Cloud-maven – Page 51 – About real clouds, weather, cloud seeding and science autobio life stories by WMO consolation prize-winning meteorologist, Art Rangno

Weather “stagecoach” full of storm presents set to arrive on Friday

Don’t really need me anymore. Everyone’s on top of this ” incoming” now, set to begin in the area overnight on Thursday, the one you’ve been reading about here since maybe last October I think. So, feeling sad today, also because it looks like its going to be a bit too warm for snow, which I think I mentioned about a dozen times. Maybe I will take it out on you by boring you with a science story, one about ice in clouds…but one featuring such stalwarts as Sir Basil Mason, Stan Mossop, John Hallett, Pete Hobbs, Alexei Korolev, and others. Interested now?

But first, a few nice cloud shots from yesterday so you don’t get too mad at me for boring you first:

2:07 PM. CIrrostratus fibratus (has detail, not just an amorphous veil).

4:21 PM. Cirrus spissatus patches and dog, Zuma (named after the acclaimed dramatic series, Baywatch, which took place at Zuma Beach, also where the author, whilst not storm chasing spent a LOT of time. — 4:21 PM. Two dense patches of Cirrus spissatus patches and dog, Zuma (named after the acclaimed dramatic series, Baywatch, which took place at Zuma Beach; also where the author, whilst not storm chasing, spent a LOT of time.

5:22 PM. Cross section of a Cirrus uncinus (hooked at the top). This shows how the ice crystals forming at the top first get heavy enough to fall out, but if encountering drier air, start to evaporate, slow in fallspeed, and as in this case, form a flat layer of tiny crystals at the bottom of the head of Cirrus uncinus. Likely a little moist again at that bottom location so the tiny guys don't away very fast. — 5:22 PM. Cross section of a Cirrus uncinus (hooked at the top). This shows how the ice crystals forming at the top first get heavy enough to fall out, but if encountering drier air, start to evaporate, slow in fallspeed, and as in this case, form a flat layer of tiny crystals at the bottom of the head of Cirrus uncinus. Likely a little moist again at that bottom location so the tiny guys don’t away very fast.

5:29 PM. Sunset in Cirrus (spissatus and others).

Cloud ice science story

(drink some coffee, maybe take an extra swig of an “energy drink” if venturing forward)

Kind of takes the fun out of it when other people are saying what you want to say by yourself, lilke today’s forecast for Friday’s storm. Kind of like being second when you publish “new” results behind other researchers who “got in” a little a head of you (like Korolev et al.-with Hallett!) did in 2004 reporting the FIRST image of a shattered frozen drop they said.

Drop shattering during freezing; what about it?

It was thought not to happen in natural clouds after that embarrassing episode back in the 1960s when the Great Knighted, Sir B. J. Mason¹ and his student, Swinbank (1960), reported drops exploded with they froze. Liquid centers tried to get out of the ice shell as the drop froze from outside in, as you would expect, but then blew up when the freezing water expanded inside the shell. Looked pretty good.

There was only one thing wrong, their findings weren’t valid for real clouds.

They put too much CO2 in their cloud chamber (that’s right, the very SAME stuff that’s supposed to make the earth warmer and warmer year after year but has been sitting around lately, about 15 years actually, not doing anything) and that CO2 in the experiments turned out to make the outer ice shell real weak, and also the CO2 came out of solution in the water in the liquid center to make matters worse by expressing gas through the shell. I wonder how many people have done that?

This was found out by researchers in my very own group before I got there, Jim Dye and Peter Hobbs, a few years later. When real air was used, the drops didn’t explode. So, down that hypothesis went that exploding drops caused a lot of ice to form in natural clouds.

End of story? Nope.

Later, Hobbs with grad student, Abdul Alkezweeny, repeated the experiments with freezing drops, but this time instead them just sitting there, had them rotate as they froze and they DID shatter some, but not a lot! This was back in 1968.

But no one was reporting images of shattered drops.

In those days, there was a HUGE amount of unexplained ice in clouds. Cloud chambers on the ground and in aircraft, found that little ice formed until the air IN THE CHAMBER was at least as cold as -20 C (-4 F), but instrumented aircraft repeatedly found tremendous amounts of ice in clouds that had never been colder than -10 C (14 F). Hence, an enigma.

But the explanation that a few drops exploded, sending out thousands of ice shards never gained any ground because there was never any observational evidence that it happened. Instead, an Australian researcher, originally from South Africa, Stanly C. Mossop, with John Hallett, discovered in 1974 that a bar moving through a cloud chamber between -2.5 C and -8 C, caused ice splinters to eject from SOME of the little drops hitting the bar and freezing on it. But the drops had to be at least 24 microns in diameter, fairly large for cloud droplets, or nothing happened. Also, if they moved the bar too fast or too slow, nothing happened. So, there were a lot of criteria involved in this process, temperature range, drop sizes, speed.

So, the Hallett-Mossop riming-splintering hypothesis was born. They assumed the bar, moving at the fall speeds of soft hail, showed what soft hail did inside clouds: multiply ice content!

It was an exciting time to see that the mystery of all that ice in clouds at higher temperatures was finally explained, not needing, shattered drops or anything else.

But there were some problems. In the early days, it was thought that this process, to raise the ice concentrations in clouds much, would take as long as 1-2 hours because it was a “cascade” process. The few first splinters had to grow to sizes there they fell fast enough to bump into drops and cause ice splinters to eject. Well, that wasn’t right. Natural clouds formed ice MUCH faster than that, as you here in Arizona know so well.

The experiments continued and it was found that shattering helped this process (assuming it occured, but even more important was the freezing of drizzle and raindrops. When those froze, they became instant rimers, splintering objects, and so the time for a cloud, but one having drizzle and raindrops in it, and in the right temperature zone, just between -2.5 and -8 C, was cut down to minutes, something like 10-20, to get ice concentrations from about 1 per cubic meter, to tens of thousands per cubic meter, a real rain cloud.

Except for a single image of a drop half by a researcher using a cloud camera with a glider in the 1970s, no one had reported a shattered drop. Then along come Korolev et al. (with the great Hallett!) in 2004 reporting shattered drop images in a Canadian frontal band using an advanced cloud camera. They wrote that it was the FIRST images ever reported of shattered drops. Rangno and Hobbs (2005) also reported images of shattered drops in clouds around the Marshall Islands, thinking at the time that they were going to be first in line, and then discovered the Korolev et al. report. It was a sad day to find that reference, as a researcher that was thinking about the glorious days ahead, the keynote addresses to important conferences, that would result from being first in line with something and then other people would always have to reference you.

As Ecclesiastes wrote, their is hardly anything new under the sun if you’re slow going about it.

Published another paper on shattered drops back in ’08. But, found they didn’t SEEM to be making a big contribution to the ice content in clouds, less than 10%. You can go here to see that I didn’t make that part up. That was kind of sad finding, too. You want what you find to be HUGE, and it wasn’t so huge as I hoped.

So, riming and splintering remains our best, most accepted explanation for the great amounts of ice in clouds that aren’t so cold, though the author and Hobbs, have mostly found it wasn’t powerful enough to account for the speed of ice development. Only the author’s friends, Stith et al (2004), have reported a lot of ice that couldn’t be explained by the riming-splintering mechanism as have R&H over the years.

But it would be so great if others confirmed the Stith et al findings.

The End for now.

———————-

1Wiki doesn’t do a very good job, and doesn’t even list his outstanding updated, Physics of Clouds text published in 1972, the “bible” of cloud physics in those days! Unbelievable.

²Riming: Think of what happens to an airframe in a liquid drop cloud at below freezing temperatures. HELL, here’s a photo by the author from the author-occupied Lear Jet 35 flying in supercooled clouds over Saudi Arabia, 2006, The weapon-looking things under the wings image precipitation particles like raindrops and snowflakes using laser beams with light sensitive diodes at the other end, one that when shadowed, give you a two dimensional image of what went through the laser beam.

ann DSCN1223 rime icing — 8:01 AM, December 16, 2006.

11:02 AM, December 10th, 2006. Had to land at Hail, a small, pretty town north of Riyad to pick up some supplies, ones for the randomized cloud seeding experiment underway. It was interesting that we could carry these boxes labeled "Explosive" to the Lear Jet without any notice. Hmmmm. — 11:02 AM, December 10th, 2006. Had to land at Hail, a small, pretty town north of Riyadh to pick up some supplies, ones for the randomized cloud seeding experiment underway. It was interesting that we could carry these boxes labeled “Explosive” to the Lear Jet without any notice. Hmmmm. They were there because that’s where another NCAR radar was besides the one at Riyadh, and a plane might have to land to continue seeding if it ran out of the seeding flares like the ones inside these boxes.

Not blogcastin’ today; but an old science story “filler” from the Middle East!

Lettin’ the past few weather blogcasts about a good chance of snow here in Catalina during the Christmas season ride the old stagecoach into town. Doesn’t seem to be any need to change it… In the meantime this.

A science story for you, while we kill time waiting for some snow

You’ve probably read about snow in Jerusalem and elsewhere in the Middle East. I saw it snow in Jerusalem when I there for 11 winter weeks, January through the middle of March, 1986, on a self-funded cloud investigation. Its not terribly uncommon to see snow in Jerusalem, believe it or not.

I was single in 1986, so I could do stuff like that, quit my job at the University of Washington for awhile (2 years), with no need to ask a spouse, “Honey, do you mind if I quit my job today and spend the equivalent of $40,000 going to Israel to look at clouds for a couple of months, and then spend a year without income working on a publication about ’em?”

Not gonna happen.

I had just sold a house in Durango, Colorado, so had some money to waste; I could be a “gentleman scientist” as in the old days of science before WWII and Vanevar Bush and the onset of big government funding for science, and maybe what some would call the beginning of “careerist” science, that followed WWII and the beginning of the Cold War to propel us forward.

So off I went in early January 1986 to see the clouds of Israel.

Jerusalem was often a city in the clouds during storms; it was so COLD and windy during them, unbelievably so considering what we think of there from Bible stories. I was outside a lot, experiencing the weather and rain, and on one occasion I remember I couldn’t pull the shutter on my old Rolleicord medium format camera, my fingers were so cold.

The three wisemen/magi came in the winter, didn’t they? They don’t seem to have enough clothes on in the Nativity scenes that I have seen, given what the weather can do in the winter there. Below, Jerusalem in the clouds, with 20-30 mph wind, at about 40 F:

I_TALK_001 — Part of the new construction of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Might have been a hospital wing. Note leaning cypress or juniper trees.

January 12, 1986. Looking down King David Blvd, Jerusalem, during a storm.

January 21st, sunset over the Med, from the beach fronting Tel Aviv. — January 21st, 1986: sunset over the Med, from the beach fronting Tel Aviv.

I really loved it in Israel. The Israel national weather service (IMS, Y. L. Tokatly, Director) was great to me, letting me have a little research area in their offices after I just showed up on their doorstep, unannounced. Later, in a display of incredible scientific idealism, when the Director learned that the key scientist and I had a falling out about the clouds of Israel after my second week there, he allowed me to continue to use their historical records and my little space in their offices, terming what happened between that researcher and myself, as “merely a scientific dispute.”

Oh, my; where has that pure idealism fled to in the global warming wars?

But I loved the clouds there in Israel the most as they rolled in off the Mediterranean, borne on the cold winds of continental Europe, then boiled upward from flat little guys that they started out as by the warm waters of the Mediterranean into big Cumulus and Cumulonimbus clouds, the latter often spewing lightning, by the time those clouds and cold air got to Israel. It is a gigantic lake-effect situation there in the Mediterranean, the kind that is produced by the warmer waters of the Great Lakes as Arctic air traverses it, such as the storm buried folks in New York recently. Over over the Mediterranean, the air has a chance to really warm up after leaving Europe due to its low to mid 60s late fall and wintertime water temperature.

January 15, 1986. Cumulonimbus marches ashore north of Tel Aviv. — January 15, 1986. Cumulonimbus calvus marches ashore north of Tel Aviv.

February 9, 1986. Skies open up near Nahariyya, in extreme northern Israel. — February 9, 1986. Skies open up near Nahariya, along the extreme northern Israeli coast near the Lebonese border.

January 12, 1986. An epiphany moment as the first storm in daylight hours occurred during my visit. — January 12, 1986. A moment of “cloud ice” epiphany as the first storm in daylight hours occurred during my visit. I knew with the first two hours of this storm that my hunch about those clouds was right. BTW, showers like these can roll into Israel, and into Lebanon for that matter, for days on end, termed “rainy spells” in that region. Cold air troughs aloft like to “nest” in that region in the wintertime, enhancing the clouds there, and stimulating the “Cypress Low” pressure area at the surface in the eastern Med.

The short of this is, and I COULD write a book, “go long”, was that I questioned, from afar mind you, after I plotted balloon sounding of temperature and moisture from Lebanon and Israel when it was raining, whether the clouds being described by a leading scientist in Israel were correct. In fact, from these plots, I was rather sure they weren’t. But it would, as I knew, be real heresy to conclude that in those days.

Of course, questioning findings goes on all the time in science. Its what makes it better.

A short paper was submitted to the J. of Applied Meteorology in 1983 reporting this discrepancy, and some other problems. It was rejected by three of four reviewers, one being the leading scientist mentioned above. I really was of the opinion I would “get in.” so was disappointed, but not undaunted in the least! Should have taken more than ONE day, July 4th, 1983, to write it, coming into the University of Washington at 6:30 AM, I was so excited to get it off!

I knew what those balloon soundings were telling me, and so after the paper was rejected, it began to occur to me to GO to Israel and see the clouds for myself. After all, by this time (1983) I had been punching clouds with cloud measuring instruments at the University of Washington for about seven years, and had a good idea of what was in them just from their visual (external) appearances. And I was starting to build a list of papers on reanalyzing and commenting on cloud seeding experiments, getting some notice.

So I reasoned that even if I just looked at the clouds of Israel, I would know whether the many journal and conference reports about those Israeli clouds were in error.

Error? What would that be, you ask? Some background, if anyone is still reading.

The clouds being described in Israel by researchers there, ones operating a cloud seeding program, were supposed to get real thick and cold before they rained. That meant the clouds weren’t very efficient and could to be seeded with a substance called silver iodide (AgI) to make it rain sooner, before they got so thick and cold. The AgI would introduce ice, needed to start the rain process going, at higher temperatures than the natural clouds rained at, thus seeded clouds would rain before having to be so thick and cold.

This meant that more would rain when seeded compared to not seeded clouds because not just the taller ones in Israel would rain. More clouds raining would, of course, add hours of rain to storms on seeded days, it was posited, and the researchers evaluating their second randomized experiment reported those very results: seeding, on randomly drawn days, had increased the hours of rain compared to randomly drawn control days. And these increases in rain on the seeded days were statistically significant, as they had been in a first randomized experiment.

So, in not ONE but two randomized cloud seeding experiments in Israel, statistically significant results had been obtained on seeded days, and the scientists reporting these results also had what appeared to be a solid cloud foundation for having obtained more rain by seeding; the natural clouds just had to be too thick to rain, but they fixed that by seeding with AgI. It all made sense.

It doesn’t get better than this for scientific proof, the so-called “gold standard” of science; statistically significant results in two randomized experiments and a solid physical reason why it happened. Due to these attributes, these experiments in Israel were accepted as “proof” of seeding effects by our highest scientific panels, such as the National Academy of Sciences, and every expert in the cloud seeding domain. For a time…..

Representative of this status is a 1982 article in Science magazine; “Cloud seeding: One success in 35 years” That success was the two Israeli experiments en toto.

From the outside, my trip to Israel in 1986 to investigate the clouds would have seemed ludicrous. Why bother; too many peer-reviewed publications documenting the attributes of those clouds, and also in a number of conference papers as well.

Could they all be wrong?

Yep¹.

The End, more or less.

Below, an “action shot”:

Yours truly atop the Riviera Hotel, Tel Aviv. — Yours truly atop the Riviera Hotel, Tel Aviv, January 1986, readying for clouds and storms to blow in from the Med.

——————————————-some final commentary that sort got out of hand after more coffee———–

¹The short ending. That answer is not in question anymore. Did that leading researcher allow me to go to either of his two radars to see how thick the clouds were when they were raining?

Nope.

So my publication on those clouds (1988, Quarterly Journal of the Royal Met. Society) had to make inferences about cloud top temperatures based on primitive balloon sounding data. But the results in that paper, that shallow clouds were raining and had MUCH higher cloud top temperatures than had been reported to that time, were confirmed by independent researchers, the best kind, using aircraft and modern instrumentation a few years later.

Spiking fubball now! (Can’t seem to lose that sense of irreverence, even when serious.)

Some final, “human” notes about this chapter of science:

This same leading researcher, in 1972 (published in 1974 in Weather and Climate Modification, Wilmot Hess, Ed, Wiley-Interscience) wrote what may be the BEST, most circumspect review of his experiments, as his second experiment was underway! It is recommended reading for anyone in this field.

So, “something” happened later on when he got his radars to monitor cloud tops and likely learned there was a problem. And you can imagine, I was his nightmare, a smart-ass with a building publication record critical of cloud seeding coming to Israel to question his cloud reports. Ideally, no problem. As scientists “ideally” we want to be the first to know that our results are in error. We care only about truth. (Right.) Ufortunately, our humanity sometimes gets in the way.

The leader of the Israeli experiments died only a year after my visit at the age of 54, aware at that time (1987) that the paper on clouds of Israel was going to be published in the QJ (Prof. Peter Hobbs, the Director of my group, had communicated this news to him after we got word from the QJ that year.) So….we can speculate.

But our meetings were cordial at all times; he was a great story teller, and there was no shouting, even when he firmly asked me to leave his office and never come back (2nd visit when I was telling him about my “findings”, which included a mention of drizzle, something his clouds were never supposed to do).

In fact, I felt bad for him, and still do, knowing the position I was putting him in, how this might end when other researchers began asking more questions about his cloud reports and eventually they would have to be overturned. At one point, on top of the old Hebrew University of Jerusalem, during our first very cordial meeting, I said, “Maybe we can co-author something if I find anything.” Coming from a “newby” like me, I am sure, as cordial as he was, he would have liked to have pushed me off the roof.

Some day I will post the whole technical thing on this experiment, and another one that was its mirror image in the Colorado Rockies. That future post (Cloud Seeding and the Journal Barriers to Faulty Claims: Closing the Gaps) will be piled high with references But this is already too much for now.

White holiday season day still in the cards

“Cards” in title referring to computer models, not some kind of goofy fortune telling thing, though, in fact, the models can be kind of goofy, too.

Also by talking about the exciting weather ahead here in Catalina (how many inches will it pile up?), I wanted to deflect attention from error. No rain here in Catland yesterday, as thought likely a couple of days ago (thanks to Enviro Can’s GEM model), though a couple of light showers and even a thunderstorm were close by. There was even a lightning strike from the cell shown below according to the National Lightning Detection Network, one that’s off limits for the tax payers who paid for it. (Must go through private weather providers or work at a university to see the NLDN directly, quite an outrage, as was the case in the early years of Doppler radar data.)

4 PM AST. Radar and satelllite IR image from IPS MeteoStar. — 4 PM AST. Radar and satellite IR image from IPS MeteoStar. Arrow points to Cumulonimbus cloud that briefly erupted to the SE of us.

While Yesterday’s Gone, for Chad and Jeremy¹, here are some clouds shots anyway…

First of all, the long foretold and then bailed on Altocumulus castellanus (and floccus) showed up yesterday morning:

11:09 AM. Altocumulus floccus and castellanus. Floccus has a ragged base. From the taken- while-not-driving collection though it looks like it. Professional course, do not attempt. — 11:09 AM. Altocumulus floccus and castellanus. Floccus has a ragged base; cas a flat base, not that it matters that much. From the taken- while-not-driving collection though it looks like it. Professional course, do not attempt.

2:59 PM. Later in the afternoon, scattered Cumulus clouds were aplenty under some remaining Altocumulus, but did not attain the ice-forming level, with a couple of exceptions, which of course, I will have to show.

3:44 PM. Moderate Cumulus (mediocris) over the Catalinas. Can you find the remnant puff of ice from the highest turret formerly in this grouping? — 3:44 PM. Small and moderate Cumulus (humilis and mediocris) over the Catalinas. Can you find the remnant puff of ice from the highest turret formerly in this grouping? That ice puff up there tells you that one of these rained on someone earlier. Hope you logged it in your clouds and weather diary…

Same photo as above except with annotation and s... like that. I don't cuss but it sounded funny to write that, detracting just that bit from erudition. — Same photo as above except with annotation and s… like that. I don’t cuss but it sounded funny to write that, detracting just that bit from erudition; stepping out of character for humor. I laughed anyway. Maybe this blog is just for me anyway. That’s what my brother says.

4:40 PM. Dramatic scenes like this on the Catalinas closed out our dry day.

5:19 PM. Fading clouds and drier air move in from the southwest. All threat of rain is gone, but not of a great sunset.

What’s that about white stuff?

Here’s the latest 500 millybar map (flow around 18,000 feet above sea level):

Valid at 5 AM AST, Friday, December 20th. Those bowls in the SW are going to be SO COLD! Poor guys. — Valid at 5 AM AST, Friday, December 20th, rendered by IPS MeteoStar. Those bowl games in the SW are going to be SO COLD! Poor guys.

Big U-turn in jet stream shown over AZ and all the way to Canada! On the east side of the U-turn are clouds and precipitation and sh… like that. (hahahaha, to continue an out of character theme for a second for humorous purposes…) In the middle of the U-turn are the lowest freezing levels, on this map, low enough in AZ for snow here has either already occurred, or is on the doorstep or already here. On the backside of the U-turn, where the wind is blowing out of the north, the air is mostly subsiding, drying out, clearing off, allowing huge amounts of infrared heat to escape from the earth’s surface into space.

Here’s something else… See how much stronger the wind at this level is over CA, OR, and WA than in the eastern part of the U-turn? That means the U-turn itself is going to push farther S as time goes on, a mechanical thing. This would be a VERY cold episode for us, hard freeze variety, when the clouds and precip clear off.

While the amount of precip here has varied as the exact configuration and placement of the jet has varied in model run to model run, the OVERALL pattern of very cold air getting here has remained in place. Be ready!

Note, too, in the map above that the strongest winds at this level are WELL south of us, and so its already preciped here. Now I will look and see when the precip starts with this gargantuan trough and record cold (in part of the West) pattern first takes hold: OK, looks like the night of the 19th-20th, starting out as rain, changing to snow as storm ends, IMO.

Terribly cold weather will impact the whole West, and punish the northern Rockies and Plains States again. You’ll be reading/hearing about this one during the through the runup to Christmas, so similar to the blast of cold air that broke so many low temperature records last week. Will be tough on travelers. Not so happy about that prospect.

BTW, just to make a point about those crazy NOAA spaghetti factory plots: they have been pointing confidently, as readers of this blog will know, for more than ten days or so, to another pretty extreme weather event here and throughout the West, and that’s where they come in as an important tool for weather forecasters, when a strong signal shows up. Normally, weather forecasts go pretty bad after five days to a week. But “Lorenz”-spaghetti plots can help us see through the fog of middle range forecasting sometimes. That’s why you look at them everyday to see what’s up beyond the first five days or so.

BTW#2, all of this crashing down of the jet stream suddenly into the West after our nice spell of weather, is due to that jumbo storm that erupts in the western Pacific, builds a high pressure ridge ahead of it, and then that causes the mild-mannered jet crossing the coast in British Columbia to go into a southward, buckling rage, dragging record cold air behind it as it does so from northern Canada. That key gigantic eruption in the western Pacific has also been predicted with confidence day after day.

Really going overboard today, got up too early I can see that…. Below, the first the “la-dee-dah” spaghetti plot valid just two days from now:

See how the illustrative contours are piling into BC and northern Washington State? Over us and the WHOLE West, is a big fat ridge. No problems. Toasty weather, here too, for December. Note also, how small the errors are that are deliberately introduced at the beginning of the model test (or “ensemble” runs)! They hardly make any difference in a 48 h forecast (the lines run on top of each other). The giant low in the western Pac has not yet erupted, so there’s not much amplitude to the jet stream, its just pretty much west to east flow, la dee dah.

But look below at the waviness (amplitude) of the flow in the Pacific AFTER the giant low erupts, forming a big ridge downstream!

Valid at 5 PM AST, Thursday, December 18th; pattern caving in. Wrote all over this, got too excited about what's ahead. — Valid at 5 PM AST, Thursday, December 18th; pattern caving in. Wrote all over this, got too excited about what’s ahead.

Whew! Quitting here, got a little over worked today about the weather way ahead. Too long to proof, too…. But HELL, its the internet; don’t have to be a great writer to be on the internet²!

The End, except for historical culture footnote below.

————————

¹Part of the “British invasion”. If you’re a kid, have your parents explain to you that it was not a military thing to reclaim America except in terms of music. Pop music here wasn’t good enough (Beatles were better than the Beach Boys I guess) in the mid-1960s, and so they came, and they came and they came from that little island nation with their weird hair styles and great hooks and dominated the air waves. Pretty soon, everybody had weird hair styles.

From Saturday Review... — From The Atlantic Magazine…

Rainy day GEFS; #s 4 and 17

Didn’t Bob Dylan write a song about this? “Rainy days, #12 and 35”, or something like that? Well, we’re writing about rainy days, too, but #s 4 and 17.

Error-laden model runs^{1 I really like footnotes; creates a sense of erudition where there is none)}, #s 4 and #17, based on yesterday’s 00 Z (5 PM AST) global data, have the best chance of a substantial storms here in Arizona in the December 20-22nd window. So, we hope that those errors in those runs are correct!

Here they are, amongst the other error-laden runs below. Novella-sized explanatory caption, an innovation first seen here, included:

Valid Friday, December 20th at 5 AM AST. The key contour at 500 mb that I had gone to some trouble to annotate, is the 558 decameter one, usually in the heart of the jet stream at 500 mb. If that contour really swings offshore as in 4 and 17, we are in for some great precip, rain with a good chance of it turning to snow as it the situation progresses after Friday morning, the 20th. But you can see that there are a bunch of those error-laden contours (oval) that are along the West Coast and dip down this way into the bottom of the “trough bowl” in the SW overall. Those would bring precip here, too, though due to the drier trajectory of the air, not as much as #s 4 and 17, which we could refer to, if we named them, “rainy day women (or men), #s 4 and 17”, maybe write a song about how bad they could be….

So, if I haven’t said that already, were going to see the actual model run based on the data as best we know that data (remember, it always contains some errors we can’t pin down), will flop around some in where the 558 contour and heart of the Jet Stream end up over these next few days. This is because the errors grow in time the farther away the predicted map is. So, as we get closer to December 20th, we’ll see the model runs “converge” more closely to the one that’s going to verify. We want #s 4 and 17, but, you can see that they are “outlier” model runs (“outlaws” to add a more western motif to this attempt to explain something. Hope like mad, too, because 4 and 17 would be real drought denting storms, and phenomenal for the wildflower bloom ahead (probably, too, for those who ski on top of Ms. Mt. Lemmon).

How about those middle and high clouds yesterday?

There weren’t any. Hahahaha (on me, who said there would be some).

Well, except for that tiny streamer of Cirrus on the S horizon at sunset, some afternoon Cu also on the S horizon (Cu not mentioned yesterday, but there they were). Here is the only shot from yesterday of any interest because the Cu I saw down there was about ten times larger than I imagined a Cu could be yesterday. All in all, it was a pretty gaffey cloud day. First, a documentation of no clouds….

4:26 PM. Day concludes with no clouds. An example, looking SE.

4:27 PM. Looking S about as far as you can possibly see. Note Cu congestus down there. Was an remarkable site for a December day.

Today’s clouds and weather

Those distant Cumulus clouds yesterday were a preview. More Cumulus, Cumulus congestus later on in the afternoon, ice likely to form in the larger ones as weak “cold upper low” goes by, freezing level comes down some. Ice in clouds means virga and rain showers as the Cumulus congestus transition to small Cumulonimbus clouds in the area. Lightning possible in the region. Apparently, its too dry aloft for even mid-level clouds³; they’ll be off to the SE-S of us if we can see them at all. All in all, a pretty cloud day is in hand even without patterned middle clouds.

The End.

——————————
¹Lorenz² or spaghetti or Global Ensemble Forecast System plots (GEFS—hahahah, should be GAFFES because they have so many errors in them!)

²I have made this name up because I think he (E. N. Lorenz) deserves that these plots, representing an attempt to resolve the weather chaos out there, be named after him. Are you listening world? (Well, of course not. I’m just a cloud maven person here in little Catalina and nobody reads what I write anyway…)

³This deduction from our great U of AZ model that forecasts soundings over us from which you can see what it is store for moisture profiles overhead.

Pretty cloud day yesterday; storms dead ahead and ahead

In case you missed the pretty sights of yesterday:

7:05 AM. Sunrise on the Altocumulus. Two layers are evident.

8:42 AM. Kind of blasé except for the rarely-seen-in-AZ (faint) halo. Altocumulus with Cirrostratus above.

3:30 PM. Pretty patterns; Altocumulus perlucidus.

4:45 PM. Cirrus uncinus and Altocumulus (clouds with shading). — 4:45 PM. Cirrus fibratus (not hooked or tufted at top) and Altocumulus (droplet clouds at right with darker shading). Lower gray portions beyond Pusch Ridge and extending to the horizon is probably best termed Altostratus.

4:56 PM. Nice lighting effects on Samaniego Ridge. — 4:56 PM. Nice lighting on Samaniego Ridge.

5:21 PM. Your sunset. Nice underlit virga from patchy ice clouds. Could be termed Cirrus spissatus or Altostratus, if you care. — 5:21 PM. Your sunset. Nice underlit virga (light snow fallout, likely single ice crystals, not flakes) from patchy ice clouds. Could be termed Cirrus spissatus or Altostratus, if you care. What kind of crystals, you ask or didn’t? Bullet rosettes.

The clouds and weather just ahead

Expect more Altocumulus, Cirrus, and Altostratus today, patchy and gorgeous. Would expect some nice Ac castellanus (one with spires) as an upper level low off Baja starts to move toward us. Some measurable rain likely tomorrow in the area, but probably barely measurable, maybe a tenth at most since it will fall from middle clouds with a lot of dry air underneath them. (Enviro Can mod still sees rain around here tomorrow.)

Middle clouds might get large enough to call the (small) Cumulonimbus clouds, with a slight chance of lightning tomorrow, Thursday, as this low moves up and over us.

So both today and tomorrow will have some great clouds!

WAY ahead; watch out!

After a quiescent period of gorgeous, misleading days, where the temperatures gradually recover to normal values and you’re gloating over the nice weather you’re experiencing by coming to Arizona from Michigan, blammo, the whole thing caves in with strong storms and very cold air heading this way. Yesterday’s 18 Z WRF-GOOFUS model run for 500 millibars (rendered by IPS MeteoStar), was, if you like HEAVY precipitation throughout Arizona, well, truly”orgasmic.” You just cannot have a better map at 500 mb for Arizona than this one from that run. That low center over California, should this verify, would be filled with extremely cold air from the ground on up, cold enough that snow in Catalina would be expected as it goes by. So, there’s even a prospect of a white Christmas holiday season. Imagine.

Valid 264 h from 11 AM AST yesterday morning, or for 11 AM AST, Saturday, beginning of football bowl season I think, which last until February I think. — Valid 264 h from 11 AM AST yesterday morning, or for 11 AM AST, Saturday, beginning of football bowl season, which last until February I think.

Now will this verify exactly like this? Nope, not a chance. But, spaghetti tells us we’re going to be in the Trough Bowl, filled with cold air and passing storms beginning in 8-10 days from now. How much precip and how cold exactly it gets is unknown because these progs will flop around in positioning the troughs that head our way. There will be major troughs passing through, so while the amount of precip is questionable, the cold air intrusion is not. It was just so neat, exciting, mind-blowing to see that such a gargantuan storm has been put on the table for us in that 18 Z run.

Most likely subsequent model runs will take this exact map away, but then put something like it back, until we get much closer to verification day, the 21st. May even shift around on which day is the doozy, too, by a couple of days either side. Still, a really exciting period of weather is ahead.

This may seem odd, but one of the keys to our storms way ahead is the eruption of a huge storm in the western Pacific (and that storm is shown developing in the last day (144 h panel) of the Enviro Can mod.

———–dense reading below————-

That erupting, giant low pressure center will shoot gigantic amounts of warm air from the tropical ocean far to the north ahead of it in the central Pacific. That warm air shooting north, in turn, causes a bugle to the north in the jet stream, a ridge, which deflects the jet toward the north toward the Arctic. As the jet stream does that, there is almost an immediate response downstream from the ridge; the jet stream begins to turn to the south, developing a bigger an bigger bulge, or trough to the south. So, a jet stream running on a straight west to east path across the Pacific can be totally discombobulated when a giant storm at the surface arises and shoots heat in the form of clouds and warm air northward¹. In this case, all of this takes place beginning in the Pacific in about 6 days, so that a sudden southward bulge, a buckling of the jet stream, due to that giant low in the western Pacific 8, 000 miles away, happens over the western US. And voila, our big cold and maybe our big storms, too. then.

————end of lead-filled text———

The End.

————————————-

¹First noted by much-honored meteorologist, Jerome Namias, who did not have the Ph. D. but was great anyway, in the early 1950s.

A historic 7-days of weather; another real cold episode ahead

“A historic 7-days of weather” or “An historic 7-days of weather”? Check this grammar site out, in case you were wondering, like this English language buffoon was. There must be simpler languages I can learn…

Check out the national records that fell during the past seven days here. You can view them here, but its best if you go to the original site and poke around. Pretty amazing week. You should feel pretty bad if you didn’t set some kind of record where you are, somehow got left out. Also, maybe I should check for locusts and big earthquakes…in case things are coming to an end overall. Just kidding, astrocatastrophists, thermageddonites (warm and cold ones¹), etc.

Interestingly, he sez, this was all foreseen in the models more than a week out, mentioned here, and the reliability of that severe weather pattern buttressed by those crazy looking NOAA generated “spaghetti-Lorenz” plots that Mr. Cloud Maven person often displays that evaluate the degree of chaos out there by running models over and over with DELIBERATE little errors. Imagine, how bad things would be if we did that, added deliberate errors to everything we did every day that added on top of the inadvertent ones: “I think I will err today by putting too much electricity into my computer, modify plug to fit in a 220 receptacle, plug it in, see if it runs faster.” In a way, those crazy plots are doing that to see how much things change with errors we know about (since the obs contain errors that we don’t know about). So running the models with little errors is to see how robust a forecast is.

The weather ahead

Enviro Can GEM mod is seeing more rain in AZ late Wednesday into Thursday than our WRF-GFS, so I like it more than our own and it would behoove² you to check it out for yourself to see if I am lying again. Still, its a slight upper level storm that drifts in from the southwest from off Baja. There will be great middle and high clouds no matter what happens. Rain extreme amounts are wide, zero (USA WRF-GFS) to a tenth of an inch here in Catalina by Thursday evening. Would fall from mostly mid-level clouds showing virga first. Best estimate, therefore: 0.05 inches. Oh, well, SOMETHING is in the works. You can see it spinning around out there off Baja here from the University of Washington Huskies Weather Department.

The weather way ahead

Check this out, you Lorenz plot expert. I went crazy when I saw this, really points to a great chance for a substantial storm on the 20-22nd. Need more rain for those spring flowers!

Above is an example of a strong signal for a big, cold trough 10 days out, something like we in the West have just experienced, though probably not “historically cold” not quite as cold as the present situtation all over, and along with that, another great chance for a good rain here in Catalina. As we say, CMJs, “Tell your friends.” Your favorite weather person should be all over this by now, going “deep”, you might say, with his/her audience giving them a brain thump.

Not real happy, though, about another round of low (properly, not “cold”) temperatures.

Your clouds today?

Cirrus-ee ones, maybe heading into thick ice clouds we call Altostratus. Get camera ready for great sunrises and sunsets over the next couple of days. Could be extra spectacular.

The End, of the excitement for today.

——————————–
¹During the global cooling hysteria (hahaha, sort of) during the late 1960s and early 1970s, my Department Chairman at San Jose State, Dr. Albert Miller, who smoked a lot and died when he was 54 years old, suggested to me that we put soot on the growing Arctic ice pack to melt it off and increase the amount of sunlight absorbed at the ground to ward off global cooling. If the earth’s snow cover go too big, it was posited at that time, it might cascade into a complete glaciation of the earth due to feedbacks caused by too much reflected sunlight by the increasing snow cover.

²Interesting that an expression seeming to pertain to perissodactylas (hooved critters, i. e,. ungulate mammals) is used in conjunction with advising people to do something. “Behooved”? Could be, but isn’t, put on hooves? Try not to think about this all day so that the work you have to do suffers.

Clouds without comment

Remember Consumer Reports, “Quotes Without Comment” page? Well, I am lying like anything here¹.

Only ONE comment today (I’m lying again), but its about wind today. It will pick up suddenly from the north later this morning or in the early afternoon, and be gusty and cold. We here in Catalina get more of this north wind than, say, TUS, which is blocked from this wind by the Catalina Mountains. A big high is bulging into Utah, a state north of us, that’s why.

Next rain chances, a weak one late Wednesday or Thursday, and a stronger one around the 20-22nd, the latter as spaghetti has been suggesting for some time now.

Your cloud day below in case you were inside watching football television all day:

7:03 AM. Note light rainshowers on north horizon. Only a trace here.

9:14 AM. Looks pretty much the same. Hmmm. That's a comment. When it comes to clouds, I guess I just can't shut up, even when they're boring. — 9:14 AM. Looks pretty much the same. Hmmm. That’s a comment. When it comes to clouds, I guess I just can’t shut up, even when they’re boring Stratocumulus.

9:15 AM. Only a minute later! Yes, a "concerto in gray" yesterday, and I want to make sure you see all of it. — 9:15 AM. Only a minute later! Yes, a “Concerto in Gray” yesterday, to allude to some music that has not yet been written (perhaps it will be one day by a depressed composer), and I want to make sure you see all of the gray we had. Gray was my favorite color in elementary school! THought you’d like to know that. Man, after a second cup of coffee I am just exploding with interesting information!

11:49. Still "Overcast in Stratocumulus"; could be the second movement in "Concerto in Gray." Signs of break up here. another potential — 11:49. Still “Overcast in Stratocumulus”; could be the second movement in “Concerto in Gray.” Signs of break up here.

11:50 AM. Some of you are dropping away like this horse. Can't take it anymore. Well, I demand a million dollars to stop blogging! — 11:50 AM. Some of you are dropping away like Jake the horse. Can’t take it anymore. Well, I demand a million dollars to stop blogging! Note, however, that “Dreamer” the horse is still paying attention, setting a good example.

3:26 PM. Skies eventually opened up and our pretty deep blue skies returned amid the small Cumulus and shallow Stratocumulus, a rousing, happy finale to our "Concerto in Gray." — 3:26 PM. Skies eventually opened up and our pretty deep blue skies returned amid the small Cumulus and shallow Stratocumulus, a rousing, happy finale to our “Concerto in Gray.”

3:58 PM. "Frosty the Lemmon"; could be a popular Christmas song. If you stepped away from football television for even a minute, you might have noticed this interesting look on Ms. Lemmon. This frosty look is almost certainly due to "riming" on the trees, the collection of supercooled cloud drops in clouds that are not snowing much or at all. Substantial water can be collected by trees on mountains when supercooled clouds envelope them. Hope that science not wasn't piling on the boring for you. Piling on can be a penalty in football if it happens late like in this blog. I demand two millions dollars to stop blogging! — 3:58 PM. “Frosty the Lemmon”; could be a popular Christmas song. If you stepped away from football television for even a minute, you might have noticed this interesting look on Ms. Lemmon. This frosty look is almost certainly due to “riming” on the trees, the collection of supercooled cloud drops by the trees in windy clouds that are not snowing much or at all envelope them. The liquid drops hit and freeze and buildup on them, much like airframe icing. Substantial water can be collected by trees on mountains when supercooled clouds envelope them in windy conditions like yesterday. Hope that bit of science wasn’t piling on the boring for you. “Piling on” can be a penalty in football if it happens late, like in this blog. I demand TWO millions dollars to stop blogging!

5:20 PM. OK, some ice cream on your plain oatmeal; a pertty sunset, pastel Altocumulus above (gray, of course) Stratocumulus.

The End, at last. You can wake up now, horsey!

————————
¹It comes pretty easily to weather forecasters, but you do have to speak with conviction; a certain degree of authenticity has to be imparted when lying. :}

Creepy Stratus fractus

Well, that cloud WAS “creeping” toward us after suddenly appearing on Pusch Ridge at dawn… Looky here:

7:14 AM. It thinks we're not looking. — 7:14 AM. It thinks we’re not looking.

7:25 AM. In only three minutes, a spurt toward Cartalina, hugging the mountains where its safe.

7:44 AM. I wasn't watching for awhile, and suddenly, there it was across from me! — 7:44 AM. I wasn’t watching for awhile, and suddenly, there it was across from me!

8:00 AM. By this time it was just sitting, pretending it was something innocuous, but I knew better.

1:44 PM. By afternoon, it was gone... Or was it? You see, creepy Stratus fractus is afraid of the sun, writhes and evaporates when sunlight hits it, or it just warms up a little. It is truly cold blooded. — 1:44 PM. By afternoon, it was gone… Or is it? You see, creepy Stratus fractus is afraid of the sun, twist and writhes in a death throe, evaporating right before your eyes when the sun comes out, or the weak light from the sun, as yesterday, warms the air up a little. Stratus fractus is truly cold blooded and only strong light will make it go away! The end. Below, some apropos music and commentary…

———–

With Halloween only 10 and half months away, I thought I would “get in the mood” and make up a little creepy-ness for the little kids who read this blog. Hi, kids! Hope you didn’t get too scared reading this. “Uncle Artie” is sorry if you did get scared.

What you saw in that sequence of Stratus fractus movement is also demonstrative of what often happens to smog layers funneling out of the Tucson area toward Mark Albright’s house in Continental Ranch, Marana. Here’s an example of creepy morning smog (smoke and other aerosol junk), partitioned to the lowest layers near the ground by a radiation inversion, a temperature reversal that develops at night that results in a temperature rise as you go up. In the afternoons, after the sun has done its work for awhile, the temperature DECLINES as you go up and the smog molecules are dispersed over greater and greater depths. Got it?

7:32 AM, December 2, 2013. Maybe you remember this morning. Smog stays down there until the sun comes up, and then slowly creepy-creeps toward Catalina and our foothills as the wind changes direction and comes toward us in the late morning and afternoon. Happens during stagnant weather patterns, not much going on. Fortunately, the heating by the sun disperses this goop into a greater depth so the smog seems less obtrusive, less visible, though its still there. BTW, the second arrow pretty much point’s to Mark’s winter home in Continental Ranch. Mark is a research meteorologist/climatologist at the University of Washington who got his feelings hurt when he corrected exaggerations of snowpack losses in the Cascade Mountains of the Pacific Northwest and people in his own department got mad at him for correcting those claims; happened back in 2005 or so. But, of course, it still goes on. Mark and his colleagues were proved right in the ensuing years of mountainous snows in the Cascades. Of course, a hundred years from now, well, that might be another story. Tune in later, maybe around 2050 to 2100. It is interesting that when me and Peter Hobbs was correcting cloud seeding claims found in the peer-reviewed literature, ones made by people in OTHER universities, the people in MY department loved me for doing so!

Now, where was I after that big caption….?

Oh, yeah, the weather on deck

Sunday marathoners, achtung!

Looking more like a dry day now on Marathon Day, Sunday, though a cold front will have gone by just before it starts. Looks like measurable precip will be partitioned to the north of Oracle on Sunday, but it will likely be cloudy with Stratocumulus clouds as the day starts, but those should gradually disperse into scattered to broken Cumulus clouds with virga by mid-day, some of those deeper Cu could produce a cold one; i. e., a sprinkle.

Jet core (at 500 mb, 18,000 feet or so) is well north of TUS as Sunday starts, and its really hard to get precip here until the core passes, which on Sunday will be later in the day. But then, the cold front has long gone, and the tendency for precip with the jet core has diminished (subsiding air behind the front is moving in then) to just scattered deeper Cumulus clouds having some ice-forming potential. Deeper clouds are stymied on the right side of the jet (looking downwind) overall in the Southwest in the wintertime by warmer air aloft and stable layers, the kind that produce lenticular clouds.

Below, what”m trying to say in words, is shown in this 500 mb forecast from IPS Meteostar with the wind velocities on it:

Winds at about 18,000 feet above sea level forecast for Sunday morning at 5 AM AST. No rain is also predicted by this latest WRF-GFS model run on Sunday in the TUS area.

Since this is an analysis from a model output, one inherently containing error, there is that inherent bit of uncertainty. So, you, as a weatherfolkperson, imagine what can go the best (the most rainful error), and the worst, and make outlier predictions. Potential rain here in Catalina on Sunday: max, a tenth (everything goes right); bottom, zero (or trace), in this case, as predicted by this model.

Way ahead

I will leave you with this. I think its looking more promising for storms later in the month. I think you’ll see what I mean:

The End

PS: Lots of low temperature records falling in the West these days.

Rain piling up; total 0.35 inches at 3 AM! Now its 0.48 inches at 6 AM!

Sounds more exciting if you title like that…and that’s what I’m here for, excitement, weather and cloud excitement!

Pima County ALERT 24 h precip totals, some around here below, as of 6 AM:

Gauge             15         1           3          6            24         Name                        Location
    ID#      minutes    hour        hours      hours        hours
    —-     —-       —-        —-       —-         —-       —————–            ———————
Catalina Area
    1010     0.00       0.04       0.08        0.08         0.43      Golder Ranch                 Horseshoe Bend Road in Saddlebrooke
    1020     0.00       0.00       0.04        0.08         0.43      Oracle Ranger Stati          approximately 0.5 mile southwest of Oracle
    1040     0.04       0.08       0.12        0.12         0.47      Dodge Tank                   Edwin Road 1.3 miles east of Lago Del Oro Parkway
    1050     0.04       0.04       0.08        0.08         0.47      Cherry Spring                approximately 1.5 miles west of Charouleau Gap
    1060     0.00       0.04       0.08        0.16         0.71      Pig Spring                   approximately 1.1 miles northeast of Charouleau Gap
    1070     0.00       0.00       0.08        0.08         0.35      Cargodera Canyon             northeast corner of Catalina State Park
    1080     0.00       0.04       0.08        0.12         0.51      CDO @ Rancho Solano          Cañada Del Oro Wash northeast of Saddlebrooke
    1100     0.00       0.04       0.04        0.08         0.28      CDO @ Golder Rd              Cañada Del Oro Wash at Golder Ranch Road

Santa Catalina Mountains
    1030     0.00       0.00       0.00        0.04         0.20      Oracle Ridge                 Oracle Ridge, approximately 1.5 miles north of Rice Peak
    1090     0.00       0.00       0.00        0.00         0.00      Mt. Lemmon                   Mount Lemmon
    1110     0.00       0.04       0.12        0.24         0.71      CDO @ Coronado Camp          Cañada Del Oro Wash 0.3 miles south of Coronado Camp
    1130     0.00       0.00       0.00        0.00         0.04      Samaniego Peak               Samaniego Peak on Samaniego Ridge
    1140     0.00       0.00       0.00        0.04         0.24      Dan Saddle                   Dan Saddle on Oracle Ridge
    2150     0.00       0.00       0.00        0.00         0.04      White Tail                   Catalina Highway 0.8 miles west of Palisade Ranger Station
    2280     0.00       0.00       0.00        0.00         0.31      Green Mountain               Green Mountain
    2290     0.00       0.00       0.00        0.00         0.24      Marshall Gulch               Sabino Creek 0.6 miles south southeast of Marshall Gulch

As you can see, a couple of stations in the Catalina Mountains were virtually missed by the storm (ZERO total, for example, at Ms. Mt. Lemmon) or it snowed on those low total precip gauges and the snow has not melted and is sitting in the gauge’s funnel. Select choice number 2. Mountains just becoming visible; looks like snow down to 6,000 foot level.

Didn’t see any precip/virga before dark yesterday, started raining just before 10 PM, nicely, and continued through midnight when it quit. However, the main event, lasting about 6-8 h is supposed to start happening about now, but rain mostly lighting up in TUS. That means we should see some clearing around mid-day, but leaving enough low clouds stacking up around the Catalinas for some nice quilted sun and shadows on those mountains, one of our prettiest sights I think, along with our now snow-capped mountains.

FROPA, or “frontal passage” in weather text speak, occurred late yesterday afternoon. I wonder if you noticed the wind shift and dropping temperatures? However, was a very shallow depth of wind that shifted, and temperature took about 3 h to drop 10 F, (58 F to 48 F) not exactly as sharp a FROPA as was anticipated from this microphone yesterday. Also, a bit unusual, the rain band was displaced far behind the wind shift that occurred around 4:30 PM.

Yesterday’s clouds

I thought yesterday was quite an interesting day for you. Lots of cloud types to log in your weather and cloud diary. Let us begin our retrospective with Sunrise on the Equestrian:

7:17 AM. Splayed Cirrus display, racing at you at over 100 mph.

7:52 AM. Orographic Stratocumulus top the Catalinas, a very good sign that the incoming front will produce rain. Indicates reasonable lower level humidity. — 7:52 AM. Orographic Stratocumulus top the Catalinas, a very good sign that the incoming front will produce rain. Indicates reasonable lower level humidity already in place.

9:34 AM. Small Cumulus form over the Oro, Cirrus above. So pretty a sight, I thought.

12:17 PM. Micro-snowstorm (Cirrus uncinus) passes past the Catalinas. You can see this cloud from the U of A here in their time lapse movie.

12:58 PM. Seattle-style Stratocumulus overcast. Got a little homesick there for a second. — 12:58 PM. Seattle-style Stratocumulus overcast. Got a little homesick there for a minute.

DSCN6773 — 3:38 PM. Atop horsey Jake now, looking for signs, knowing that front is getting closer. Here those darker, lower line of clouds were atop the windshift that was about to occur, marking the leading edge of the front. This colder air has lifted and chilled the moist air from the southwest to help create that lower base, the sure sign of a wind shift. Looking north toward Saddlebrooke from near The Chutes on the 50-year trail .

toward

4:27 PM. Cloud bases lower significanty as the cooler air rushed in. But look, no precip in spite of the heavy cloud cover? What's up with that? No ice, cloud tops still too warm in FROPA area. — 4:27 PM. Cloud bases lower significantly as the cooler air rushed in. But look, no precip in spite of the heavy cloud cover. What’s up with that? No ice present in them; cloud tops still too warm in even FROPA area¹.

Your next storm: due in Sunday morning. Likely just something around a tenth of an inch. Nothing showing up beyond that, but lots of mod fluctuations re storms. I suspect the one that showed up a few days ago for the 20th or so will arise again in some future run. Just a gut feeling since there’s no evidence in the spaghetti plots yet to support that hunch.

The End.

————————————————
¹The TUS balloon sounding yesterday afternoon about the time of the next to last photo. Shows tops WERE warmer than -10 C, in case you didn’t believe me because the clouds looked so dark yesterday afternoon. They were pretty dark because there was a higher ice cloud overcast (Altostratus) and when droplet concentrations are high, clouds are darker on the bottom. We usually have pretty high droplet concentrations here in old Arizony.

2013120500.72274.skewt — Note that the temperature of the air (blue) lines slope upward to the right.

“Oh, what a beautiful morning”; and day its going to be

1) I like to refer to songs about weather, though the musical references I’ve used are somewhat dated, as here, a song from 19th Century I think. BTW, tapping on the link above, you’ll see a guy riding a horse AND singing at the same time because he’s so happy, so it really fits the big western life we’re all leading here in old Arizony in the wintertime and seemed apropos. I wouldn’t recommend singing AND riding at the same time, however, unless you know you’re horse reel good. Might get spooked if it was you or me singing and not the cowboy, Gordy MacRae¹.

BTW#2, if you watch that entire song link above, you’ll see whole crowds of people getting carried away with the State of OK at the end of it. But…you’ll also notice in that scene that there is a MOUNTAIN on the distant horizon in the background. I don’t think they were in Oklahoma for that song! So, maybe they didn’t really like Oklahoma as much as they claim in song…. Now, where was I?

Man, the clouds are going to be spectacular today, zipping along like a dragster on nitro! Expecting some real great lenticular clouds, those hover ones, downstream of the Cat Mountains, too. Lots of wind, as well, to add to the drama with a Big _Cold Front (B_CF) getting closer during the day, then passing us during the evening-overnight with some rain by morning. Likely to be a 10-20 degree F drop in temperature within an hour or less, as this real “bad boy” cold front and wind shift go by. Ely, NV saw a 56 degree drop in temperatures in 24h. We Need more rain; always. Cold? Not so sure about that. All in all, a “beautiful” day² coming up.

How much rain here in old Catalina?

We’re on the edge of the jet stream up there, and you know what that means, on the edge of the precip, too. So, if you’re telling your friends how much rain you expect, and as a CMJ, they will expect you to comment on it, you’d best not go overboard and say, “a half an inch between tonight and Friday morning”; play it down some.

On the plus side, this is a storm type (flow pattern type, more westerly up there) that we Catalinans get MORE rain than surrounding areas, other than the mountains. So, on the edge means a low rain prediction; but the flow pattern suggests pushing a little on the greatest amount possible for an edge storm. Here’s the range I would tell you to say to neighbors:

Bottom (since it might miss), 0.08 inches (the “8” for faux accuracy); top, 0.50 inches (yep, has a high potential due to the storm type; that is, the angle of the winds impinging overhead on our mountains). Average of these guesses, which likely is the more accurate guess-amount, 0.26 inches.

Later we will compare the U of AZ supermicro Beowulf Cluster model prediction, one that takes our best model’s overall prediction for Arizona, the one WRF-GFS, and then breaks it down into our local areas better, like here and on the Catalina Mountains, because it uses much more detailed terrain. (Not available yet here at 4:45 AM–to Hell with it then!) ((Still not available as of 6:24 AM. It is finished..publishing now.))

There’s another cold blast on the heels of this one. Hits on the 8th. Poor TUS marathoners… ‘Nuf said.

The weather way ahead

2) With the upcoming storm and cold well in hand, that is, well described by our excited met men and women, both at the NWS and on TEEVEE, where in the latter case they make a LOT of money, really, its incredible how much (well, maybe not in TUS, but LA? Oh, my) Let’s see, where was I? Oh, yeah, I thought I would look WAY ahead, two weeks, which in weather model terms is like an astrologer looking through a telescope at the giant star, Betelgeus, its that far away in model prediction terms.

Still, I REALLY think you need to see this forecast even though its so far away because its pretty giant, too, in weather terms. If you’re too lazy to click on “this”, I have gifted you with the highlights below, highlights that might be the best forecast maps I have ever seen (again). Yes, to quote the song, “Everything’s (weather-wise) going my way.” ( “My way”? To Catalina, Arizona.)

Drum roll……

Well, there they are. I hope you’re happy now. Its quite an orgasmic sequence from a weather standpoint.

Why? There’s about THIRTY-SIX hours of rain in our area are foretold from these maps, 14-15 days from now! That last one has heavy rain throughout Arizona! BTW, I’ve posted them in sizes that are proportional to their credibility, thumbnails.

Now, since I’ve been learning you up on spaghetti, I’ll let you decide whether its a Big_Outlier (BfO). Take a look here and at where the”blue” lines are. They would have to be clustering down around Rocky Point-Puerto Penasco for this forecast to have any serious credibility.

Yesterday’s clouds

Cirrus ones. As always with our deep blue skies now days, so pretty up there. A few shots:

8:01 AM. The ever-present, rarely seen Cirrus castellanus (bubble Cirrus). — 8:01 AM. The ever-present, rarely seen Cirrus castellanus (bubble Cirrus lower center).

8:02 AM. Cirrus fibratus (long, more or less straight trails, at least from this overhead view).

5:26 PM. Subtle color in Cirrus and distant Altostratus layer (deep ice cloud). — 5:26 PM. Subtle sunset color in Cirrus and in a distant Altostratus layer (deep ice cloud).

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¹Not wearing a helmut, either, which is also a bad example besides singing while riding a horse.

²Words can mean different things to different people, and here, “beautiful”, as in the title, may not be the “beautiful” day you were expecting to be described.