Again, paraphrasing a skit from that old, innovative TEEVEE show. In Living Color, featuring Jim Carey, the Wayan Bros. etc., to describe the results of this run of the NCEP “ensemble of spaghetti” plot. This is a great output! Mmmmmmm, makes me want to throw a meatball on it right now! As in yesterday’s presentation from this keyboard, this plot is valid for football day, Saturday, Nov. 10th, at 5 AM AST. (Cloud pics at bottom.)
What’s to make of it?
Plan on being cold, very cold, my friend (s)—plural if there is more than one reader. There’s no way of avoiding being cold now on the 10th and for a couple of days after that. There’s probably going to be be some minimum temperatures in the 30s, maybe lower in the washes.
What this plot shows is that the signal for a huge temperature change pm the 9th-10th is very strong; its not gonna go away. And that is shown by the blueish lines that are packed together and dip toward Arizona with a lack of lines to the north of us over Nevada-Utah, Idaho-Montana into Canada.
Where the lines bunch together indicates where there is high confidence that the predicted pattern (yellow lines) will happen. You can see that the red lines are also VERY bunched south of AZ, another strong confidence indicator. Also, at this time of year, those blue lines indicate where the jet stream will be, along the 5580 meter height above sea level line, the height where a pressure of 500 millibars (mb) will be found, to add some complications to this discussion.
Below is what the model actually predicted at 500 mb from last night’s global data taken at 5 PM AST, from IPS Meteostar with the map valid for 5 AM AST, November 10th. At this point, the cold air has already arrived here in Catalina, likely the evening before. However, if the winds aloft are what is predicted, we’ll likely be dry. Dang!
In model run after model run we are going to see predicted, almost the same thing; a big cold trough barging into the West with the jet stream dipping way down into AZ. Along with this exciting development, a strong, strong low center will form inland at the ground, probably over Tonopah, NV, where they like to nest. That low center will bring our first really windy day as it moves toward Utah, probably beginning on the 9th when the temperature is still comfy.
Then after those strong SW winds, an extremely sharp cold front will go by in which the temperature plunges maybe 10 degrees in an hour or so as the wind shifts to the NW, probably on the tenth. Maybe you should think about getting a new, better thermometer/temperature sensor to document this. Just a thought.
So, our cold event, like the movement of the Sandy the Hurricane, is well predicted though the exact timing is still, of course, fuzzy. But count on something like this happening here in SE AZ.
Cultural impacts of sudden cold air:
Let’s see if the AZ Cats have a home game on the 10th….. Oh, my gosh, its Homecoming for the AZCats! Maybe they should practice in a large refrigerator after all these warm days. Fortunately, they play Colorado, a really crummy team, so maybe they won’t have to practice that much. :}
Rain with that cold air?
It looks marginal since the passage of the jet stream aloft is nearly overhead so far, not much if any of it to the south, the wintertime requirement for rain here. So, if there is rain, it will be a very slight event. But, will have nice clouds banking up against the Catalina Mountains for a day or so in that cold air.
Farther out: the models are suggesting this will be the “new pattern” for a few days, that is, it will recur, and another trough heads this way after this one, so we’ll have another chance for rain a few days after this upcoming cold spell.
One great aspect of this “new pattern” is that droughty areas of the Plains States will get hammered with substantial rains and snow, good for the winter wheat crop, and thus, all of us!
Pretty cirrus makes for pretty sunsets; these from yesterday:
Ensemble plot produced by the National Center for Environmental Prediction based on global data taken at 5 PM AST last evening. Arizona, I think, is shown by an arrow. (Actually this was a faulty run having too many contours; still there is something for us to glean here.)
Or, maybe should it be, “clear?” Or, “Huh?”
Of course, the two people who read this blog know that I am a big fan of these spaghetti plots, as they are known by in the business, in elucidating the likelihood of coming weather events shown on the progs.
Today’s prog has a huge trough barging into the West at this time and again a couple of days later.
Valid Saturday morning, football day, November 10th. Produced by last evening’s global data taken at 5 PM AST.
But previously, these same models had a gigantic hot air containing ridge building over us between the 10th and 15th (see it here: 15 day forecast Nov 15)! Now that same model has a couple of big troughs coming through the West at that time. So which ouput is likely to be right?
By examining the spaghetti plot, it’s PLAIN to see that its the trough of cold air that is very likely, and NOT an upper level, desiccating ridge of hot air sitting over us on November 10th. Notice that there are a lot of lines swirling southward and then curling back to the north over the West Coast (look just to the “left” of where Arizona is). Well, take my word for it as a meteorologist. Hmmm. I guess that’s not the most reliable person you would want to take his word from when it comes to weather 10 days out…
Instead of hot air over us in two weeks, an invasion of uncomfortably cold air marked by the passage a sharp cold front is almost in the bag on the 10th-11th. There is a slight chance of rain, too. Rain, what’s that? Well, it falls from “clouds” and there should be some sun-blocking “clouds” with that cold front.
With only dry weather temperature fluctuations ahead into the first half of November for us here in Catalina, I thought I would resuscitate this blog with a few cloud shots from the past few days, ones I was too lazy to get out there in a timely manner. OK, here’s some sky “dessert.”
6:25 AM, Oct. 24. Altocumulus perlucidus.6:25 AM, Oct. 24. Ac perlucidus toward the Catalina Mountains.9:02 AM, Oct. 24. Ac perlucidus undulatus (has rolls or billows).7:27 AM, Oct. 24th. Ac perlucidus undulatus again. What’s the temperature? Answer: not low enough for ice production.
A baseball story
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Now I am going to bore you, unless you are a fanatical baseball fan concerned with the tiniest minutae of that game, with a personal baseball story. It seems semi-appropriate with the World Series underway. Its a glimpse of the behind the scenes world of Major League baseball. But, to pique your interest, the 1980 University of Arizona National Championship baseball team is mentioned, as is the giant El Nino water year of 1982-83. This vignette is completely true, not made up. I post it mostly because there is some humor in it, I hope.
Mr. Cloud-Maven person, when his semi-pro baseball career was winding down in Seattle in the early 1980s, turned to serving up baseballs for the awful Seattle Mariners in the awful Kingdome, that is, was a batting practice pitcher for awhile. Here is the story about how that came about.
It does not end well.
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When Mariner coach, Frank Funk, called me in from the bullpen, I was pretty nervous. I had never before pitched to major league batters. Tommy Davis, the former Dodger and then the Mariner hitting coach, had been nice enough to warm me up out there instead of one of the Mariner catchers.
I strolled onto the Husky Ballpark mound, heart pounding. I had played at this venue, Husky Ballpark, many times for Seattle’s Paintings Unlimited team, an unlikely name for a semi-pro team, but still, the whole scenario of the Husky Ballpark filled with major league players just after the 1981 baseball strike ended was surreal.
Since I didn’t follow major league baseball, was too busy PLAYING baseball for Paintings, I had no idea who the first batter was that stepped into the batters box for BP, his gray hair protruding prominently from under his Seattle Mariner cap. I thought he might be a coach just to check me out before the actual players stepped in for batting practice. I began throwing to him in as machine-like mode as I could, one ball after another, no dawdling. I threw exactly as I did to my semi-pro team before our games, which was hard for normal BP and not the normal loopy, bloopy BP you see. I liked hard BP, and dammitall, that’s the way others would get it, too.
Somehow I got into a rhythm in spite of my nervousness and it was one strike after another. I focused totally on a small area of the net behind home plate as hard as I have ever concentrated on anything. I was giving up a lot of solid line drives and homers. After the old guy with the gray hair sticking out from under his cap, it was a series of Mariners; Lenny Randle, Gary Gray, Julio Cruz, Bruce Bochte, etc., maybe a couple of others. Gray, who was having a great start until the major league baseball strike, hit quite a few out. The whole forgettable 1981 Mariner roster is here, though why anyone would want to look at it is puzzling.
I found out a day or two later who that first, gray-haired batter was; it turned out to be Tom Paciorek, the Mariner who was then leading the American League in hitting! Honestly, I had no idea who he was.
After my BP stint at Husky Ballpark that day I got a lot of positive comments from the players, “sweet BP” and such. I was told by Coach Funk that they would likely call me down to the Kingdome when the games resumed to help out with BP. Of course, I could never be sure that it would really happen; maybe they were just being nice.
But, in any event, whether they did or not, I had a witness to the scene that fun day, not that being a BP pitcher is that big a deal; lots of guys can do it. My good friend, Steve Rutledge with whom I played catch with at the U of WA all the time, was there at Husky ballpark that Saturday afternoon, and saw the whole “drama” unfold.
Still, in spite of being a lowly servant wearing a numberless Mariner uniform, it was pretty exciting to throw BP. My whole desire for throwing it was really just to see how different a major league team was in hitting a baseball compared to my own Seattle Paintings Unlimited team to whom I pitched BP to regularly. I liked to throw BP with velocity, and my team loved it. “Regularly” meant throwing a LOT of BP, too! In the Western International League that we played in, there were four-nine-inning games a week beginning in June and continuing through August. The WIL was a league comprised of a sprinkling of ex-pros and summer college teams, like the Washington Huskies. One stalwart to play in that summer league (now the Pacific International League) many years later was current Giant superstar, and former Washington Husky, Tim Lincecum.
In the days that I played for the Seattle’s Paintings Unlimited team, generally 3rd base or outfield, we had a regular supply of pro baseball signees: eight were signed to minor league contracts from that one team during my 5 year tenure. Several made the major leagues, if only for “a cup of coffee.” One was Mike Kinunen, who, the very next year after his 1979 season with Paintings, was pitching for the Minnesota Twins and against the likes of the Yankees’ Don Mattingly! In 1979, when I batted cleanup for the Paintings team, the hitter before me, Jay Erdahl, was to make the last out at the College World Series in Omaha in 1980 as his Hawaii Rainbows lost twice to the Arizona Wildcats in the two games that year for the National Championship. So I did know how well good amateur players hit. It was a heady time to be playing in the WIL!
But in 1981, at 39 years of age, and competing against area college players trying to make the team, I demoted to the bench, hardly playing. For all the years that I played beginning in 1977, I had been the oldest starting player in the WIL and was always vulnerable. In 1981, riding the bench, warming up pitchers, coaching at 1st base, it was the end of an era really; I was hungry to do something more with a baseball. And it was one summer day that year that I read that that the Seattle Mariners, following the end of the 1981 baseball strike, would begin working out at the University of Washington where I worked as a staff meteorologist. So, I went down to see if I would be allowed to do something. It was kind of a ludicrous thought to think you could just show up and ask to pitch BP, but I did, and it happened.
The next day after that impromptu BP session at Husky Ballpark there was a tiny mention of my BP effort in the Seattle Times. And, to top it off, someone in the Department who had seen that little note in a small font in the Times had pasted it on my desk at the “U-Dub”, along with a little sign that read that there would be a “$1 charge for seeing the desk of Art Rangno.” It was pretty funny. An awful lot of guys can throw BP, but to my co-workers and grad students it was something special for a staff member they knew to do that.
A few days later the 1981 baseball season resumed its abbreviated schedule, and while I was at work, I “got the call” to join the major league team—as a batting practice pitcher!
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The Mariners were pretty bad during my stint 1981-1983 as a BP pitcher under manager Rene Lachmann. All during that time I threw my style of BP, getting on the mound and throwing with velocity, the kind I liked to hit against. Everything seemed to be fine doing so, a style that was different from the other BP pitchers, but the players had liked it that day at Husky Ballpark, so I kept throwing it that way, not moving up from the mound and throwing loopy balls as did the other BP pitchers (usually there are about three).
In 1984, I was “released” by Del Crandall, the new Mariner manager. Instead of having local amateurs come in and pitch, the team would now use its coaches almost exclusively for BP, with I think, one exception, Jerry Fitzgerald, a fellow “volunteer” BP pitcher who was a lefty. Lefties are always in demand!
But there was another factor that lead to my “release” in 1984, one that came out of the blue, a factor that was hard for me to believe.
In one BP session later in the 1983 season at the Kingdome, one in which the last place Mariners had the lowest team batting average by 20 points at 0.237, Steve Gordon, the Mariner bullpen catcher in those days, caught me. Usually you just threw to the netting behind home plate. At one point while I was throwing, Steve raised his right arm in a throwing motion and waved it at me several times, using an overhand motion. Since I was throwing one strike after another with velocity (no looping BP throws from this guy!), I thought he was signaling to me about how great I was throwing.
Not.
When my session was over, Steve came over to me and said, “The guys are getting pissed because you’re cutting the ball.”
“Cutting” the ball in baseball meant that you are throwing a ball that had movement; it was not going on a straight line which makes it eminently hittable. You would think that BP against the kind of ball thrown normally in the games, one with movement, would be a good thing to practice against, but not so.
But I was flabbergasted, and felt truly bad, since as an amateur pitcher from time to time even in the WIL, I never was accused of throwing a ball with movement, a downfall for anyone that wants to pitch. It was so ironic that I was now being told that my ball had “movement” while throwing BP!
I also began to realize that I wasn’t giving up many home runs while throwing BP in the Kingdome. The fun part for the players is to just blast the ball as friggin’ far or as hard as they could, it made them feel good, get confidence, and that wasn’t happening. Richie Zisk, the Mariner slugger of the day, once told me I had “the best sinker in the league”, but he was SURELY joking, maybe even being sarcastic I thought. I forgot about it; it was a ludicrous suggestion.
I began to think about some other not-so-great things that had happened in 1983 as I puzzled about unintended “movement.” One HUGELY embarrassing thing for a BP pitcher had happened during a session pitching to the struggling Al Cowens; he swung and missed a batting practice pitch! My face turned red and I kind of apologized, muttering a “sorry” to him. Then, he broke his bat on another pitch. I felt so BAD for him! But I didn’t think I had anything to do with it; he was in mental funk about hitting and in those days, probably would have had trouble hitting a ball off a batting tee, the kind of thing kids use when they’re little.
Another dismal chapter in 1983 involved the aging, overweight Gaylord Perry, a good hitting Hall of Fame pitcher. He stepped into the batters box during BP one day after he was acquired by the Mariners, wanting to crush a few just for fun—pitchers don’t bat in the American League. After a few swings and misses, and foul balls, he quit in disgust and yelled at me, “That’s terrible!”
I never forgot THAT comment. I only wish I had been fast enough to add, “Hey, I was just putting goop on the ball like you did all those years to see how you liked it, you washed up balloon. Players who batted against you should have an extra five percentage points added to their batting averages because you cheated them.”
Perhaps he would have charged the mound in an unforgettable visual treat for the fans; a player charging the batting practice pitcher!
Gaylord Perry was a well-known spitball pitcher who amassed his wins in a dishonest way, but one in which baseball generally looked the other way. Perry was finally ejected from a game in Seattle in 1983 for doctoring the ball.
In a 1982 weather forecast I made for KZAM-FM, duriing the “clowns and computers” era of media weather forecasting, which meant I had to come up with some “schtick” if I was going to be a media success, I alluded to the Perry methodology in this way:
“There’s a low in deep left Gulf of Alaska, its got moisture and rotation on it, it looks like something Gaylord Perry threw….” If you’re really interested in what that era of forecasting was like, here is a typical example: KZAM wx forecast styled after Mariner broadcaster Dave Neihaus
Yes, during the BP era I was working fulltime at the UW, throwing BP at times, and had a part time early morning radio forecasting job.
Later, and in trying to be analytical about “movement” on the ball, I thought that maybe my sweaty hand—I was always tense stepping out on the Kingdome mound, had maybe caused that unintended movement. And BP pitchers were always throwing almost brand new baseballs from a basket next to you, one that held about 40 of them. Those new balls had little friction so you had to be careful throwing them, making sure you had a good grip. Maybe I was gripping them too tightly? Since I did not move up from the pitching rubber like the other BP pitchers did and I threw from the mound like a regular pitcher, maybe with more distance and greater velocity (one BP pitcher said I was “throwing rockets”) it gave the ball a chance to move. When I say I “threw with velocity”, I am talking upper 60s to low 70s at the MOST, just not the loopy, bloopy stuff the other BP pitchers threw from much shorter distances to the batters. It was nowhere near the speed of major league fastball.
I never did find out what caused the movement the players objected to.
Other things that happened during that BP stint….
Three non-strikes in a row happened a couple of times, and the quiet, that lack of a ball not being struck every second, is really unsettling. The whole Kingdome seemed to go silent at such moments. They were rare, but they did happen. The tension to throw a strike builds incredible fast after the first non-stirke.
In a 1983 session, I hit Mariner centerfielder, Joe Simpson, in the knee. There was an audible “oohhh” from the tiny early arriving Kingdome crowd. I wanted to crawl under the pitching rubber. On another occasion in 1983, Dave Henderson had to duck from under his batting helmet because of an errant pitch.
You know, I am sounding more and more like a really bad BP pitcher! Maybe I was really a part of that Mariner badness of those days; after all, they were they were the worst hitting team in the Major Leagues that year. I can imagine a 1983 players reunion in later years, one in which it might be said that, “The Mariners and our organization were so totally bad in those days that even our batting practice pitchers beaned us before games.”
BPLachmann was fired during the 1983 season, and before he was fired, he was under intense media scrutiny and pummeled with advice.
Lachmann ran around the perimeter of the outfield before the games, and being out there myself during BP, I remember yelling to him just before he was let go:
“Hey, Rene….about the team….” At this point he turned toward me, one of his BP pitchers, with the darkest frown you can imagine. I continued: “I don’t have any advice.”
Lachmann broke up at that punchline and that moment comprises one of my fondest memories.
Another memorable moment was pitching to just two batters, Paciorek and Bochte for my whole 20-25 minute BP stint. The reason? They thought my delivery resembled that of Jim Palmer and they were playing the Baltimore Orioles that night with Palmer pitching. Paciorek and Bochte got five hits that night!
If your wondering, only one batter on one occasion asked to practice hitting against curve balls in BP, John Moses, a Mariner center fielder at one time.
In another humorous moment, a columnist for the Seattle Times suggested the Mariner’s woeful hitting was due to a single, longtime BP pitcher, Carl Benson, who had stopped showing up to throw BP because the Mariner’s had stopped paying him. Perhaps Benson was so good and raised batter’s confidence level so high that without him the Mariners were in a hitting funk and that might explain why the team had the lowest batting average in the majors.
It was a ludicrous hypothesis, but it triggered a counter thought following the 1983 season. I wrote a facetious, but serious sounding letter to the Mariners taking full responsibility for the poor team batting average. As a frustrated amateur ball player throwing BP, I had actually been pitching fantasy games to the batters, working the strike zone, using movement to get them out to see how good I could have been in the Majors. In my fantasy, I had a record of 21-3 against them in 1983. Of course, I wrote, it couldn’t be obvious that I was pitching to get them out, and not really throwing BP. I had to be subtle and so studied all of the Mariner hitters and where they had “holes” in their swings and worked those zones. In that letter I apologized for almost hitting Dave Henderson in the head, but I wrote that he was getting “too many hits in batting practice and I had to move him off the plate.” It seemed humorous to me, anyway.
So, when I showed up in the locker room in 1984, with the “guys”, I was given the word that my services were no longer needed. I left the locker room kind of embarrassed, passing the security guard I had just said “hello” to, hopped on my bicycle, and rode home. Yep, I peddled every time to the Kingdome from the U of Washington, and then from there to my home in north Seattle’s Greenwood neighborhood, probably a good 10 miles total, and with slopes and traffic.
I remember, too, in those simpler days, how easy it was to get in the locker room of the Seattle Mariners with my little bag of equipment, by just saying to the security folks, “BP”. Of course, after a couple of times they recognized you and in you went to join the “guys.”
It was fun to do that BP, too, because unlike the other BP pitchers, and before I pitched my 20 minutes or so, I ran around in the Kingdome outfield like a mad man chasing those balls hit in batting practice—I mainly played outfield in my amateur career and this was like outfield practice.
A couple of times, too, when a player found out I was a meteorologist at the University of Washington, we would stand around in the outfield during BP and talk weather. I remember a long conversation with Richie Zisk about El Ninos, a giant, headline-grabbing one having occurred during the 1982-83 winter. He really asked a LOT of questions!
BTW, if you were here in Arizona and in Catalina, you would never forget that giant El Nino year here! That water year (Oct 1982-Sept 1983) we received a Seattle-like 32 inches of rain in Catalina, and 36 inches if you count the next few days of October 1983 when the worst weather disaster in Tucson history struck due to several days of heavy rains associated with tropical storm Nora.
Back to baseball…..
It may seem odd, but I could hardly stand watching a major league game even in the stands right behind home plate. As a player, playing with top amateur talent, the last thing you wanted to do was sit on your butt and watch other guys play! You wanted to be playing against the BEST yourself. My Mariner BP “pay” was to sign in for four free tickets behind home plate with the players’ wives. But in those three seasons, I only went to one game for a few innings. I usually gave my tickets away by signing in the names of faculty, staff, or students I knew from the U of WA Atmospheric Sciences Department on the guest ticket list before I left. While I many of these great seats were used, the Mariners were so bad in those days (1981-1983), that on MANY occasions I couldn’t GIVE away the best seats at a game, the ones right behind home plate!
After awhile, I didn’t make much of an effort since it was kind of embarrassing to be turned down two or three times by my co-workers and grad students. Almost as bad as being turned down two or three times for a date; well, not THAT bad.
Well, that’s all I can remember right now, but its already too much.
Thought I would run down to Golden Goose Plaza here in Catalina to catch some sunset shots after I thought of this headline; “gold on gold” :{ Here are three shots from the GGP for your viewing pleasure:
5:48 PM. Altocumulus, no virga showing.5:49 PM. A hot more to the southwest with Altocumulus opacus on the horizon showing snow virga.5:50 PM. Zoomed shot to show remarkably heavy snow virga shaft (left of GGP sign) falling from that distant patch of Altocumulus. Another shaft is visible above the white car.
Lesson time… The clouds in the first shot aren’t producing virga. Why? Not cold enough you would guess, AND, the liquid cloud drops in them very tiny. The smaller the drop, the more freezing is resisted in clouds, the larger the drops, and the lower the temperature, the more likely it is that ice will form.
When ice does form in a droplet cloud, the drops around the ice crystal evaporate and the vapor appears on the ice crystal, depositing on it as new molecules of ice. Under a microscope on a glass slide, the crystal magically gets larger while a liquid drop next to it gets smaller and disappears. This process occurs in clouds that are comprised of both liquid droplets and ice crystals and the crystals eventually fall out as precipitation. The folks who described this “mixed phase” process, and at one time thought to be the only one that produced rain at the ground, was Alfred Wegner1, Tor Bergeron2, and Walter Findeisen. We won’t mention “riming” an additive to that process today, which is the collection of instant freezing of drops by the falling ice crystals making them heavier…
This “mixed phase” (liquid and solid together) process is ALWAYS described in weather text books from elementary to graduate ones. It requires the presence of droplet clouds and the introduction of ice to get the ball rolling. Altocumulus clouds are always mostly comprised of droplets, and so virga coming out of them is ALWAYS due to the “mixed phase” precipitation process. Tell your friends.
Here’s some surprising facts about yesterday’s Altocumulus clouds, even to me.
How high were those clouds? Well, according to the TUS balloon sounding they were no less than about 27,000 feet above sea level, or about 24,000 feet above us here in Catalina, and along with that, they were extremely cold, with tops indicated to be about -30 C (-22 F). The thinner ones on the right side of these photos would have been only slightly warmer, and as you can plainly see, had no virga, no ice in them even at those low temperatures! Pretty remarkable. In thin clouds like those not producing ice, you can bet the droplets were very, very small, likely smaller than 10 microns in diameter, and that small size of droplets is associated with a resistance to freezing. Such clouds also tell you that there is a lack of what we call, “ice nuclei” up there, substances around which ice can form, usually soil particles.
In the clouds with virga off on the horizon (3rd photo), they are clearly deeper, meaning the drops were larger near the top of the clouds, AND likely a bit colder as well, both factors leading to prolific ice formation and heavy virga trails. Hope this makes some sense. Pretty skies, anyway.
The TUS sounding for last evening at 5 PM AST:
Today’s clouds and weather?
Some mid-level moisture is still around, and so more Altocumulus clouds, along with some Cirrus should move in during the day and evening hours with virga possible, since they’ll likely be cold again. The U of A mod also sees lower, but very shallow Cumulus clouds likely, ones too warm to rain via the “mixed phase” process that you now know about. So, rain chances are pretty dismal later today and tomorrow. Nothing in the longer term, two week view either. Man, this is a LONG dry stretch!
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1Remember Wegner? The meteorologist that came up with the idea of plate tectonics around the turn of the century? But the geographers/geologists laughed at him for about 50 years until they saw that he was right. Why did they laugh at him? He was a weatherman, not a paleogeographer/geologist ( i. e., not a member of the club).
2Here’s a photo of Tor Bergeron from 1968 in case you wanted to see what he looked like. I don’t know who that is standing next to him…looks like someone who might have been influenced by Buddy Holly.
Best chance for rain here, and its not that great, is later Saturday and Sunday AM as an upper level trough comes by, one that includes that bit of poor Paul, who died at sea. Here’s what that trough looks like when its about over Catalina at 8 AM Sunday morning, this map due to the U of WA Huskies Weather Department:
Now, I will be truly surprised if I don’t see some rain hitting the ground somewhere in viewing distance around Catalina between Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning as this little trough goes by with Paul’s ashes. But mods don’t show anything, however, at least as of now (at 5:24 AM). Certainly, we should see some nice cirriform clouds, and middle clouds like Altocumulus, Saturday and Sunday AM.
Elsewhere in the West
Since we’re all bored with our “pleasant weather” now days, I thought I would look around and see what else is going on that might get you excited…
Unusually heavy Nor Cal rains: begin on Sunday; last for about a week associated with purple monster (trough) in map above–it sags southward along the coast. Many inches should fall in the coastal range north of SFO (aka, “Frisco”). Maybe we should get a field trip going, some kind of “Rain Safari” to refresh ourselves on pounding rains. I wouldn’t charge that much. Also, during the trip, I would pack in a LOT of information, like that in the paragraph below, which provides some trip details.
We would go to Shelter Cove, CA, and the King Range north of there to get that rain fix. Now, I have linked to some nice photos of this area but you would not be able to see any of those because the clouds would be based at only 300-500 feet above the ground at the coast, and everywhere else would be mostly IN the clouds. The King Range, 150 miles or so north of Frisco, juts up from the ocean suddenly to about 4,000 feet, which causes a lot of water to be condensed in the clouds during onshore flow. The drops get bigger in those clouds over and upwind of the King Range, bigger than 30-40 microns in diameter at which point they can collide and stick together forming a much larger drop that falls faster and collects more drops on the way down and, before you know it, those drops have reached millimeter-sizes (real raindrop sizes) in a hurry. This rain-forming process called the “collisions-with-coalescence” rain mechanism or “warm rain” mechanism because there is no ice involved and it is seen on radar as a situation where there is no “bright band” where level where snowflakes are melting into raindrops as is usually seen when its raining steadily. This situation is also called, “non-bright band” rain, something that is quite common along the West Coast but you knew all this already. That kind of rain formation rarely happens here in AZ because it takes extremely clean air in which few cloud droplets can form in the clouds and being fewer, are larger, and here we have too many sources of aerosols and “cloud condensation nuclei” to have really pristine clouds in which this can happen. The result here is more and smaller drops in our clouds, ones too small to bump into each other and stick together. I will point out those days here when the warm rain process is active–our rare wintertime drizzle (tiny, close together drops that almost float in the air) occasions are due to that process. Some periods of that heavy Cal coastal rain will certainly have a LOT of ice mixed with liquid droplets, and those liquid droplets are either collected on snowflakes as they fall, or evaporate in the presence of ice and that water vapor that evaporated from them then deposits on the ice crystal causing it to grow (the Wegner-Bergeron-Findeisen mechanism of precipitation formation), too, so it would be quite interesting for you to go there for that, too. You would experience two of the three kinds of rain-forming mechanisms. (The other one, often seen at higher elevations, like in Colorado, is where precipitation, usually very light, is formed soley via ice crystals without any liquid droplet cloud being involved. Many textbooks overlook this third one. Its great being on the internet and having a blog where you don’t have to worry about packing in too much information and worry about where sentences/paragraphs should end and begin; just get it out there and you’re knowledge-hungry audience will dissect it eventually.
I suppose if we drove in a marathon drive, some people would want to jump out due to info overload now that I think of it. Of course, I would not be providing “empty” info calories, but full ones.
Yesterday’s Clouds?
Ci uncinus with moon shot; can you find them? BTW, Ci uncinus and other forms of Cirrus clouds are good examples of the all ice precipitation mechanism.
The best place to go is to the Climate Prediction Center to see how much drought is going on and what their thoughts are on the future of drought. Apparently they don’t think there is enough drought west of one of the current baseball epicenters, St. Louis, and they have foretold persisting drought where it already is for the most part, and also that it will spread northwest into the Pacific Northwest (2nd map below).
First, the current scene, as rendered in the “Drought Monitor“, hosted by the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, aka, Big Red:
Below, CPC’s forecast through the end of this year (December 31st), using a colored font here for a little razzle dazzle:
Summary: “UGH-LEEEE–EEEEEE”, west of a line from Detroit to El Paso.
Fortunately these forecasts are not THAT good (it sez so under the map; “use caution for applications–such as for crops” (Hell, that’s why I looked at it!!!! (hahahahaha); in essence, “don’t plant crops based on this forecast.”
But, its the best we can do. You wouldn’t want to go too far against it. Don’t plant dryland rice in Nebraska; maybe hedge toward prickly pear.
One aspect about the Southwest is that it takes only a few storm days to clobber these predictions, and those few storm days, as pointed out in the explanatory paragraph in the CPC map above, are largely unforecastable except in the first week ahead. Great news!
So, with an “El Nina-La Nada” season, such as we have now (not much going on the tropical Pacific Ocean south of us to hang a climate prediction on), doesn’t mean we can’t have decent rains in the next few months as we had last year when droughty projections were also made. But, as you know, this keyboard is always hopeful, overly so sometimes.
Interestingly, with unusually heavy rains for October on the doorstep for central and northern California, this prediction will take a bit of a hit over the next week.
It’s great when models falter, and yesterday was one of those times that a human bean can exult. The U of A model, crunched out on the Beowolf Cluster (I can’t even imagine how powerful such a computer would be with a name like that), said that Catalina would have NO RAIN yesterday, zero, nil, 40-love, zilch, etc. (though there was predicted “model” rain close by).
In fact, in the space of about three minutes, just after 12 noon yesterday, Catalina, right here, received 0.02 inches!!!! I couldn’t believe how WRONG that model was! It was a tremendous victory for those of us predicting a little rain, like even a trace; those that rebelled against the “king” and won, 2-nil. If in soccer, it would have been a real drubbing.
Here are the clouds what done it yesterday, small versions of Cumulonimbus clouds that arose from a widespread layer of clouds with shafts of rain that looked like weak versions of our summer thunderstorm shafts:
7:51 AM. A weak shaft of rain falls from a Cumulonimbus sprouting from this overhead layer. The sloping shaft of rain below the cloud indicates both strong wind shear and that the rain drops are pretty modest in size. No cloudburst here.9:28 AM. Miniature Cumulonimbus cloud with a light rain shower approaches Catalina from the south. Note the lack of dense cauliflower turrets, and wispy, icy tops, no anvils, these obs suggesting weak updrafts. Tops like these yesterday probably only rose to somewhere below 25,000 feet above sea level, and around -20 C (-4 F). In contrast our summer gully washers usually fall from clouds with tops above 50 KFT. Still, it was a pretty day overall. Hope you called in sick to enjoy the first measurable rain in almost a month.
4:45 PM. Our last hope for rain arose late in the day when a line of clouds approached from the SW. While no rain shafts were evident upwind of Catalina, this Cumulonimbus and rainshaft was agonizingly close. Why didn’t the clouds show ice and precip upwind (like the sunsetty ones below)? Too shallow, tops didn’t reach above -10 C (14 F) level, a general requirement for ice to form in our clouds here. Temperatures aloft cooled rapidly to the north late yesterday and will today as well, so tops in that direction will be taller and colder than over us. We will again be left with clouds having tops too warm to form ice/rain.
5:53 PM. Nice sunset, though, even if the clouds had no ice in them (which would have produced virga).
Harangue about those models we love and hate
We desert lifers have a love hate relationship with our mostly superb weather forecasting computers such as at the U of AZ, ones that no longer require us to think when making weather forecasts for the next day or two. (please see the colloquium by Prof. Cliff Mass in Seattle that pointed out that the NWS was wasting its time putting man-power on forecasts for the next day and beyond; the computers have largely won that battle.)
Where can we forecasters provide skill? In the weather right now! That which occurs in the next few to 12 hours. That’s because, like yesterday, the models don’t know exactly where those showers, ones they might have even predicted, are going to be EXACTLY, and we can fine tune those predictions. Happens all the time in the chaos of our summer rain season, for example.
But we hate those models like now when they predict dry conditions week after week. Why can’t a dry forecast day turn up wet, be WRONG? But they excite us when forecasting rain, even in the fuzzy predictive days one to two weeks ahead. We know for the most part, such predictions can’t be relied upon, but still we hope they WILL be correct, of course, me in particular (I’m from Seattle and am still adjusting to dry MONTHS).
And here in the desert, most of the rain days predicted in the week to two week range dry up in the models it seems, so there’s always a modicum of disappointment being handed out by them. We have rain days again today out around the 22nd of Oct, but its not worth mentioning.
The link up there is for a huge technical presentation based on the Climate Prediction Center’s Oct 9 update. You might be bored by it, or this blog, but then, maybe you wanted to take a nap anyway.
In sum, it looks less and less like an El Nino will form, the Climate Prediction Center losing confidence in their earlier prediction, darn. But they haven’t bailed altogether. El Ninos can often produce wetter winters here, so I’m a little bummed out, as you will be if you’re not sleeping, by this update.
“?”? It goes with the predicting the future territory…
Raining at 4:19 AM! Pretty good sized drops! Wow. Current NWS forecast now says rain only after 11 AM so an early start is excellent.
Moisture is moving rapidly into southern Arizona. As an example, look at this uptick at Sells, AZ to the SW of us (green line in top panel).
The satellite view is also promising with a bank of Stratocumulus with buildups (castellanus-like) to the SW moving rapidly this way. Take a look at this, courtesy of the U of AZ, and if you look closely you’ll see some whiter specs appearing indication that a few of these clouds are getting colder tops compared to surrounding clouds.
Those whiter tops would be small Cumulonimbus clouds with rainshafts in that mass of clouds entering AZ. So, there’s a whole mass of those little guys scattered here and there in that mass of clouds heading for us.
Not likely to get too much rain out of them, however. The rain from the clouds over us now and immediately upwind is falling from clouds that are not connected to the ground and so the updrafts in them tend to be not so great. Higher updrafts usually means that more falls out the bottom if the tops of the clouds can reach that magical -10 C level up there where ice can begin to form.
Later in the day, as it warms up, the updrafts will be rooted at the ground and be stronger as the moisture revs up and with that, the chance of an organized line of showers moving in during the evening, one that might last an hour or two, goes up.
One caveat: The U of AZ mod from their 11 PM AST run (here) doesn’t see ANY rain in Catalina today, tonight, or tomorrow, which seems surprising (and likely bogus as estimated from this keyboard). It could be those clouds to the south, and the moisture intrusion we’re now getting were not seen in the data at the beginning of the model run. This output does, however, indicate that we are in a marginal rain producing situation. Usually this model is quite good.
24 h rainfall ending 5 AM tomorrow, October 12th, a truly horrible depiction.
Don’t really know what’s wrong with the model, but it does seem like measurable rain will fall in Catalina, though its likely to be less than 0.25 inches. Will be pretty happy, since it is a marginal situation, if we get more than 0.10 inches, something to settle the dust and clean the desert vegetation up a bit. At the least, there will be some interesting clouds to look at!
A few more drops here at 5:13 AM! Excellent.
Looking way ahead, 14 days or so.
In the longer view, more rain for Arizona is seen, of course, in the 10-15 day model prognosis, possibly substantial ones. But last time this was predicted in the models, “upon further review” we saw that those rains were associated with a model run was an outlier of some kind, plain goofy, when we looked at the NOAA-NCEP ensemble-spaghetti plots, dammitall. So all that rain in AZ in THAT model run was almost certainly bogus.
But, once again the the models came up with some pretty good rains in Arizona, these rains derived from the model run using 5 PM AST global data from last evening. These rains are more “robust” in terms of confidence.
In fact, the situation we have right now, and the one predicted in 14 or so days, are rather similar in appearance in the spaghetti plots. Our current incoming upper low center was quite well predicted more than 10 days in advance when one examined the “spaghetti” plots.
How about the rain prediction below, goofy or what?
To answer that query, we’ll go to our friend, the NOAA NCEP ensemble-spaghetti plots here. We need to have a trough in upper levels, just like now, to have rain in the cool half of the year. Will there be one?
Gee, can’t do that based on last night’s data. No ensemble “bad balloon” plots done yet. Will have to wait, but the spaghetti plots from the night before last were encouraging. Will update this discussion when the new spaghetti plots are producted. So, after all this discussion, we’ve kind of ended up with nothing!
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This word just in minutes ago from NOAA-PSD where the ensemble plots are displayed. “System down for maintenance. Should be available later today.” Great. Then I can really ruminate on those spaghetti plots!
Pretty clouds out now (8:46 AM), take a look if you have a chance.
Tomorrow, we’ll talk about CLOUDS!
Valid for Friday mroning, 5 AM, October 26th. The green areas indicate the rainfall the model expected in the prior 12 h. As you can see there is a lot of coverage in AZ.
First of all, nice Cirrus-ee clouds yesterday…. Cirrus fibratus left, Cirrus uncinus (with tufts at the top, filaments of falling snow below) on the right. What is remarkable to me is the finely stranded nature of these clouds. With an aircraft, you would hit, in one of those strands, a burst of ice crystals just 10s of yards (meters) wide, some only about 10 yards (meters) wide. Those crystals falling out in strands are the largest ones to have formed in these clouds, though they would likely be no more than a few human hair’s width in diameter (around 300-400 microns). You would think that any turbulence up there would disrupt such delicate strands, but here, anyway, it doesn’t. The snow falling out is more like a fall of dust, the crystals are so small and light, the kind of snowfall they get at, say, the top of Mt. Everest at 29,000 feet.
The weather ahead
Rain 1:
Begins later Thursday. Agreed on by Canadians, NOAA, U of Washington’s WRF-GFS more finely gridded model output, etc. Its “in the bag” I would say. But, what exactly is “in the bag”?
Amounts: worst case, trace, best case, 0.25 inches by Friday morning, daybreak. OK, its not that much. We’re struggling here to get a cloud here below 20,000 feet though, so we should be happy with any liquid that falls out of the sky.
Rain 2: the big one maybe; getting more hopeful. Complicated discussion below.
The models have shown a gigantic trough and low pressure system developing in the Great Basin every so often around the 20th of Oct, but then it has disappeared. Looks a bit more reliable now since NOAA/NCEP spaghetti plots are showing something at that time reflecting this huge change in the jet stream. The spaghetti plots had nothing earlier when this huge trough was forecast, indicating it might be a huge bogus-outlier model run in which one could have little confidence in. Now they got somethin’. Below is an example of that “somethin'” in those plots, valid for 5 PM AST, October 20th.
The yellow line is the actual model run based on last evening’s data. The blue lines are the “bad balloon” runs, where slight errors, or differences in data are used to see how robust the actual predicted pattern is. If the blue lines and the yellow ones converge over one another in an area, like they do south of Japan-Kamchatka Peninsula in the western Pacific, then the forecast is reliable; “count on it.”
Is our forecast as reliable as the one for the western Pacific on the 20th-21st?
Nope, as you can see by how wide the spread of the blue lines is compared to that in the western Pacific.
BUT, the “bad balloon” blue lines ARE poking down to the south along the West Coast, “trending” toward the yellow line (last night’s actual prediction with the data as it came in). Those blue lines are close to where the jet stream is going to be located with deliberate errors introduced.
So, there is a strong indication that the jet stream will at least dip southward along the West Coast because even with slight errors, it still does that, trend southward along the West Coast. Now this is exciting, even if there is some remaining uncertainty on exactly how it will play out. If nothing else, we’ll certainly be on the edge of some strong system about the 20th-21st.
The really picky eye will see that the yellow line (that reflecting a jet stream contour from the actual model run based on last evening’s global data) along the West Coast is still a bit of an outlier (that is, its outside the zone of the most blue lines). Pretty much all of the blue lines are north of the yellow’s position. So its very possible that we could end up with less of a trough along the West Coast than was predicted in the actual run using the global data as it was. I guess this is confusing, but I am trying to make it less so, with little apparent success.
How much rain is foretold presently in “Rain 2”?
Below is a panel from last evening’s global data crunch for valid for 5 AM, October 21st. You’re gonna like what you see:The colored regions are those in which rain is forecast to have occurred over the prior 12 h, meaning the rain likely started Saturday afternoon, the 20th here.
What’s fascinating is that in all these model runs, there has been a tropical storm/hurricane shown to the south of us. Sometimes it fades away, or moves over New Mexico, but its always been there. What’s fascinating #2 is that again, it is a hurricane that hasn’t even formed yet, but the model detects a “signal”, a pattern, a combination of factors that will come together to form a tropical depression, then a tropical storm, and then a hurricane that is caught up in all the upper level goings on in the West. In the latest model run, one panel shown below, that fading hurricane is approaching Baja and its remnants are now drawn into Arizona.
So, there, in that hurricane remnant, is where the potential of a mighty rain lies on Saturday evening into Sunday, the 20th-21st of October. Models are indicating 1-2 inches in portions of AZ over a 24 h period with this situation. Us? About half an inch in 24 h, but stand by.
So, lots to hope for….
There is yet one more suggested rain (Rain3) after “Rain 2” so it would seem SOME rain will fall in the next two weeks!
Here a very nice site if you want to look at what weather records were being set around the country, with an example for the past few days below. The one below were set as a gigantic blob of cold air (high pressure region) plopped down into the US, one bigger and colder than usual for this early in October. There are a ton more low temperature records being set today. As you know, this cold air event was well predicted in the computer models many days in advance and was blabbed about here.
Does this exceptional cold air in early October presage a cold winter?
Well, to know for sure, sort of, we go to the Climate Prediction Center to get their best guessestimate, and then look at natural phenomena, used by folk long range weather predictors, like the height of ant cones, length of horse’s hair, etc. The CPC’s outlook, the best info around, beats Farmer’s Almanac by quite a bit, kind of like the way my former employer’s sports football team was beaten down by Nike Team One in Duckville, Oregon last Saturday evening, 52-21; wasn’t close. Let’s see what the CPC sees for the next few months:
Wow! This is not what I expected to see for October, November and December because of the current weather regime with all that record cold in the very areas where warmth was expected.
This CPC prediction suggests that the cold air now in the East is a fluke and a quite comfy, energy-conserving fall season should be observed where the low temperature records are falling today. This CPC longer range prediction would go with an El Nino-influenced winter, but so far, the overall pattern has not looked much like one. Of course, phenomena like the El Ninos/La Ninas, when they are strong, are the best hat racks to hang our climate prediction hats on these days. The El Nino we have now is pretty marginal, barely made the criteria for one; a crummy hat rack.
The above seasonal forecast by CPC was issued on September 20th and a new prediction will be issued shortly. Usually, though, they don’t “yo-yo” much, that is, change much from one month to the next in what is foreseen for the next three months; there’s some inertia involved.
BTW, and oddly, one of the severest winters in the East was associated with a very weak/marginal El Nino in 1976-77, a year also that included extreme drought along the entire West Coast through February.
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Folk weather predictions; ant cones (are they really better?)
Now lets look at ant cones and see what we can make out of those. Perhaps ants know something about the coming winter since they’ve been around for about 10 billion years1. Maybe there was something in our summer temperatures and rains that “spoke to them” about the coming winter. Below, a typical ant cone of the size around now.
You know, I’m not getting a lot out of what these ants are trying to tell me about this coming winter, though, its very nice.
So, for the present, and with no strong climate signal anywhere, we have to assume that the early cold is a fluke, not an indicator of a whole winter.
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A little rain is but a few days ahead, Thursday. In the meantime there have been some nicely patterned Cirrus, Cirrocumulus, and Altocumulus streaming out of the very same system that moves over us Thursday evening.
There will be more of these photogenic clouds today and in the days ahead of the storm. Keep camera ready!
It will be fun to have more dramatic skies and some wind with a “storm” finally. Mods have another one a week or so later, too.
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1I’m exaggerating here since the entire universe, one that began with a spec smaller than the head of a pin and yet had everything in it, is about that old.
