Don’t really need to explain this NOAA “ensembles of spaghetti” map anymore, so thought I’d just post it. Made me feel real good thinking about all the summer rain ahead in the next two weeks and how green it will be around here then. The second greening of Arizona; its so great!
Valid at 5 PM AST, August 3rd. I think it would make a great summer “I ‘heart’ spaghetti” T-shirt for you, too, maybe sleeveless using dry-fit cloth. Still working out the details, of course. When you want to make a LOT of money off a T-shirt, you want to get it right.
Yesterday’s clouds, in cast you missed them, especially the great sunrise:
5:27 AM. Altocumulus opacus.
5:28 AM. Unusual -for -summer Altocumulus lenticularis near the tops of the Catalina Mountains.11:30 AM. The perfect example of Cumulus humilis, those little acorns destined to grow into moderate-sized Cumulonimbus clouds with light-to-moderate showers yesterday afternoon. What was particularly great about yesterday was that we had our usual absolutely stunning visibility due to an absence of the early July smoky skies we saw day after day.3:27 PM Light showers (Code 2 rainshaft; transparent one) drift across the Catalinas. Cloud too shallow here for lightning.3:51 PM. Growth of those clouds continued as they moved SW toward Marana. The denser shaft means tops were far higher than they were for those clouds over the Catalinas. “Code 3” shaft, horizon barely visible through it.
The End.
Useless note: Might have been 0.02 inches of rain early this morning, but then again, the tipped buckets might have been due to condensation this coolest morning (71 F) in the past few weeks. Radar did have tiny echo going over….still, not sure it was “rain.” But, heavy dew is good, too! Non-recording gauge also had 0.02 inches, so I guess its was real “rain” not dew! Mystery solved.
First, check out these eye-popping totals from the Pima County ALERT network, led by Ms. Lemmon with 4.33 inches!
Yesterday was a day when cloud/storm watching can be kind of fun. Here’s the scene in the early evening, storms over Marana and southern Oro Valley are bypassing Catalina. We only have moderate Cumulus clouds drifting off the Catalinas. You might have been quite sad to see that the storms were missing us, and those friendly folks down there were getting a good rain again. You’d feel good for them, but sad yourself. Maybe we wouldn’t have any summer wildflowers and greening up around Catalina, you began to think, with another miss at hand.
But you would have been “too fast on the mental draw” and should have envisioned the following scenario:
Those strong rainshafts down toward Marana, Twin Peaks area were going to push a mighty blow of wind up our Oro Valley and toward Catalina, and like the miniature cold front it is, would push air it ran into upward and launch the moderate Cumulus overhead and slightly upwind of Catalina into Cumulonimbus cloudzillas.
And you’d have been right.
Imagine telling your neighbor, looking at our so-so clouds, “Wow (be very excited), this is GREAT!” Look at all that rain falling down there toward Marana! Now we’ll get a good rain, maybe a trmndus one!” You’d be so excited, you might start speaking in “text.”
If the following events wouldn’t have made you the neighborhood weather guru for life, probably nothing else would except telling strollers by your house that they had three minutes to raindrops, big sparse ones, like I did yesterday around 6 PM. Those strollers got good and drenched, which was GREAT, too! They kept going outbound with doggie even AFTER I screamed at them about those drops coming. The cloud bottom overhead was just starting to unload.
Oh, well, there’s only so much cloud and weather gurus like us can do to help people.
It was the push from the south toward us that made last evening’s torrents and power outages possible (oops). Lets give those Marana Cumulonimbi a hand, an “assist”, really, like in baseball or basketball!
5:05 PM.
Here are some dramatic, memorable scenes, the big rainbows, etc, for you. These will be thumbnails because when take more than 200 photos in one day, you can’t post them all… I wish I had a gigantic web site where you could do that, and you with a gigantic wall monitor so that you could enjoy them in life sizes, because they would ALL be there for you to enjoy. Its all about you, again.
They’re going to be a little messed up in the post because, “haven’t time for the pain” (of posting them nicely) as the song said.
The End. Today? Let’s see what happens! Still light rain around even now!
5:06 PM. Cu to be energized by Marana outflows.
5:35 PM Marana storm expands northward, outflow winds reaching south Catalina.5:53 pm. Arc of uplifted clouds due to Maran outflow winds extends from Cat Mountains over Catalina and Oro Valley.
5:57 PM. A nicely shaped cloud bottom begins to let its contents out almost over ME!
6:20 PM. Core of first cell passes just east of Catalina, but still unloaded 0.22 inches.6:30 PM. What’s this?! A new base forming overhead upwind! Did not see that coming, first rain dropping out now!
6:38 PM. In the middle of a 0.45 inches dump!
6:54 PM. One of the brightest rainbows you’ll ever see finishes off a great rain day, totaling 0.67 inches. Or did it?6:54. Closer look at same rainbow that ended storm, or did it?
7:03 PM. Parting rainbow; certainly won’t be any more rain after a wonderful 0.67 inches…or not.
7:20 PM. What? New, firm cloud base forming upwind. Surely there can’t be more coming. It was, a lot more.
We accumulated just 0.01 inches of rain here from those overhanging anvil clouds from thunderstorms centered on top of Ms. Mt. Lemmon early yesterday afternoon but they drenched Ms. Lemmon with 2.28 inches! Details from the Pima County ALERT rain gauges can be found here. The next highest amount was on Samaniego Ridge with a nice 0.79 inches. Both good.
You may have noticed something odd, too, the thunder from those cells was continuous for a long time while Lemmon was getting pounded, quite remarkable, indicating, as you would guess, highly electrified clouds, unusually so.
The last time I experienced continuous thunder without break was in Oklahoma City during the El Reno tornado-producing complex of Cumulonimbus clouds, ones with huge mammatus formations that just ERUPTED from the overhanging, approaching anvil cloud repeatedly. An example of that dramatic OKC scene, FYI:
May 31, 2013, 3:34 PM above ASA Stadium, Oklahoma City. Thunder from in-cloud lightning, as here yesterday, was continuous, not the least break, as the rain approached and tornado sirens went off. Yep, Mr. cloud-maven person was there and took this shot. The former company team, the Washington Huskies, had made it to the WCWS. and me and the missus used to go to the Husky games in Seattle.
Oddly, like that OKC situation, where there was almost no cloud-to-ground lightning as the storm approached, and not so much during the 5-7 inches of rain that fell there that night. Neither was there much C-G LTG around here yesterday with OUR continuous thunder; I saw not ONE cloud to ground strike in the several thunderstorms which developed on top of Ms. Lemmon, nor from the continuous thunder-producing cell toward Charoleau Gap around 7 PM. Here are views of our contrasting thunderstorm and overhang from that at OKC looking toward the Cat Mountains. Below that, the remarkable-to-me, anyway, the continuously thundering cell with a modest rainshaft toward the Gap in the evening hours:
12:34 PM, soon after nearly continuous thunder began from the Cumulonimbus that erupted on top of Ms. Lemmon.7:03 PM, looking toward Charoleau Gap at a moderate-sized Cumulonimbus ALSO emitting continuous thunder! No cloud-to- ground strikes were seen over about a half hour’s time. And the thunder ended abruptly, like a light bulb that had been unplugged. That was odd, too, since usually LTG tapers off as the conditions producing it slowly change (well, over minutes, anyway.)
I really expected to see some rogue cloud-to-ground strokes coming out of that overhang over Catalina yesterday (middle photo), as often happens here, dangerous ones because they can be quite removed from the rainshaft and so you don’t expect them.
Have only seen one or two days like yesterday before, absent cloud to ground strikes but a lot of electricity up there in Catalina over the past five summers. So if you thought it was an unusual day, you were right.
Today
More showers and TSTMS are expected in the later afternoon and into the nighttime hours according to the U of AZ model run from 11 PM AST last evening. Still hasn’t finished crunching numbers, but goes through tomorrow morning. Again, the flow is from an easterly direction and so the early bombardment of Mt. Lemmon should have us in the trailing overhand again until evening when cells are likely to form away from the mountains today.
A real odditiy is that upper level low from back East (Virginia) that is headed to Catalina land! You can see its progress over the past few days here from the U of WA map makers here–you’ll need a big pipe to see all 64 of these frames in a reasonable time., Here from San Francisco State, these 500 mb maps, starting with the low over West VIrginia and SE Ohio, ending this morning with the low now over the Texas-Oklahoma border! Amazing.
July 12 at 5 AM AST. Low too be here forms over Ohio and West Virginia! Oh, my, this is so funny.5 PM AST, July 14th. The SAME low is now moving from OK into Texas and toward US!Valid for July 18th at 5 PM AST. Remnant of low moves into SE AZ.
So if something like this happens, we’ll have a DISTURBANCE to cluster our Cumulonimbus clouds into real monsters, ones bigger in area, and ones that last longer, maybe make up some rain deficits around here.
Of course, with such an odd track, lots can go wrong, but its something to keep in mind.
We live in interesting times. As with so many days since June 30th, thunder almost rules the day, going on intermittently for hours, as it did yesterday. And yet, only a little rain, just a few drops from an anvil overhang just after 2 PM, can find its way here to my house here in Sutherland Heights, Catalina. I know areas down toward Golder Ranch Drive and just south of there have gotten brief hard rains this July, but not here. What is going on?
Or what is NOT going on? Not enough heating I guess, only the very highest terrain participated in Cumulus and Cumulonimbus production yesterday; those cloud bottoms just could not work their way off the mountain tops, and so only the middle and higher dissipating portions dribbled over Catalina land. No disturbances to group them either, regardless of temperature, like two mornings ago when the line-cluster of thunderstorms came through.
Lets just hope that upper low that used to be over Virginia a coupla days ago can get here and be that needed “disturbance.” You probably didn’t know that weather moves from Virginia, or even Ohio, to Arizona…..well, its happened, and no doubt due to climate change where weather is backward from what it usually is, this low is , now over MO, continues moving west and south, reaching AZ by Wednesday the 17th.
It is a little unusual to see that and here’s what real convective-severe storm weather guru Bob (lives in Tucson, BTW) is saying to a weather folk group in Albany, NY:
“Ed and Greg – the current forecasts looked familiar to me. Check out the 500 mb analysis
series from 00Z 9 August 2003 through 12z 16 August 2003. Short wave in westerlies
over Ohio morphs into an inverted trough in the easterlies. The IT moves SW across the
southern Plains and ends up near the Four Corners on the 16th. It was associated with
a widespread thunderstorm outbreak across Arizona on the 14th. Bob Maddox”
“On 7/12/2013 11:25 AM, Edward Szoke – NOAA Affiliate wrote:
Greg – we remarked about this up at the CIRA weather briefing yesterday in Fort Collins. We see westward moving systems in the sub-tropics, but this far north and heading so far west does seem rather unusual. It looks like quite an outbreak of convection in OK come Sunday presumably as the cold pocket aloft moves over that area. Maybe it will keep moving west, close off and deepen over the 4- corners and bring us the seldom-seen but often talked about July snow! (OK – heat has made me go goofy – hope all is well at the Wx Channel). ed”
End of filler material from experts to get you a little excited, as we all will be if this comes to fruition as now foretold in models.
Yesterday’s pretty castellanus:
5:57 AM. Altocumulus castellanus spire under a higher layer of Altocumulus perlucidus.
5:57 AM. Looking west toward the Tortolita Mountains at a large grouping of those lower castellanus clouds. This, I thought, was one of the best shots I’ve taken of those clouds.6:28 AM. As sometimes happens with these clouds, they can group together and morph into true Cumulonimbus clouds based at high levels capable, as yesterday, producing lightning and brief heavy rain; they’re not caused by heating at the ground like our afternoon and evening storms. This is a common situation in the Plains States during winter when moist Gulf of Mexico air overrides cool winter air masses at the ground.
Our afternoon clouds, ones springing off the heating slopes of the Catalinas, dribbling overhang with sprinkles on Catalina once or twice:
1:30 PM. Cumulonimbus over Ms. Lemmon, middle and upper portions hanging out over Catalina.4:06 PM. Got pretty excited when this behemoth sprung out over the Cats. But, faded quickly after a lot thunder.
Oh, well. Day ended up with a nice multi-cloud layer sunset, always the best ones:
7:38 PM. Why we love the summer rain season and would never go to places like Michigan to avoid it.
Today is supposed to be about like yesterday, but hopeful that more rain can dribble off the Cat Mountains.
At least it wasn’t predicted the day before, but how nice to see a “mesoscale convective complex1” (a bunch Cumulonimbus clouds clustered together) come roaring over the Cat Mountains yesterday morning. Here it is, in case you missed it and want to see it again, from the beginning when what was going to happen was in doubt:
11:00 AM. Major rainshaft, and accompanying dark base where updraft is forming new precip approaches Catalina area.11:47 AM. The dramatic backside of this cluster, resembling those seen in the Plains States; good mammatus, too.
It was great, too, to see some evidence of water on the ground, and several natural livestock ponds form due to the storm. Its been too long since puddles formed. I like puddles, BTW2.
11:18. Evidence of significant rain; a puddle has formed.4:38 PM. Calves inspect newly formed livestock pond on Equestrian Trail Road. Mom not impressed.
Go here to see some regional rainfall totals from the Pima County network and here for the U of AZ network.
What was best was the clarity of the air after the rains washed all that smog, and we had our brilliantly white clouds against that deep blue sky back:
4:10 PM Cumulus mediocris over the Catalinas.
Today:
First, right now (6 AM) we have some of the best Altocumulus castellanus around I have ever seen. So pretty!
U of AZ 11 PM mod run expecting afternoon showers/TSTMS over Cat Mountains today, trailing off to the NW and near Catalina proper. Showers and lightning now to the S-SW, expected to die out before reaching us. So, happens, look for bases launched in the late morning and early afternoon to drift overhead–often a street of clouds forms over the southern portions of the Cat mountains about where that dark base in the first photo is, and if we’re lucky, will dump in this area. Look toward Table Mountain and a stream of clouds from around there headed this way.
————
1It would be great if you used this term with your neighbors when talking about yesterday’s rain: “That was a great MCS that came through yesterday morning! Hope we get another one today, though rain in the morning here is rare, but anyway…..” Neighbor “A what went through?” You: “Oh, sorry, I meant a nice cluster of thunderstorms. ” You continue: “As a cloud-maven junior, I’m learning a lot incomprehensible jargon that I can use to impress neighbors. Hey, have you heard of the ‘diffusion domain’? That’s when you’re flying in clouds and you can’t see either the ground or the sun! The next time you fly and that happens, tell the passenger next to you…..”Hey, I think we’re in the diffusion domain.”
2Photographed a lot of puddles on a trip to Death Valley in 2005 (wettest rain season there in 75 years). It was a lot of fun for me.
Yesterday was a disappointment. Oodles of water up there above us, as represented by cloud bases somewhere around 15 Celsius (59 F) yesterday morning, early Cumulonimbus activity–one was up toward Oracle by 10:37 AM–Oracle got 1.06 inches yesterday, but while the skies darkened over Catalina several times, they didn’t “unload.” Maybe only once or twice before in six summers have I seen this darkening to the level we had yesterday, without a rain shaft soon falling out of it. A couple of examples from yesterday:
1:29 PM. A Cumulus congestus takes shape over Cat State Park, and heads toward Catalina. Only sprinkles fell.2:40 PM, looking toward Charoleau Gap. It doesn’t get more “portenful” than this. I was SURE a shaft would crash down, and with it, the WIND from the north, the clouds then building over ME to the south, as happens so often when heavy rains pour down on the Gap. Didn’t happen, at least not until too late, long after it had moved farther north. Got pretty dejected.
So, what went wrong? Why were the clouds SO DARK, even shallow ones like Stratocumulus, let alone the Cumulus congestus, but with so little “emitting power”?
The darkness of these clouds was surely due to the high smoky aerosol content of the air that led to unusually high droplet concentrations in these clouds. The higher the droplet concentrations, the darker the bottom of the cloud, say holding cloud depth constant. So, a moderately deep cloud, but one too shallow to rain, can look like these, like the normal darkness on the bottom from which blinding shafts of rain fall. So, most likely we were looking at smog-laden clouds, the kinds of ones in our future around the world because that’s what we do, produce smog and smoke, well, us and lightning.
And, as we recall from Squires and Twomey (1967), smoke inhibits the formation of rain in clouds. I am sure most of you remember that article about smoke and sugar cane fires in Australia, and how those smoked up clouds did not rain like the ones around them that were “clean.” This phenomenon has been reported on numerous occasions since, like how in LA it helps reduce drizzle (mist rain) occurrences.
However, as we know, even smoked up clouds can rain IF they get high enough to reach the -10 C level here because then copious amounts of ice, soft hail and snow will form aloft, and down it will come! That only happened in isolated places, like over Oracle where they got that inch of rain (at least around here). So another cause of dark clouds lacking in downspouts was that they were not QUITE deep enough for the tops to reach -10 C. up around 20,000 feet above the ground yesterday–those tops were SURELY so close, though!
Back to smoke effects. With bases as warm as 10-15 C yesterday, there should have been rain formed without ice, and almost certainly a little did (these eyeballs detected some yesterday afternoon on the Catalinas). However, this is the type of rain that smoke inhibits most. This is because with so many cloud droplets competing for a given amount of condensation, they all stay too small to collide and stick together (requires drops bigger than 30 micrometers in diameter (let us not forget Hocking and Jonas (1970)…. So, we lost some rain due to smoky skies there, too,
Next, it can be relatively cool with tremendous amounts of rain IF there is a good disturbance to cluster the clouds together, forcing converging air near the ground, taking it away at Cirrus levels. We didn’t have a “disturbance”, a trough or a low to help out.
Finally, without the help aloft, we needed, as you can all guess by now, that bit more heating at the ground, maybe just a few degrees was all to launch some really large but isolated storms.
Today?
U of AZ 11 PM mod run has Cbs developing over the Catalinas by noon, and during the afternoon some of those showers trail to the northwest over Catalina. I think one will. So, once again we have a day with rain around, and maybe today a little cell will bombard us with a quarter of an inch. Should be warmer, today and that will help since again we have no trough help. Still smoky, as you can see here at sunrise by that orange-brown layer below this morning’s Cirrus. So, once again, the clouds may look a bit darker than they “should” when we have clean air.
The End except for this nice morning shot of Ac perlucidus undulatus I would call it. Very nice!
6:54 AM. Altocumulus perlucidus undulatus, if you care.
Stratus fractus on the sides of the Catalina Mountains:
5:54 AM this morning.
This tells you how wet it is out there, if per chance you haven’t walked around in it, and also tells you that moist air has some depth. These are the lowest clouds yet of our summer rain season. CUmulus cloud bases later this morning and this afternoon should also be lower than any prior day, and that means more rain gets to the ground, and likely the cloud clusters are large.
Fingers crossed for half an inch or more today here in Sutherland Heights-Catalina area.
BTW, some points in the Catalinas, such as White Tail, got 1-2 inches yesterday. Douglas way in the corner is already over 4.6 inches or about 160 % of their whole July normal. Excellent.
Running out of material, which is quite interesting because I haven’t been doing much, so am reprising these….
We had a little uptick in rainfall last year mostly due to that four and half inches in July. Very nice. No trend is evident in the summer rainfall here, global warming aside.
When it falls in summer….
Hmmm. Just noticed a discrepancy in the years of record. Huh. Must investigate later.
Some of yesterday’s clouds
One of my specialties is cloud bottoms, and there were several opportunities to photograph them. Here’s a quite nice one, hoping one day it might appear in a gallery, it’s that good I think. It was just starting to unload its watery burden onto the unsuspecting folks in south Catalina and Oro Valley (see next shot):
3:44 PM and above Catalina.4:03 PM. From Sutherland Heights looking SW toward Oro Valley, just 19 min later.
Models chock full of moist days for at least a week ahead, so “let the games begin”. Certainly we Catalinans will get nailed one of those days. Extreme SE AZ has been pretty wet so far, with Douglas having almost 2.5 inches already. Will be green down there soon! Might be worth a trip to see how things are coming along.
The End, except for this shot of the prior day’s really dramatic sunset:
We begin today by not talking about sports as the title suggests, but rather examining pretty castellanus, Altocumulus castellanus, that is, from yesterday morning:
5:38 AM yesterday from Equestrian Trail Road.
The brighter regions at the top are liquid droplet clouds, below, snow virga as the drops quickly freeze into ice crystals. As they grow and collide, snowflakes (“aggregates of single crystals) develop. But the dry air below the clouds prevents them from falling more than a few thousand feet below those white tops. Too bad. This is also what the tops of many widespread rainy/snowy storms look like if you could cut away just the top few thousand feet, those situations where there is moist air all the way to the ground.
L. A. suns? No, the PHX team did not move to a cooler venue as might be desired on these record breaking hot days. But our orange suns of late, particularly in the late afternoon, are reminiscent of those sunsets seen in smoky, smoggy regions of which this earth has too many.
6:37 PM. The smoky orange sunset yesterday. Ugh.
Furthermore, smoke gets in the way of rain formation, something noted by experimenters as far back as 1957, and later when burning sugar cane in Australia in the 1960s. The burning there stopped the clouds, relatively shallow ones, from raining. This is because smoky clouds have more and smaller drops in them. Smaller drops are resistant to forming ice, and a cloud must become deeper to generate drops large enough to coalescence with one another to form drops big enough to fall out.
So, not only are the skies messed up by smoke, but the formation of rain, too, is interfered with. Fortunately, if deep thundery clouds form, as we expect today in our vicinity, this smoke effect can be overcome at least in those clouds and rain will fall out.
Also, because small drop clouds send more light back into space from their tops, even moderate-sized Cumulus clouds can look awfully dark on the bottom, suggesting they are deeper than they really are.
Here from IPS Meteostar, a favorite place to look at weather, this.
Valid only 12-13 days from now, July 9th at 5 AM Local. Heavy rain (blue region) shown for SE Arizona during the preceding 12 h ending at 5 AM! (More simply: “overnight.”
Sure, could be illusory as we know, but it does demonstrate that we are deep into the summer rain season by July 9th, as predicted by the seasonal outlook from the U of AZ. After the past desiccating months, fingers crossed.
Also, let us consume some spaghetti to see if there is any truth to this rain at all:
Valid July 9th at 5 AM Local
Yes! I love spaghetti! Upper high in correct position for good rains here, around the Four Corners area (area lacking lines), so that heavy rain COULD actually happen!
BTW, hope TV Weatherman George comes back. He is very, very good. I know I tease about TEEVEE weathermen, but maybe its only jealously, and also I don’t think I could do their job, too much (non-atmospheric) pressure! I might say something awful, in a happy talk context:
“Too bad about those people in that plane crash, but, ‘hey’, how about those Wildcats!”
No, it really does take some real explanatory and graphics skills to do TV weather these days, plus be likeable on top of those. George has those skills and attributes.
