This whole situation, in spite of the inclinations seen in “spaghetti”, has gone to pot. Well, actually, to the north more than foretold days ago. No rain is now foreseen here for another week or two.
But instead of discussing in minutiae what went wrong, and why CM fell for it, that is, go through a bunch of hand-wringing about how bad our models are, even with some chaos thrown in (produces “spaghetti”), let us instead change direction for awhile, a diversion really, and consider the two forms of anarchy today: good anarchy, and bad anarchy.
We begin our discussion with an example of “good anarchy”, shown below:
Here, at an entrance to the University of Washington, conscientious citizens exhorting their fellow citizens to be as good as they can be and not break laws. While it was illegal to write on the wall, you can see that they were good-hearted people, ones that might pick up litter as well.
In contrast, below I present an egregious example of quite “bad anarchy.” Please note the clear message by the authorities on the sign at right:
This was horrific, shocking. Here people, but not me, violate a clear edict about walking past a sign with a black pole marking the point you are not supposed to go past. And the violators seem to have no remorse about they have done, but are just kind of ambling along. What has happened to us? Perhaps the woman on the left is bowing her head in shame. Maybe THAT is the only thing we can take away to boost our spirits over this sad scene of otherwise happy, non-chalant acting people in violation of the law. I will never forget this scene.
Yesterday’s clouds
We did have a nice sunset; so many here. Hope you saw it. Pretty much an all daymlollipop lentiular cloud downwind of Ms. Lemmon yesterday, too. Here’s the U of AZ time lapse for yesterday. You can really see how these clouds hover, shrink and expand, disappear, reappear, as the moisture grade changes.
6:45 PM. Altostratus with virga, lit from below due to a distant hole that allowed the fading sun to illuminate this portion of the As clouds and the light snow falling from them (virga).
7:03 AM. Ac len downstream of Lemmon.1:13 PM. Still there.4:43 PM. Some more over there, too.
Let us compare different dusty sunsets, one from Saudi in 2007, and one from Israel, 1986, together at last for the first time:
Landing in a Lear, Qassim, Saudi Arabia, 2007.Dusty sunset on a beach at Tel Aviv, Israel, 1986. Dust (and warm weather) comes from winds from the south and southwest that have passed over the Sahara Desert, a fact known by local forecasters there for more than 2000 years. The clouds you will immediately recognize as Altocumulus floccus virgae. The slightly different colors may be due to using different cameras, the last from Agfachrome film. Also, aerosol composition may be slightly different, of course.
That title is so TEEVEE: “Stay tuned for ‘Jeff’s’ forecast at 11 PM (6 hours from the title announcement) to find out.” So silly. Yet, when I look deep inside myself, I find I wouldn’t mind saying things like that if was making a LOT of money to say things like that, like those TEEVEE people do. TEEVEE people making a LOT of money, its unbelievable really, how much they make, and pointing that out is kind of a theme here. Always has been, and its not just because I am not making any money myself, though it might be.
For vocational guidance purposes, for the reader considering a career in meteorology, I introduce the following graphic:
This graphic1 was based on a 1980s story in the San Francisco Chronicle about two TEEVEE meteorologists for KGO. The main guy made $400,000, and the weekend guy they had just pinched from another station for fill in and weekends, $225,000! It was forwarded to me by my mom who apparently wanted to make me feel bad about being in research at the University of Washington.
Oh, yeah, the answer to the title question?
Yes.
Let us begin and end our discussion with spaghetti:
Valid for 5 PM AST Sunday, March 31st
You can see a big trough is guaranteed here this day (and will be affecting us the day before, March 30th). Look at how the red lines cluster over northern Mexico. That means it a very confident forecast, say compared with that just east of the Hawaiian Islands.
Then, WAY out there…..
Another moderately confident rain from a trough is foretold for April 5-6th. This trough has a trajectory more or less straight out of the Pacific, and would have more tropical air in it compared with the one shown here in spaghetti.
The End.
——————-
1Like all political cartoons, a certain liberty has been taken with the facts. Today you would likely have to have a DEGREE in meteorology to even work at a TEEVEE station in Pumpkin Corners, Nebraska.
An example of taking liberties with facts for humor is this classic insight into President Reagan’s brain from former University of Washington student, and Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist, David Horsey:
Mr. Reagan did not believe that California was that big in size, so we know that’s one thing wrong.
This loop. Its got Catalina rain in it. Can you tell when from the jet on these maps? It would be so great if you could. Might get another star on that CMJ Deluxe Mark IV Hail HelmetTM you put on when its about to graupel or hail, only $4 plus $150 for postage and handling. (Helmet cam and ruler for reporting size, extra.)
I have relatives visiting and I don’t feel, in good conscience, I should spend too much time visiting with others…well, “visiting with others”; its actually more or less with “me, myself and I”, as we used to say, chortling away at some silly thing I’ve said to myself like what I just said up there. Must give attention elsewhere.
Bye.
PS: Generally clouds are boring, but I have reached the saturation point with Altostratus! Go away!
I would like you to clear your mind and stare at this map at this site for 10 minutes. After which time I will ask you to do things you might not otherwise do, like buy a weather station for the back yard and have it report to the Weather Underground (not to the radical left wing group spawned during the late 1960s, but to the OTHER Weather-centric Underground, though it is true that they both originated at the University of Michigan and what is that about?)………buy that “I ‘heart’ spaghetti” (weather “spaghetti”, of course) T-shirt for $4 plus $75 for postage and handling, and some other things as I think of them.
I’ve thought of some things… For example, while under this “spell”, like maybe take more cloud pictures, take a course in cloud photography, fill in your weather diary more completely than you have been, you know, that kind of thing, nothing really untoward at all. I am pretty sure you won’t have to worry about ending up some kind of weather automaton or human weather robot until I snap my fingers after viewing that map up there (linking to it yet again just to make sure you saw it). Maybe we should constitute a human subjects review committee before I post today….just in case.
In the meantime, look for some nice Cirrus today. Some of it should be visible by daybreak. That Cirrus is all that’s left of some front that banged into the coast yesterday. This scruff of Cirrus in the satellite imagery is moving so fast it appears it will go by completely before being capable of giving us a colorful sunset. It’ll be a close call. Oh, well.
The weather way ahead–lookin’ good, that is, bad
Finally, the less reliable 06 CUT-GMT-Z time model run (the one that crunches some global data at 11 PM AST) has some green pixies here. As rendered by IPS MeteoStar here are two shots of a rain that occurs the night of the 29th-30th of March, yes, THIS month. Wow. The model outputs at 06 Z and 18 Z are not considered as reliable as those at 12 and 00 CUT (Central Universal Time, as we have named what used to be Zulu, or Greenwich Mean Time, but does the rest of the Universe know what time we think it is? “I don’t think so”, an editorial). Some graphics of the possible precipitation event:
Valid for 11 PM AST, March 29th. Colored regions show areas where the model thinks it has rained/snowed over the prior 12 h.
Valid at 5 AM AST,March 30th. There’s hope!The upper level configuration for 11 AM AST March 29th, just about the time the rain moves in here. Very nice.
Of course, its mandatory to see if this forecast has ANY support whatsoever in the NOAA “ensembles of spaghetti”, and here is a plot for the 29th of March. It’s coming, that trough, it will be here. Yay! However, will it be strong enough to bring rain? I think so, but, then, I would always think that because an inherent bias that I feel duty bound to report. BTW, wouldn’t you like to be wearing a T-shirt like this for $4 plus $75 for postage and handling???
Ending crassly, CM
Valid for 5 PM March 29th, a Friday. Could be exciting that day.
2:11 PM. Cirrus uncinus march in tandem across the NW sky.2:19 PM. One Cirrus uncinus element playfully mimics Comet Panstarrs, trying to get in on some of the publicity: “I can be a comet, too!”
Cirrus get this way after an initial “formation burst”, often like a bunch of porous tiny Cumulus clouds with very slight updrafts, maybe centimeters (inches) per second. But those there is enough structure/variation in those tiny updrafts that some of the ice crystals that form get larger than most and begin to fall out. These bursts of formation, from vertically-pointed radars, are usually in a thin layer of air that has no wind shear, that is, the layer is moving at the same speed over a thin depth. So the clouds that form in this “mixed out” layer, are vertical.
However, when the largest ice crystals settle out, they usually encounter layers of air where the wind twists in direction and it loses some velocity compared with the thin layer in which the clouds originally formed. So, those lonely larger crystals get left behind. And they usually fall into drier air and gradually start getting smaller, the trail of the uncinus flattening because they can’t fall so fast as they get smaller. Its kind of sad when you think about it; getting left behind, withering away, usually all the way to nothing at all, being vaporized. We used to sing about being vaporized during the Cold War, or at least, the band X-15 did there in SEA, an anti-“pop” band.
Below, a Cirrus formation burst. Look at how they look like tiny, porous Cumulus clouds:
2:39 PM. Cluster of new Cirrus elements appears–could be termed Cirrus floccus maybe. Some fine trails are already beginning to emit from these elements (center where its starting to look like chicken scratches. The youngest burst is in the upper third of the photo.
The weather ahead
NOAA’s not helping out with any green rain “pixies” (aka, “pixels” in model forecasts) in southern Arizona through the end of the month. That’s really sad. However, there is a close call on the 28-29th. It will get windy. and much cooler at that time.
Any blobs of anomaly in the US future again? They’re back! Happen around the 25th (as rendered by IPS MeteoStar):
Valid on March 24th, 5 PM. The warm and the cold exceptionalism at 500 millibars, almost always together as a couple.
So, while we’re complaining about another March heat spell, the folks back in the East, and especially the southeast, will be complaining royally about how cold it is for late March. Few will be happy.
Spaghetti virtually confirms this pattern. So, let’s say you have a brother and his family living in Asheville, NC, maybe he’s a retired policeman or something, you’ll want to call him and advise him of some cold air ahead, as an example of taking action on the weather ahead you’ve just found out about…
6:44 PM. Some Cirrus spissatus (thicker blobs) floated over late yesterday. When its unusually warm, Cirrus are often unusually high altitude such as yesterday’s.
Still no rain in the two week model “headlights”…and believe me I look for it.
A science story
While we’re waiting for “weather”, I thought I would partially bore you with another science story.
I am supposed to be dead by now, well, within 5-10 years after 2003 due to the development of a rare disease called pseudomyxoma peritonei, resulting from a tumor called, mucinous cystadenoma. Actually, I feel so good today at 71 years of age, doing more weight at the gymnasium than I ever have in the past 16 years on some machines, I tell friends that it must be a pre-death “bloom.”
But back in August of 2003, I left work with an incredible gut pain and ended up in the ER at the University of Washington’s hospital, never having finished that afternoon cup of coffee. After a day or so of monitoring, the doc there, Mika Sinanen, “went in” with his team. It wasn’t presenting as a classic appendicitis. He found a tumor exiting the appendix. He had never seen this before, and didn’t know what it was.
Later, while in his office, the pathologist came back with the report on it. It was a “mucinous cystadenoma”, not cancerous. But SInanen wasn’t as excited as I thought he should be that it wasn’t cancer. He told me to meet with the University Hospital’s surgical oncologist.
A few days later I was informed by that oncologist that I would likely experience a series of abdominal operations over the coming years due to the development of the disease called, pseudomyxoma peritonei, in which a mucinous jelly like growth attaches to organs in the gut. There is no cure I was told; portions of the gut are removed, the doc said, until no more can be removed and you die of “blockage.” It didn’t sound good.
Keep in mind the date of this event, August 2003.
Now the science part.
In September of 2002 a farmer from west Texas was upset over a cloud seeding program his county was going to undertake and had decided to write to all of the universities having atmospheric science programs about the status of cloud seeding. Was it proven? And would it work in the summer clouds of west Texas?
He eventually reached me at the University of Washington. I had published critiques and reanalyses of cloud seeding experiments in peer-reviewed journals, usually with the Director of our Cloud and Aerosol Group, Peter V. Hobbs, as a co-author, over the preceeding 25 years. In the farmer’s note, he said that he had contacted over 130 universities, and that my name had come up often. I cherish that e-mail even today, an indication that your peers had noticed your work.
I should mention that all of this reananlysis work was self-initiated, and except for one paper, they were done off and on on my own time with no funding whatsoever over a period of about 25 years. I sometimes partially joke about this aspect in introductions of talks on this subject by describing all this self-funded work as a “crackpot alert”. But I was trying to be a good crackpot.
I sent this farmer the fairest objective one-page note on cloud seeding I could, one that I thought my peers would also agree with. Its our job as scientists, even if with think they are still faulty reports out there, we have to cite them until they are officially overturned. I wrote to the this farmer that cloud seeding had not been proven in those types of clouds (summer Cumulonimbus ones) in ways that we in the science community would find convincing. That is, proven through randomized experiments, double blind ones, and in which the results had been replicated. That’s the gold standard for all science. I did point out, as I must as a scientist, that there were “promising results” using hygroscopic methods of seeding of such clouds. That was about it.
Implementing a commercial cloud seeding project creates jobs (don’t forget, the author has participated in these), and it looks good for sponsoring organizations, like state and county governments, to try to do something about droughts. Makes constituents happy even if most academic scientists question such a practice absent proper evidence.
Within 24 h of sending that note, I received this e-mail from Texas:
“You will die in 11 months from a fast-growing tumor, you f…… rascal.”
It was pretty odd since it had a timeline, and that 11 months was odd, and I thought use of the word “rascal” didn’t fit the preceding expletive. Another expletive would have fit better. There was no way to connect this e-mail to the note I sent that farmer, but the timing made it clear it had something to do with it.
Well, EXACTLY 11 months after that note I was on my way to the hospital leaving a half a cup of coffee on my desk at the U of WA due to an odd tumor exiting my appendix. And, by golly, I WAS going to die, but in 5-10 years!
I will never forget that day the surgical oncologist at the U of Washington hospital told me that. The disease never showed.
I always wanted to write to that e-mail address from where the threat originated (a phony one) and say,
“Hah-hah (emulating “Nelson” on The Simpsons); it was a SLOW growing tumor!”
——————————–
One final note.
Scientists don’t like it when you’re reanalyzing their work, naturally. The very first review I saw of my first paper reanalyzing a randomized cloud seeding experiment was so bad, and had a personal attack that I did not have the credentials to reanalyze that experiment1 it made a fellow, cartoon-drawing graduate student in our group, Tom Matejka, laugh. He then came up with the image below of how that reviewer must have seen me. His drawing was so perfect a depiction, I loved it. The paper, “A reanalysis of the Wolf Creek Pass cloud seeding experiment”, was the lead article in the May 1979 issue of the Journal of Applied Meteorology.
I have also included a photo of Tom, one of my favorite grad students passing through our Cloud and Aerosol Group at Washington. You can see the playfulness in his face.
Tom Matejka, circa 1979.
—————–
1True, actually; I had no credentials in that domain at that time.
Lotta high temperature records falling in Arizona lately, info courtesy of U of WA Husky researcher, Mark Albright’s web page here.
Arizona daily record temperatures and precipitation
SXUS75 KPSR 150830
RERPSR
RECORD EVENT REPORT
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE PHOENIX AZ
130 AM MST FRI MAR 15 2013
...RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURES SET AT PHOENIX AND YUMA...
A RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURE OF 95 DEGREES WAS SET AT PHOENIX AZ
YESTERDAY. THIS BREAKS THE OLD RECORD OF 91 SET IN 2007.
A RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURE OF 96 DEGREES WAS SET AT YUMA AZ
YESTERDAY. THIS BREAKS THE OLD RECORD OF 95 SET IN 1934.
$$
SXUS75 KTWC 150104
RERTWC
RECORD EVENT REPORT
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE TUCSON AZ
535 PM MST THU MAR 14 2013
...RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURES SET FOR THURSDAY MAR 14...
LOCATION RECORD OLD RECORD
TUCSON INTL AIRPORT 92 87/2007
BISBEE-DOUGLAS AIRPORT 85 83/2007
KITT PEAK 71 71/1972
PICACHO PEAK 90 90/2007
$$
SXUS75 KPSR 150013
RERPSR
RECORD EVENT REPORT...UPDATED
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE PHOENIX AZ
0511 PM MST THU MAR 14 2013
...RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURES SET AT PHOENIX AND YUMA...
A RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURE OF 95 DEGREES WAS SET AT PHOENIX AZ TODAY.
THIS BREAKS THE OLD RECORD OF 91 SET IN 2007.
A RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURE OF 96 DEGREES WAS SET AT YUMA AZ TODAY.
THIS BREAKS THE OLD RECORD OF 95 SET IN 1934.
$$
SXUS75 KFGZ 150057
RERFGZ
RECORD EVENT REPORT
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE FLAGSTAFF, AZ
556 PM MST THU MAR 14 2013
...RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURES FOR NORTHERN ARIZONA ON MAR 14 2013...
CITY (PERIOD OF RECORD) NEW HIGH PREVIOUS RECORD/YEAR
PAYSON (1949 - 2013) 78 78 (TIED) IN 2007
PRESCOTT (1899 - 2013) 77 77 (TIED) IN 2007
PRESCOTT AIRPORT (1948 - 2013) 79 78 IN 2007
SELIGMAN (1905 - 2013) 81 81 (TIED) IN 2007
THESE RECORDS ARE PRELIMINARY PENDING OFFICIAL REPORTS.
$$
CO
SXUS75 KPSR 142314
RERPSR
RECORD EVENT REPORT
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE PHOENIX AZ
0414 PM MST THU MAR 14 2013
...RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURES SET AT PHOENIX AND YUMA...
A RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURE OF 93 DEGREES WAS SET AT PHOENIX AZ TODAY.
THIS BREAKS THE OLD RECORD OF 91 SET IN 2007.
A RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURE OF 96 DEGREES WAS SET AT YUMA AZ TODAY.
THIS BREAKS THE OLD RECORD OF 95 SET IN 1934.
$$
SXUS75 KTWC 140034
RERTWC
RECORD EVENT REPORT
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE TUCSON AZ
534 PM MST WED MAR 13 2013
...RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURE BROKEN AT THE TUCSON INTL AIRPORT THIS
AFTERNOON...
A RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURE OF 89 DEGREES WAS SET AT THE TUCSON
INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT TODAY. THE OLD RECORD OF 88 DEGS WAS SET IN
1989.
$$
Here's what a giant blob of anomaly over the West looks like;
not sure I've seen one this big before, kind of a "planet out of control" map:
The height anomaly pattern at 500 millibars for 5 PM AST yesterday. They don’t get bigger than this. To reach the height of the 500 millibar pressure level you have to go up in a hot air balloon higher than usual because the pressure doesn’t change so rapidly when you go up in a hot air balloon and its hot (air has lower density). But, its cold in New Hampshire, too cold for late March so perhaps we can take some solace in that as part of another “warm in the West, cold in the East” pattern. (See low height anomaly off New England coast.)The green line is “climatology” at 500 millibars. Note how that green line bulges southward in the Southwest indicating a prevalence of troughs at this time of year. We have the opposite now, but its fading fast. Look at how the yellow and green lines are out of phase.
The weather ahead
LOTS of troughs in our future once this bag of hot air over us dissipates, but not one of those troughs is far enough south or strong enough to bring rain over the next two weeks. Ugh. Our best chance for anything still remains around the 21st–a trough in the area guaranteed, but only the thermometer will get a workout from it, cooling off from the warmth of the previous day, likely some noticeable wind, as per usual in the spring with trough passages.
So, that’s about it for weather, thermometer getting some work, the anemometer some, too, but not your rain gauge. Oh, me.
However, with approaching troughs, there’ll be some nice Cirrus clouds and with them, occasional nice sunsets and sunrises in the days ahead.
With no rain in sight now, and its looking more and more like a third late winter and spring in a row with precip below normal (there’s only been one other “three in a row” in our 36 years of Catalina records), I thought would pay homage to the Great 2010 13 Day Run of the CDO at East Wilds Road (farther below).
In the meantime, yesterday I came across a nice gurgling creek, making the kind of gurgle that characterizes New Age relaxation CDs. It was coming down the Big Rock Creek wash-tributary that empties into the Sutherland Wash at the Cottonwoods, a local name given to an area of the Sutherland Wash were illicit beer parties often take place. There was no water in the Sutherland above this point.
3:55 PM yesterday at Big Rock Creek by the Sutherland Wash cottonwoods. Horse Jake forages.2:54 PM. The Sutherland Wash downstream of the Big Rock Creek tributary. Horse Jake; his little mind wonders why I am taking another photo of not that much.
The Great CDO Run of 2010
I had forgotten that the Canada del Oro wash (river?) at East Wilds Road had run for as many as 13 consecutive days beginning on February 28th and likely ending three years ago today1. Here are a few of those shots with the date. That run, and the “Road Closed” sign on E. Wilds at the CDO began to feel like a permanent feature of life here in Catalina. You wondered if catfish were in there. It was such a special time then. And it had already run several times beginning after January 20th.
What was surprising to Mr. Cloud Maven person, a cloud maven not a drought maven, was that after two consecutive bountiful months of rain and snow, the State of Arizona, and our local region of Arizona were still considered to be in drought, “abnormally dry”, according to the Drought Monitor folks. Here is there map for March 16, 2010.
The US Drought Monitor map for March 16, 2010.
At the end of March, and after three consecutive months of above normal rain and snow in our area (8.02 inches in Catalina, or nearly twice the normal amount), with one of the best wildflower displays in many, many years in progress, 200 inches of snow and one the best all time ski winters at Mount Lemmon, articles in the AZ Star about all the water that was flowing in the washes, we were STILL classified by the Drought Monitor folks as “abnormally dry” (see below).
I began to have the depressing thought that it was impossible to exit a drought classification after those three fabulous months.
The western US Drought Monitor map for April 6, 2010. Go figure.
The End
————————-
1The Pima County stream gage at the bridge over the CDO wash at Golder Ranch Drive wasn’t working during that time (flow data here), and I don’t have photo evidence for two days, the 5th and 6th. Dang. Also, the run likely continued a little beyond the 12th, but don’t have photo evidence for the 13th, either. Dang#2.
Yesterday, that is. It felt like I never left. Only 49 F here; was 55 F in Seattle yesterday.
But the main thing that made it seem “so Seattle” was the persistent low Stratocumulus overcast, almost no sun whatsoever, and a little rain. We picked up another 0.03 inches in a couple of morning episodes of R– (an old weather texting1 shorthand for “very light rain”) to bring the storm total here to 0.55 inches. Of course, the best part of that overcast was that it allowed the ground to be damp for another day, helping the spring grasses and wildflowers by keeping the soil moisture in the soil and not flying away under a hot sun. The worst part of the overcast that lasted almost all day, was that Mr. Cloud Maven person had the day completely wrong–thought it would break open in the afternoon to “partly cloudy” and so he was as gloomy as the sky. You see, as a weather forecaster, you can’t even really enjoy a nice day if you didn’t predict it. Had some sad 75 F days in Seattle when I only predicted 69 F; everybody having summer fun but me.
Enough nostalgia, here are the clouds, even if you have no interest in seeing such boring clouds again:
6:56 AM. Interesting little punctuated lenticular. Mr. “CMP” has just finished his long blog and thinks the sky will break open in the afternoon. Hah!
8:00 AM. Stratocumulus tops Samaniego Ridge–with the turrets, you might lean toward adding the descriptor, “castellanus.” Note blue sky here, if you didn’t see any at all yesterday. No precip evident.8:02 AM. Looking north toward S-Brooke. Fine shafts of precip emit from Stratocumulus clouds indicating those regions in the cloud where there was more liquid water at one time, that is, where these clouds are humped up like those Sc clouds on Samaniego Ridge in the prior photo (the precip from those clouds may have been out of sight). But, was the precip shown here due to ice or the colliding drops process? I wasn’t sure at this point. You see, after a storm, the clouds can be real clean, almost oceanic-like meaning they have LOW droplet concentrations, and when the droplet concentrations are low, the drops are usually larger and can get to sizes where they can stick together when they collide (think 30-40 micron droplet diameters). You probably don’t have a clue about those sizes, but it sounds great if you see rain like this and tell a neighbor that, “those clouds might have drops larger than 30-40 microns in diameter near cloud tops.” Instant neighborhood expert!
8:06 AM. Then the clouds to the west of Oro Valley and Catalina began to produce fine precipitation and advance on Catalina. How nice. Definitely was looking like a true drizzle event (caused by colliding drop rain formation process), at least to me at this point. That process is a rare event in AZ when very light rain or true misty drizzle (tiny drops, close together) forms like that. Usually our clouds have too many droplets from natural and anthropogenic sources and the cloud droplets stay too small to collide and stick together, instead bumping around like marbles with all the surface tension they got. And then because they’re all tiny, they don’t have much impact when they hit, there’s not a lot of velocity difference like there would be in a cloud with a broad droplet spectrum, the kind of spectrum we see in “clean” clouds where drops bigger than 30 microns are a plenty. Note trails of precip coming down in center. BTW, to go way off topic, to distract from how bad my forecast was, in “hygroscopic” seeding, particles like salt are introduced at cloud base to encourage the formation of rain through this process in polluted Cumulus clouds. Worked in Saudi, based out of Riyadh, winter of 2006-07, flying in a Lear jet, helping to select Cu for random seeding using that methodology2. Our office at the government met building, I recall, was cleaned by the “Bin Laden” group. Hmmmm. Maybe its a common name there, to go even farther off topic.10:09 AM. So Seattle! (Have to make up for that last bloated caption.)4:49 PM. And that’s your entire day.6:27 PM. Sunset tried to do something. But, like the day, it was like that sugar icing on a stale dried out cinnamon roll, just didn’t quite make it, though cinnamon rolls are quite good as a rule.
Today’s clouds
Some residual small Cumulus, maybe clumping into a larger group this morning for a bit, which you would then refer to as Stratocumulus. Should gradually diminish in size and coverage until almost completely clear in the afternoon. Expect a north wind in the afternoon, too.
The weather ahead
There isn’t any, well, not right away, but WAY ahead….
Chances for rain begin to pick up after the 19th as we enter the “zone of curl”, “cyclonic curls” in the upper atmosphere with a lot of “vorticity” in them again, with temperatures falling back to normal values. Pretty tough to have warm weather for long at this time of year in AZ. You see, its troughs like to “nest in the West” in March, April, and May, even when they’re not strong and far enough south to bring rain, maybe only wind. Its a climo thing, and it causes many areas of the West to see an increase in precipitation in March from February, and also halts the rapid rise in spring temperatures (especially in Seattle, hahahaha, sort of).
This because the global circulation pattern, responding to the climb of the sun in the sky and warming continents in the northern hemisphere, those forces acting on the position of the jet stream, and weakening it here in the NH (northern hemisphere), is changing the jet stream pattern so that storms begin to move southeastward from the north Pacific across the Pac NW into the Great Basin area in the spring, bringing cold north Pacific air into the West. There was a great report about this phenomenon by old man Bjerknes out of UCLA with his Ph. D. grad student, Chuck Pyke, back in the mid-1960s. Pyke was a UCLA sports nut, BTW, to add some color to this account.
We won’t see that “trough in the West” pattern for awhile here in our “oasis of warmth” now about to begin, but count on it returning, as it appears to do late in the model runs from last night. Climo is forcing it.
The End, except for footnotes.
——————————————- 1Yeah, that’s right. Weathermen, as we would say it then, were way ahead of their time, “texting” each other long before kids thought of “texting.” You might write a weather friend, if you could find one: “We had a TSTM to the S with FQTLTGCCCG ALQDS last night for a few H. MVD N.” PIREPS, SIGMETS, too, were all “texted” and texted by teletype! Tell your kids.
2Was under the aegis of Research Applications Program (RAP) at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, CO. Money was good…though not nearly as much as you would make as a TEEVEE weather presenter (hahaha). I was a post retiree guest scientist for RAP NCAR. Clouds could be real bumpy there in Saudi, thought I was gonna die once as bottom dropped out of the Lear going into Cumulonimbus at night that one time. Pilot liked to cut it close between the hail shafts and the rising parts of the Cu with little or no precip, using his aircraft radar. But sometimes, it was a little too close…and we got into the shear zone between a strong updraft and the downdraft.
