Behold! Cirrus!
We often have phony dramatizations suggested by titles with exclamation marks, and frankly, today is no exception. I do like Cirrus, though. Hope you do, too.
Why like Cirrus1?
They provide a lot of nice sunrises and sunsets. EOM.
Yesterday’s displays of Cirrus, ending with a scruff of Cumulus toward Pusch Ridge:
Rain’s on the doorstep!
The End
Measurable rain to fall on beautiful Catalina in February 2018!
At least 0.02 inches, as deduced from this keyboard–haha. Should be more than that, but, in a rain of drought, everything seems to work against getting a major rain. Raindrops will possibly begin as early as 12:02 AM on February 15th, though probably not. Maybe a day or two later if a tropical insertion of moisture around a low passes east of Catalina. In that case, we’ll have to wait for the Pacific polar air to reach us near the center of that upper low as it drifts eastward.
What is certain is that clouds will once again present themselves in great quantities over our skies in just a few days. The colorful sunsets and sunrises that visually spoil us with so much splendor will return, too, after being mostly absent over these past weeks of drought.
The End
Our last hope for rain in early Feb; a thin blue line (a 552 decameter one)
Blue, as in the 5520 meter height contour line as produced by a single run of the many NOAA GFS model re-runs with those little “perturbations” of the starting data. Below, our only hope for rain here in Catalina is if the model run with a 552 decameter height contour over eastern Pacific across southern California (see arrow) verifies. Its an outlier, a rogue, a voice in the wilderness, etc.
Some background and diversionary writing in excess; skip if busy
Now that we have more powerful computers, we can run the same model over and over again with very slightly different starting data and then see how the results diverge from one another in the days ahead. In the first few days to week of the model run, the various outputs are virtually the same because the starting conditions are tweaked so very slightly. This is chaos in action! And it makes sense because we measure everything perfectly in the atmosphere at the same instant. So, little errors abound in our starting data anyway.
Think of E. N. Lorenz, “Dr. Chaos”! In fact, he thought our existing atmosphere could shift into a pattern resulting in an ice age without any external forcing (oh, like an interstellar dust cloud coming by for a few thousand years, the sun dimming, etc.)
Pretty amazing thought when you think about it, which you just have.
Nobody really thinks that today, but he threw it out on the table in his seminole (haha) paper, “The Intransitive Atmosphere” back in 1967. He also wrote about that kind of thing in the 1968 American Meteorological Society Monograph, “The Causes of Climatic Change“, papers by 22 of the leading climate authorities of that time. (Based on a 1965 conference at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, located in “Potville”, CO (aka, Boulder-haha. But, they really do love their marijuana in Boulder…).
Strangely believe it, in a further diversion from current weather and a mea culpa downstream that maybe you won’t get to with a lot boring writing before it: not one paper in that AMS Monograph was about the climate effects of CO2! Talk about being asleep at the wheel! Wow.
Well, OK, you can’t blame them too much.
The earth’s temperature was slipping downward in those days, and while it was well-known that the effect of CO2 was to cause warming, it didn’t seem to be having enough effect to counter the cooling, and we were only just getting obs of CO2 from Mauna Loa. Sure, its kind of an embarrassing chapter of science, so your not gonna hear much about it from scientists; the monograph above is almost never cited, or course. We like to avoid mentioning embarrassing chapters.
I could name some others, in my specialty, like those cloud seeding experiments at Climax, CO, in the 1960s which looked so good, so complete, and fooled the National Academy of Sciences because it was really all “smoke and mirrors.” Or those in Israel in the 1960s and 1970s that fooled everyone for a long time, too, but, upon further review, were also “smoke and mirrors.” Yes, that’s right, there was a “consensus” of scientific opinion about the results of each of those cloud seeding experiments that for a time was wrong, as, to beat a dead horse, happened in the early 1970s concerning the prospect of “global cooling;” the preponderance of scientific thought was that an ice age was ahead (as indicated by a climate change conference at Brown University in 1972, the results of which were summarized in Weather and Climate Modification, 1974, Wiley-Interscience publishers, W. N. Hess, Ed. Hell, the earth was cooling, so it made sense at that time!
Pretty amazing when you think about it, which you just have.
We know better now. CMP, like most everybody else, is predicting warming dead ahead, only how much is in question.
Here, we address embarrassing chapters head on, if anyone is still reading, which I hope they are not. Check it out.
About 13 days ago, the NOAA spaghetti ensemble factory showed a result that strongly “IMI” (in my interpretation) indicated a vast weather change beginning at the end of January. Sure, it was WAY out beyond what we consider to be a reliable forecast window, and unprofessional to make a forecast that far in advance, that is, much beyond a week, but the signal, the bunching of lines was so great, I went for it anyway. I got excited and brought to your attention that a likely drought-interrupting weather change was to occur in 12-15 days from then, troughs would occupy the entire Southwest beginning at the end of January into the first week of February.
Its not gonna happen.
Cloud maven person was too confident in his interpretation of spaghetti back then, that a trough positioned in the SW was virtually in cement; it had to happen. I was so excited and so wrong, got carried away, like I did with Sharon so many decades ago, thinking we were surely going to be a couple. I was rongno then, too. Arthur Rongno…. Oh, well, we learn and sort of move on.
Oh, there could still be a major trough toward the 5-6th of February, but as the title imputes, we’re down to a single blue, a rogue contour produced by one of the many model runs repeating forecasts last evening with those little errors in starting conditions. the Lorenz model runs. 🙁 🙁 :{
The End, finally!
Hot ‘n’ dry model outputs for Arizona reverse course overnight!
Check this out. Unbelievable, really, though it is kind of what our ensembles have been telling us would happen. These outputs of jet stream location shown below are but 6 h apart, and that’s what makes this comparison so remarkable; they are so drastically different (check how the orange colors have moved around, and then say, “Oh, my gosh!!”):
The question now is which one is right?
The answer, of course, is NEITHER ONE!
They’re both a little crazy because exact forecast maps like this for 300 h (13-15 days) can never be relied on exactly.
But, here’s where we fall back on our ensembles (spaghetti plots) to help us figure out which one is CLOSER to the truth; that’s the best we can do. Sometimes those plots aren’t helpful; there’s too much noise in the pattern around the world, so the spaghetti plots don’t converge to a pattern in which you can have confidence in.
So, here’s the ensemble (spaghetti) plot from last evening’s global data where the model computer model is started with tiny errors, ones that make no difference in the first few days of the model run, but then due to those, the repeated runs with slightly different errors start diverging, sometimes ending up looking like a ball of yarn. Its where these model runs produce the same result that we have confidence in a forecast as far out 10-15 days. In the plot below, the constricted contours in east Asia and across most of the Pacific, represents high confidence in where the jet stream will be in 14 days. The left turn to AK and a big hump off the West Coast is also almost surely the pattern that will be in place as well, as is the dive in the jet into the Plains States. Thus, a pattern of warm and wet in Alaska, and cold east of the Rockies is a VERY good bet at the time of this plot.
How about us?
The plot below is tilting toward a trough here, which would mean rain/snow chances along with below average temperatures. This, by the way, is the OPPOSITE of what the ACTUAL model runs have been telling us would happen for the past two to three days (as was the subject of a somewhat comprehensible blogulation just yesterday here). Sadly, though, the ensembles were off in their strong suggestion of a trough here, starting in late January and continuing into early February. So, we’ve lost a little of the precip expected when that pattern faded.
What about panel 2 above, which suggests a major storm for Arizona?
Its almost certainly a bogus outlier; its not supported. Its not impossible, but you wouldn’t make a forecast on that pattern. Most likely our trough pattern will, from another interpretation of the ensembles, be farther inland from the coast, which would mean colder and not as much precip as would be suggested in panel 2. But its pretty certain that its not going to be hot and dry, a computer solution that’s been roundly rejected from this keyboard all along.
No clouds; no photos.
How about a pilot weather joke instead? Fits with the models joking us around I think:
The End
Another day with Altocumulus clouds, and what else? The usual: aircraft-produced ice canals
They seem to go together every time we have Altocumulus clouds; aircraft flying through them create holes or canals! Have been photographing this phenomenon since the early 1980s, and I have not seen it so consistently occur every time there was a flake of Altocumulus around as has been the case here this winter! Its likely because our Altocumulus clouds have mostly been so cold, having temperatures lower than -15° C. Mid-level Altocumulus clouds can range in temperature from well-above freezing to below -30° C.
What was unusual about yesterday afternoon, if you caught it, was that you could make out the aircraft producing the “high temperature contrail” (aka, APIPs), a four engine prop aircraft flying just under the bottom of the Altocumulus layer. Even if you see a contrail in the Altocu, you can almost never make out the aircraft type for sure because its too high or in the clouds. But, because of our cool spell, those cold Altocumulus clouds were lower than usual, around 15,000 feet off the ground, or near the 500 millibar pressure level. The temperature at the bottom of this layer was -21° C. See annotated NWS sounding, courtesy of IPS Meteostar, below:
Here’s your aircraft shot, full size so’s you can really zoom in and see those engines:
S
The weather ahead, WAY ahead
Not a single model run since two days ago has produced a big trough in the SW US, in complete opposition to the interpretation of spaghetti ensemble output at that time. This would be, IMO, one the greatest busts of all time (not for me, of course), but for spaghetti ensembles (I was only foretelling what they told me), spaghetti considered to be one of the great forecasting advances of all time when computers became powerful enough to produce them in a timely manner.
If we believe these later model runs, it will be relatively hot and dry here, not cold and wet, as was suggested here.
But being of a stubborn nature, Cloud Maven Person is not yo-yo-ing on his forecast just yet. Surprises are almost certain in these model runs, since spaghetti still supports troughing beyond 10-12 days… Standing by for model yo-yo-ing….
A laugher (???) below from our very latest computer run (from IPS Meteostar again). This map in incredible in the lack of jet stream activity over most of the US!
The End
“Delta model”? Will someone have cold spaghetti on their face?
Yesterday, after I finally saw the model run based on global data from 5 AM AST for Feb 6th, CMP (the writer) was gloating that bit. The troughy, cold spaghetti for AZ, that which had been excitedly written about yesterday, was being confirmed; the interpretation right on, it seemed. Why even look at more model outputs until later January, I thought.
Then, just now in the pre-dawn darkness, I examined the computer outputs from last night’s 5 PM AST global data, also for Feb 6th, 5 PM AST. That is, global data crunched just 12 h later than the first panel I was gloating over, feeling really great about.
But, a completely, ghastly different weather regime had popped out!
How could this be? We don’t know. Relatively small changes would be expected, but the model outputs should gravitate back to where spaghetti placed the high and lows aloft. But this change was ridiculous, and must be rejected.
Some people, like neighbor and big professor “emeritius” of meteorology at Colo State U, Bill Cotton, refer to such differences as “delta model”. “Hence”, if that word is still used, today’s title.
(For snowbirds who have just moved to Arizona, the maps below have been annotated to show where you are relative to the rest of the US).
Yikes!
The first regime is cold, maybe some snow down in Catalina at some point about this time (early Feb), whilst the 2nd regime for the same time is suggests warm conditions, and definitely dry; no rain nowhere.
CMP (the writer) spoke of a high probability, based on ensemble spaghetti, of cold and lots of precip chances here in Catalinaland beginning at the end of January through the first week of February So, what’s up with that, this dichotomy?
Moving on to a new topic, let us look at last evening’s sunset rather than ponder what happened to the weather computer model, that is, which panel above is likely correct1:
The End.
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1The first regime above, the troughy, cold one, is strongly supported by ensemble outputs whose crazy-looking output plots are fondly referred to as “spaghetti”. The second panel served up from just last night’s 5 PM AST global data is not.
Have not looked at last night’s ensembles, but will ignore the bottom run anyway; will not panic as weaker elements might, that is, change my overall interpretation of troughy conditions in late Jan, early Feb., that is#2, reverse course now, predict drought and warmth for early Feb. , that is#3, “yo-yo”, as forecasters describe reversing course, confuse the public, lose credibility, where are my pills?
……yet. :}.
Still, “egad re this delta model”, as Bill likes to say. Its astounding! A total joke! The later one to be totally and completely rejected!
In no way did I expect to see what’s in the bottom panel, which is now above here! Trying to not panic real hard. (more kidding)
Still, how can there be an outlier of that magnitude as we see from last night? Must be a real bad error somewhere (maybe 2 kts of wind, 1.5 deg in temperature, wind direction, 5 decameters in geopotential height, etc), not an itty-bitty error as ensembles start with. Maybe Russian2 hackers did something, the North Koreans, or the Chinese? Just kidding
with weather noise and pseudo-paranoia, your Catalina cloud-maven of sorts.
Speaking of Russia, my great-grandparents emigrated from the Ukraine, here’s the cover of my latest book, published a few years ago. Well, its not my book per sé, but all the cloud photos in it are mine! How great izzat?
Sutherland Heights logs 0.22 inches yesterday; Jan now at 1.32 inches; average is 1.60 inches, water year at 1.71 inches
0.22 inches was, indeed. how much rain fell in the form of drops from Nimbostratus clouds yesterday as a modest little rain band generated by a rapidly moving trough swept through during the afternoon. Regional precip values can be found here. Our local area got the most, up to about a quarter of an inch, as often happens in marginal storms.
Yesterday’s storm marked the beginning of the new, more normal weather regime for southern Arizona, as has been blabbed about here in recent weeks. No more week after week of droughty weather with temperature far above normal, the kind of weather that has marked this whole fall and winter so far! I. e., “Thank you very much, a snowbird might say, but get the hell out!”, the rest of us might conjure up, thinking about the needs of our desert’s wildlife and vegetation.
Indications are now that below normal temperatures and above normal precip are ahead for us and all of Arizona in late Jan and early February.
The evidence for these claims?
Below, the stunning, jaw-dropping evidence for this seemingly outlandish assertion in the form of an ensemble (spaghetti) plot generated by NOAA last night. I have followed these charts for almost ten years now, and I cannot remember when such a strong signal (clustering of flow lines) 15 days out has occurred before in our region.
So, excessively excited this morning when I saw it! Its been annotated with excitement text.
This troughy pattern begins to take place on January 30th. Until then, a strong but dry cold front with a lot of wind comes by in a few days, on the 25-26th.
Yesterday’s clouds
The whole interesting, if excessively gray story is shown below:
The weather way ahead
The title sums up where we are now. Will we go have more rain? Oh, yeah. But not right away, as you already know.
Sky to do to a lot of things today
Keep cameras at the ready. Have some nice lenticulars in the lee of the Catalinas this morning if u look.
FROPA (weather text for “frontal passage” and cold air burst into Oro Valley and Catalina likely to be fronted by a lower arcus-like cloud that comes over the Torts later today. That should be dramatic, though personally I will complain about cold air right after it hits.
Still riding the forecast wave of 0.3 inches, though mods have varied from nothing to about that now. Yay!
Since its already windy, there’s a good chance of more windy (from the SW) right up until FROPA when the wind will turn to the NW for a while.
The End
The top 100 weather blogs; the weather ahead still filled with rainy portent
“Rainy portent”; is there a better phrase for a desert than that? I don’t think so. See mini-discussion below, and below that, some soapboxing! Very excited today! Where are my pills?
Now, let us discuss the top 100 weather blogs:
Bob Maddox‘ superb site, representing Tucson, makes the list ! This note and info from pal and fellow weather fiend and fellow science investigator, Mark Albright1:
“Some notable blogs in the list, Mark notes:1) Watts Up With That2) Roy Spencer11) Cliff Mass Weather and Climate (U of Washington Huskies!)
28) Judith Curry, Climate Etc (once worked at U of Washington Huskies as a visiting grad student
30) RealClimate (from the Huskies)
33) Wasatch Weather Weenies, Jim Steenburgh (graduated from from the U of Washington Huskies!)
65) Mike Smith70) Madweather – Bob Maddox (Tucson AZ) (Was grad student of mighty prof and neighbor, Bill Cotton, whose heard of the Huskies!
83) West Coast Weather – Michael Fagin”Not sure if “we” (to distribute poor performance beyond a single author) even made the top 1000; the list doesn’t go that low (or high).But, we’re not really a weather site, per se, to put a positive spin on a glum finding. We talk mostly clouds here. not so much weather. Contains sophomoric, droll, and tongue in cheek “humor”, too. Maybe Cloud Maven Person’s blogulations would make the top 1000 CLOUD sites!The weather ahead and beyond ahead
Cool with passing rains every coupla to few days, maybe some snow with one of those events, as they continue into February. The first storm begins on January 20th, and then its one threat after another. This new “troughy” regime should bring the January rainfall total in Catalinaland over average of 1.60 inches (1978-2017). Currently, we’ve logged 1.10 inches in a NWS style 8-inch diameter gauge.
Looking for tiny green sprouts out of our desert soil now.
The End
(except for all the footnoted sci commentary below)
sci commentary and soapbox module——
1Mark Albright routinely calls attention to suspect temperature data that’s out there, and other questionable aspects of some climate statements2. He is widely well thought of for these conscientious efforts in bringing temperature errors to people’s attention3. Mark was former State Climatologist of Washington State, to be redundant, for many years. Was more or less fired for questioning claims of HUGE snowpack losses in the Pac NW between the late 1940s/50s (a cold era that started after a warm era in the 30s and 40s) and the late 1990s (a Niño-filled warm decade); to wit, it was a cherry-picked study, as we learned later via Stoelinga et al 2010 pdf, and by the mountainous snows that occurred immediately after that bogus claim was published in the Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc.
Could snowpack go down gradually over the years in the Pac NW due to warming? Sure! But there was no need to cherry-pick data to create the appearance of an imminent calamity! It destroys credibility when objective investigators like Stoelinga, Mass, and Albright check into them. Michael Mann, of Penn State and “hockey stick” fame, also fueled the fires of skepticism and doubt needlessly by refusing to give the details (data and methodology) on how he created “The Stick” which eliminated such climate anomalies as the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age that followed. If you read Science magazine, they often refer to the MWP and LIA! What’s Up With That? It can’t be both,; didn’t happen but did happen????!!!!! Dammital.
“Fellow investigator”, CMP? Oh, yeah, baby! Your CMP likes questioning exaggerated cloud seeding reports after they’ve been published in peer-reviewed journals! Or checking into suspect cloud reports *(after all, he is the “Cloud Maven”) that are the foundations of seeding results. He’s even gone to foreign countries (well, one) to check out suspect cloud reports, help the people of that country understand their clouds.
While CMP has a number of peer-reviewed pubs that are critical of cloud seeding (nearly all co-authored with the late mighty Prof. Peter V. Hobbs), maybe today, as do so many good scientists and others, those critiques would just be in blogs? I dunno.
Journal editors have tremendous power over your getting in these days via who they give your manuscript to to review. (Well, that’s always been the case).
But today that power has grown enormously since they (a single editor or an editorial board) can refuse your manuscript on first sight (its “D. O. A.)” and not even send it out for peer-review! This is an intolerable situation since non-objective factors will certainly creep in to such a process. As an example of unwanted but valid science, Stoelinga et al took years to get into the J. of Climate.
Note to journal editors: Send the damn thing out! Let legitimate, even adversarial reviewers, determine the fate of a manuscript, with the stipulation that the author (s) have a chance to rebut adversarial reviews which will likely reject a manuscript prima facie. They’re the best ones!
And, no “pal reviews”! They’ve cost us so much in the early published cloud seeding claims here, and in Israel , believed to be accurate by our best scientists and national panels, but cost us and Israel tens of millions of dollars of worthless cloud seeding based on those ersatz published results.
2Some professors and students at the U of WA delete Mark’s e-mails on arrival; they prefer not to hear about discrepancies or other weather data that might cast doubt on today’s climate issues. As far as I know, only Prof. Cliff Mass has, from time to time, openly supported Mark’s findings putting him even more in the cross hairs of some of his fellow faculty members and especially some other climate scientists and students/post docs since he has often scrutinized and found wanting some gross claims on climate change. We are in a science era where questioning even the magnitude of the warming ahead, even if we believe its coming, is seen as untoward. Science is not as it should be!
3If you believe that, I also have some ocean front property in Nebraska I’d like to sell you.