is still remembered. However, it went on for 30-40 days (!) with recurring episodes turning much of California’s central valley into a lake, Los Angeles area, too, where there was a report of 35 inches of rain in 30 days.
What’s ahead, really?
Well the models are going to fluctuate on the strength of this breakthrough flow “underneath” the blocking high in the Gulf of Alaska. But almost certainly one major rain event will break through as that this happens. Its kind of a fragile flow regime, so it usually doesn’t last long.
Whether it will be stupefyingly historic, or just another ordinary southern Cal gully washer, can’t be pinned down. But, if you lived down there, you’d want to be looking around and seeing what you could do to divert water, fix a roof, etc.
There would be strong, damaging winds with one of these “coming-in-underneath”, too, and, for surfers, giant waves!
Interesting times ahead! “Floodmagedon”, as we like to say these days?
No real weather here for awhile, except around Christmas when a mild cold snap, and a little chance of precip occurs as a cold front goes by.
The End, for awhile.
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1The most intellectually satisfying version of “Frosty the Snowman” was, of course, has been rendered by Bob Dylan.
