Loudness

This is not a tome about Spinal Tap….(clips here in case you forgot) that legendary, well, mythical, really, band described as “one of England’s loudest.”

If you thought the thunder was exceptionally loud yesterday morning during our “thunderrain”, even for strikes as far as a mile or two so away, as the writer did, it probably was.  Sound travels best and away when the atmosphere drops in temperature rapidly as you go up, as it normally does on an Arizona afternoon.

But in yesterday morning’s very-unusual- for-us thunder before 8 AM LST, the temperature did NOT drop very rapidly as one climbed higher above the ground for the first couple of thousand feet.  See arrow showing this layer above the ground in the sounding shown below.  Under these conditions, the explosions produced by cloud-to-ground lightning, do not travel upward and away so well as they would with a sharp drop in temperature with height, as we have in the afternoons, and so what we hear is incredibly LOUD thunder under these conditions.  Yesterday morning’s thunderstorm, no doubt to the glee of remaining Spinal Tap band members, was one of Arizona’s loudest it seemed to me.

This morning we have had another thunderstorm THIS MORNING, astonishingly unusual to have two morning thunderrains in a row, and strikes were again loud.  The Tucson sounding this morning is very similar to yesterday’s; this time with an isothermal layer (temperature stays the same as you go up), something that would help trap the sound even better.  However, it is not quite as deep, and that, too, would play a role.

Note:  lived a couple of miles from I-5 in Seattle.  That freeway was “closer” on morning’s with an inversion (say, after a clear sky night, quite unusual in Seattle, of course) and “farther away” without one, say when it was cloudy all night, and no inversion formed.

From the U of WY Cowboys, yesterday’s 5 AM Tucson sounding, followed by this morning’s:

:

The rain and cloud report: 0.45 inches here in the past 24 h! Excellent!  Fell from these kinds of clouds:::::  (I’ve got too many colons already; may as well add a few more for emphasis that there is supposed to be a pause for some kind of surprise or something, anyway that comes next.  Besides, as many (“many”, hah!) of you have probably noted, I am a cloud maven, not a language maven.

Here is the surprise, one that I did not even know about until I uploaded the photo below::::::

8:21 AM. Just snappin’ away when I caught this stroke at right. Didn’t even know one had happened since the thunder delayed quite a bit.  Kind of a cool shot.

 

Today?

Just eye-balling the maps and clouds, SOP forecast, looks like more thunderrain is in the bag today.  Great!

Check with Bob and the NWS for a real good forecast…  I have to go out and VIEW clouds now!

The End

 

 

So big, so little; in potential to realization

The U of AZ models got pretty excited about yesterday’s rain potential, even the WRF-GFS run AFTER the one I looked at and got me excited about yesterday’s rain potential.   The model one that followed the one I saw when posting yesterday’s blog, one that comes out around mid-morning based on 5 AM data, also had a big rain day in these parts.  (Sometimes the two runs don’t agree so well, so when they did, it seemed like a “done deal.”)   Take a look, for example, at the total rain predicted in that later model run that came out yesterday morning, and take a look at what it thought Mt. Lemmon, would receive in the 24 h ending at midnight last night in this pdf:

U of AZ WRF Precip

Yep, 3-4 inches (!) was to have fallen from the skies on Ms. Lemmon in the 24 h ending at midnight last night.  You can also see that we here in Catalina were supposed to see at least half an inch (that greenish area to the west of the orangy area).  We got 0.14 inches.  Better than zero, though.

Pima County ALERT rain amounts?

Catalina mountains max: 0.55 inches, at White Tail, near Palisades Ranger Station (on the highway to Mt. Lemmon).

Probably as much as half an inch fell “over there” under this sudden late afternoon thunderstorm by Samaniego Ridge shown in the photos below.

Two places, though, one in the Rincons, and once again over in Avra Valley, did get drenched with more than 2 inches yesterday, so large amounts did fall in some areas.  Very appropriate for the really warm cloud bases and humidity we have these days.

Today?

That late night model run (based on 11 PM data) has another active day today, though not as active as yesterday.  The model thinks showers will roll off the Cat Mountains this morning.  Not so sure about that, but surely, there will be some giant clouds around and some tremendous falls of rain here and there with the humidity we have.  69 F dewpoint here now (5 AM) in Catalina.  Enjoy, as we know these spectacular rain days are numbered, and sooner or later, the westerlies will creep down here and wash all this humidity away with dry Pacific air, and we’ll start to feel those cooler mornings associated with drier air overhead, that dry air that lets all that night warmth escape into space.

GW moisture factoid

One possible cause about why global warming has pretty much halted over the past 10-15 years (well, up to 2010, anyway, when this paper I am going to mention was published), was that the moisture in the stratosphere (the layer above where clouds and precip form) had declined over the period when the temperature stopped rising.   With less moisture up in the stratosphere, more heat was escaping into space from the earth since water vapor is the biggest greenhouse gas of all, and when it changes a little, a lot happens to the radiation characteristics of the earth.   This decrease in water vapor “topside” since the late 1990s was enough, it was calculated, to offset the effects of increasing anthropogenic greenhouse gases since then.  Whether such a drying will continue, or why it happened, is not known.

This finding was from Susan Solomon’s group, work that appeared in the illustrious journal, Science.  Solomon is the scientist that did so much work on explaining the ozone hole in the 1980s.

4:21 PM. Veil-like rain with little gradation  (just above trees in foreground) falls from soft-looking bases along Samaniego Ridge.  I’m thinking “warm rain” process.  With those low (and very warm bases) the scene looks “Hawaiian” to me, a location where ice is rarely involved in the production of all that rain they get there.

 4:39 PM. After the rain over there being “veil-like”, a shaft suddenly emerged announcing that a top has shot up at least 10 kft more than the tops around it, has reached the ice-forming level. Lightning is now immiment.
4:48 PM. A wall of rain moves slowly off the Catalinas toward Catalina. Only remnants of a once proud line of heavy rainshafts arrive, leaving us with just 0.14 inches.

Catalina, Florida, USA

Dewpoints above dry ground yesterday of about 70 F at 3000 feet elelvation?  Yep, that’s just like Florida air if you could be in it at 3,000 feet.  And we had Florida-like clouds yesterday, too, with their warm bases, around 15 C (59 F) in the morning–remember how important warm bottoms are for a big rain dump. Warmer cloud bases mean more water up top.

After a couple of grizzily, grudgingly humid days with no rain very close by, we finally got that explosive, much greater coverage of huge Cumulonimbus clouds and some rain yesterday.  Only 0.06 inches here though.  Oh, well.  Lets be happy for well-watered others, if grudgingly.

The cloud signs that the day was going to be very different from the previous two humid “dry” days were there early. The first thunder was heard at 11:45 AM, as one cloud piled into the upper troposphere on top of Mt. Ms. Lemmon just an hour after the first photo below.  Those Lemmon drops produced 1.38 inches at the Pima County ALERT gage there, but a Summerhaven private gage reported 2.46 inches after several storms in the afternoon!

10:48 AM. The day ahead is laid out before you. No need to ponder whether giant storms will abound. Very tall, thin clouds like these tell you that the atmosphere is like a stick of dynamite; only the sunny fuse needs to be lit, and that fuse is beginning to be lit.  I was beside myself with excitement when several clouds like this jetted upward off the Catalinas yesterday morning, their “warm” bases topping the mountains.  As a cloud maven junior, you should have at least mentioned something to a neighbor:  “Man, there are going to be some doozies today!”, and he knows you haven’t even checked with the NWS yet.

Pima County rainfall table  Most:  Avra Valley area, Michigan and Calgary Streets, 2.13 inches.

Other rain totals here, from the U of AZ network.

Later yesterday day, these, a collection of my favorite moments, ones I hope you caught, too.  In case you forgot to log these events, I have filled in some appropriate “novella-sized” captions  for you. I don’t mind if you copy them down as though you had written them yourself… Also, don’t forget to review the awesome U of AZ time lapse movie here, to fill in any other gaps you might have.  Now these photos are going to be kind of scattered around but in that sense, reflect the writer’s eccentricities, and because he hasn’t got time to straighten them out.

11:20 AM. Your log book entry: “First cloud to reach glaciation level, 11:20 AM above Mt Lemmon. I am so excited. This is going to be a fantastic day for clouds.”
11:46 AM. Your log book entry: “First thunder now. The earlier Cumulonimbus capillatus cloud has been replaced by this larger one. I bet Lemmon/Summerhaven are getting pounded. Wish I could be there.”
12:31 PM. “Mt. Lemmon still getting pounded, but sky brightening, looks like the base has been eroded and is not being replaced, not good. Some rain working its way off Lemmon and Samaniego Ridge, but not making it very far. Maybe it won’t even get to me. Feeling sad.”
12:32 PM. “What that over there! I had not seen that while focusing on Ms. Lemmon. That cloud is huge. Look at that base, so firm, so fully packed! This is gonna be a great dump. I wonder if I can get over there in time. Nah, it goes too fast. Looks likes its gonna land on RailX Ranch over.”
12:38 PM six minutes later. “Oh yeah, baby, here it comes! Drops and hail as big as cataloupes! Well, I guess in Arizona, we would say, “as big as gourds!”, figuratively speaking.
12:41 PM, just THREE minutes later! “Feeling sad again that I am not there under this cloud with my raingauge. Maybe a cloud maven junior is there measuring it, keeping track of the time after getting his gage out in it, maybe see if some record for AZ is going to be set, like more than 2 inches in 15 minutes. I guess I can be happy thinking that someone is over there having a good time in the rain.”
12:54 PM. “Rain dump sweeping air out of the way like a big broom. Feeling a little exhausted now as storm reaches peak, likely to fade soon.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the meantime, more Cumulonimbus clouds form quickly over the Catalinas, but just as quickly fade, the rain getting closer, but only sprinkles have gotten to Catalina by late afternoon.  Then another surprise!

3:13 PM. “Yikes! What’s this coming around Pusch Ridge and out of Tucson? This is incredible-looking! Will set up video, charge camera batteries. No telling how much weather excitement might get to Catalina.”
3:33 PM. “Starting to look ‘biblical.’ That’s always good–‘the end is at hand’, at least of the disappointing dry days.’ I can only imagine how excited the cloud maven juniors are getting seeing this scene.”
3:40 PM. “The cool outflow wind has struck Sutherland Heights, those lower scud clouds riding on top of it. But where is the solid base needed for a regeneration of a huge dump of rain? I want really want to cuss and say, ‘dammitall’, but I will refrain from doing that. And its looking more stratiformy toward the south, like its dying out. What is happening? Is the main development going to propagate out toward Avra Valley again? Am really starting to feel awful now, that kind of disappointment you feel when your team has a 24 point lead at half time and loses by 12. Still looking ‘biblical’ but with your cloud maven junior skills you know its not looking ‘right’ for a big rain on you.”
4:05 PM “It is finished. ‘Biblical’ sky raced by, one associated with outflow winds of that really good storm somewhere else down to the south, and not on me, and it couldn’t push up some new fat bases of clouds that would grow into giant Cumulonimbus clouds as so often happens with the outflow winds. Going home now, kind of dejected. Hoping now we just get any measurable rain. Grasses fading in color now after our dry spell, and suggestion that a new season will soon be here, no more big clouds, adds to dejection and feelings of worthlessness. That’s what a disappointing day can do to you. But as Scarlet said, and we must remember those words, ‘Tomorrow is another day.’ And, we are having some lightning to the west of us here at 4-5 AM. Cool! Getting excited!”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Today?

OK, have spent some silly time here, now, looking out window, bases low on the Catalinas again. Dewpoints very high. Seems like it should erupt again IF the atmos structure above these clouds is anywhere close to yesterday. Let’s see what the best, Bob, has to say here. Oops, he’s not up yet, but he is the true guru of Cumulonimbus and such that we have here.  Be sure to check back soon!

Sounding from TUS this morning makes it look like its a “go” for giant clouds again, bases as warm as yesterday, if not a little warmer.  Egad, flash flood size.

Finally, U of AZ late night model here also says there’ll be a big day.  Charge camera batteries.

 

The End, finally.

“Dancing Rainshafts”; the movie

While we here in Catalinaland only received a “trace” of rain again from a thunderstorm that sudddenly formed just before 3 PM to our SE-S, there were some tremendous rains in the area yesterday afternoon and evening.  Some examples:

Pima County ALERT precip, max observation:  2.09 inches, Brawley Wash at Highway 86

U of AZ rain map, maximum, as of 7 AM (more reports will filter in during the day): 0.90 inches, N Tucson, see this dump in the movies.

Cocorahs, Pima County max, as of 7 AM (more reports will filter in during the day): 0.64 inches, 2.5 WNW Tucson

USGS, Statewide max 1.2 inches, JD Cabin near Williams.

NWS regional roundup for yesterday; available after 9 AM…

In the meantime, here’s a nice map of radar-derived rainfall, ending at 5 AM today, from the folks at WSI Intellicast:

The most exciting, predictive aspect of the day, that is, how unstable the air over us was, how ready the atmosphere was to allow plumes of cloudy air to shoot upward,  is shown in this U of AZ Weather Department action-packed movie which I shall name;  “Dancing Rainshafts”, because they do kind of twist around each other in this movie in the late afternoon.  One of those is responsible for that 0.90 inches rain in north Tucson around Sky Line Ave.   This is one of the most interesting videos I’ve seen.  Nothing much happens until late morning, and then, “Pow!”

If you noticed at the beginning of the day, when Cumulus started to form on the Catalinas, you saw these incredible, tall, thin clouds, something akin to smoke stacks, plumes from geyers, rising off them.   It was a sure sign the atmosphere would do something special yesterday.  You’ll have to see those tall thin clouds in the U of AZ movie; while I did “document” them in a sense, there was no memory flash card in the camera again, the tiny font alerting me to this fact too small for normal vision.

Still, thanks to the U of AZ Cats, who won their football game on Saturday, you can see it here,  to repeat.

OK. now on to the local cloudscape yesterday….

Here’s what I thought was a surprise, this sequence where a modest cloud glaciated.  Suddenly, after a period of remission in Cumulus activity, this moderately large cloud welled up SE of the house (first photo).

2:49 PM. So-so Cumulus congestus arises to the SE. Am hopeful something will happen, but it doesn’t look so well organized; base a little broken up.  I decided to go into the house and think about something else.

2:58 PM. Amazing! That modest guy has glaciated at the top! I am somewhat shocked. As you know, this means a bunch of snow/rain/graupel-soft hail has formed up there. Fantastic! The next two shots illustrate that this happens, most of the time here anyway, just BEFORE rain falls out the bottom.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Also at 2:58 PM looking at cloud base of the glaciating top (far right) to see if there was yet any sign of a filament of rain, though a few very large and sparse drops might have ejected from it by now (under the far right).
2:58 PM. As part of a photographic burst, here’s a better view of the bottom of that cloud with the glaciating top. No shafts. Here’s an example where, in a burst of converational meteorology you can amaze your friends by telling them, “There’ll be a heckuva shaft of rain coming out of this cloud in about five to ten minutes.”  You’ll be seen as some kind of weather guru. Perhaps you’ll be invited to the next neighborhood party as a result of your new status.
3:03 PM. Shaft emerges. There are striations in the cloud above the bottom if you can make them out. That’s all that precip up there finally being unloaded.
3:08 PM. The shaft at right, such as it is, is fully developed from that modest Cumulonimbus cloud. Other shafts have developed more rapidly.
3:16 PM. The original shaft is just about gone, but look at this coming out! This intensification tells you that a turret had shot upward to far higher levels than the one that started this whole thing off.  The shower has drifted  to the east, too.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The weather ahead….

More of the same every day for the foreseeable future, which is about a week now. Check here. They have a lightning icon in every 12 h period! Fantastic!

But, with all those percentage chances of rain over that whole given in 12 h increments, what IS the chance of measurable rain here in Catalina at some time during that FIVE days?  IF I have calculated it correctly from an example given to me by Mark Albright, Research Meteorologist at the U of WA, it is…drum roll… 96%!

Pattern clouds, a few afternoon drops here, a lot over there, and a nice sunset

Pattern clouds: Cirrocumulus undulatus in odd, parallel lines.  I had not seen parallel lines like this before.  Fragments of Altocumulus are also present.

7:55 AM. Hope you saw this–I ran out of the house since these delicate patterns are usually gone in a couple of minutes.
12:21 PM. Ms. Mt. Lemmon starts to do her thing, send moist plumes of warmer air upward, with cloud remains trailing off to the NW. A southeast flow is present just above mountain top level, giving hope that later, a thunderstorm will drift off the Catalinas toward Catalina.
2:47 PM. Not a great base, but still, it holds promise of representing the bottom of a cloud that can produce measurable rain.
3:09 PM. During halftime I am able to go outside and notice that the Cumulus clouds are still trying to do something, but only light, barely visible showers have fallen toward Samaniego Ridge.
4:06 PM. After the game was over (which game? Dunno, they’re all great) I am able to go outside again and see that a giant cell has formed dropping an inch or more out there to the NW of Catalina. There are frequent cloud to ground strikes. But, there are no more Cumulus above the Catalinas! What happened? End of rain possibility story.

Though only a few drops hit the ground here in Catalina, the day ended with a pretty sunset. This marked the third day in a row where large Cumuluonimbus clouds cells at least an inch of rain in southern Arizona, but we got missed, something that also happened several times in early August.

Some of the moisture doing this is from old, former tropical storm, Elena, particularly the moist plume that resulted in yesterday’s pretty pattern clouds shown in the first photo.  Check the moist plume (whitish stream) from her here.

Looking ahead…..

While Elena was a bit of a disappointment as far as producing rain here in Catalina, her lower level moist plume too far to the west, a sibling storm is arising off Mexico, one that the models (hah!) as they did before, have calculated will cause a renewal of our summer rain season;  showers are foretold for several days beginning around the 3rd as that storm trudges up the west coast of Mexico toward Baja.  You can see the storm and the showers here in this rendering of the WRF-GFS model by IPS MeteoStar.  Remember those green areas on these maps are those in which rain is foretold to have fallen in the previous 6 h (later in the run, in the prior 12 h).  There is a LOT of green over SE Arizona after the showers begin to occur by the afternoon of the 3rd.

As is commonly heard these days from people concerned about drought, “think green”!

 

 

 

6:40 PM. A little hole in the clouds allows the late evening sunlight to penetrate into the aerosols we have over us, thereby producing an orange ray of sun.

Catalina miss, but an inch just next to Saddlebrooke

I guess we can be happy for them…  Here’s how the day went.

9:39 AM In case you missed logging this special cloud, Cirrocumulus undulatus, waves in the atmosphere.
9:40 AM. I guess you could have been distracted by the first Cumulus rising off Mt. Ms. Lemmon.
12:07 PM. Nice progression to our Catalina cloud street off’n Lemmon, but slower to grow than the day before. Reason to be concerned.

 

3:08 PM. The local picture begins to improve as a Cumulonimbus with a strong rainshaft forms N of Catalina and Cumulus congestus arise away from the Catalinas.
4:23 PM. Now this is really looking fantastic! Its going to dump for sure, and while this Cumulus congestus base is to the N of us and moving away, the ensuing outflow winds from the falling rain might well cause clouds to back up against the wind and new heavy Cumulus might form over us!
4:33 PM. “Dump, der it is”, paraphrasing the popular ditty from “In Living Color” that emerged at ball games, “Bloop, there it is”…  Now, lets see what the outfloiwng wind does.  Can it move that dark region this side of the rainshaft thisaway? I sped off to Sutherland Heights district to get a closer, electrifying look.
4:43 PM and 20 photos later…. This is looking fantastic, at least, over there by Saddlebrooke.
4:50 PM. Someone’s getting ver wet over there. A Pima County ALERT gage reported 1.06 inches under this. But, the dark cloud base on this side has thinned (take a look above the partial rainbow). Its over for Catalina as far as outlfow winds pushing up a new base.
5:15 PM. While pretty to look at, the tattered clouds to the left of the rainshaft are telling you “its over.” Now, the only question that remains is whether there will be a nice sunset?
6:50 PM. And the answer to the sunset question was yes.

“WeathKit”

Got up a little late (4:06 AM), got behind, feeling kind of lazy, and then started thinking about Heathkit, Benton Harbor, MI.  Perhaps you, too, had put one of their electronic kits together, ones that smoked after you plugged it in, like me.  Oh, yeah.  That was exciting!  Perhaps I could do a “Weathkit” in the modern era.  You would order it, being interested in weather and clouds as you are, and it would come in something like a shoebox, but then there would only be a thumb drive in it with a bunch of links for you to assemble your own weather forecast.

At first, of course, you’d be upset because you paid me so much for a thumb drive and complain that the packaging was overdone, misleading.  And then on the thumb drive there would be, say, several links.  They would be tuned, of course, from the region from which you ordered, except maybe one which would be a more general, global  link in case you wanted to check the weather in world trouble spots.  Lastly, there would be one to help you with the “final product” in case you bungled the whole thing like I did with my many Heathkits.

The links wouldn’t be labeled because that would be part of the joy of assembling your own weather forecast from them.  You’d be so excited just to click on each one and see what it was, some of the fun and appeal of “Weathkit.”  A prototype is shown below.  Let me know how much you would pay for these on a 1 GB thumb drive….

Link1

Link2

Link3

Link4

Link5

Link6

Link7

Link8

Link9

Thanks; your opinion is important to us here at WeathKit (pronounced “weth-kit”, NOT “weeeeth-kit”, dammitall!)

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Got a trace of rain yesterday afternoon just after noon as a matter of fact, as Cu congestus piled up over the Cat Mountains and drifted over Catalina from the ENE.  The day started much more promising than it ended up since cloud bases had lowered substantially from the prior day and were now just above the top of Ms. Lemmon.  Rain had not been predicted at all the previous day and so the occurrence of even a trace was a bit of a model fumble, a flub.  And, if you looked around, MUCH heavier showers were nearby.

12:01 PM. Nice cloud street streams directly overhead giving promise of a shower.
12:02 PM. Twin towers show further indications that the cloudy air was going to reach great heights yesterday.
12:19 PM. Its raining from this, pretty early for a rain shower. Maybe we’ll have something great later on!
2:49 PM. Large, but sloping Cumulonimbus calvus forms N of Catalina, top bubble is just now beginning to show the transformation to ice. No rainshaft yet.
12:49. Closeup of that glaciating Cb calvus top. “Calvus” means “bald”, BTW.
2:55 Pm. Its got the big shaft now, but the sloped aspect says this Cb has pretty weak updrafts in it and may not last long. Remember when we used to see these weak Cumulonimbus clouds and sing, “Hang on, slopey, slopey, hang on, da-dum-da-dum-da-dum”, because we knew ones like this probably wouldn’t last?
5:58 AM today! Here’s your sunrise photo, Altocumulus perlucidus, in case you were too lazy to get up and see it. Now, get going on your forecast…

Rain: its out of mind, but not out of sight

The summer rain season has departed from us here in Catalina, but its still evident on the horizon in Mexico, and even here in Arizona.  Take a look at these distant Cumulonimbus cloud tops yesterday.

4:59 PM. Arrows denote Cumulonimbus tops protruding from anvil Cirrus shield, “over the border, down Mexico way”,  as the song says.
7:00 PM. Looking WSW from Catalina at a massive Cumulonimbus top.

So, as we like to say around these parts, someone’s getting shafted (rain shafted, that is)

An example of conversational meteorology for everyday use:

Person 1: “Did you get shafted yesterday?”

Person 2:  “Yeah, it was GREAT! Got more than an inch in just over 30 minutes!”

End of example.

Looking a few days ahead

While we are dry now, the summer rains are really pretty close (as represented by green pixels in this rendering of the WRF-GFS model, our best one).

Unfortunately, it keeps the “green pixies” away until the afternoon of September 4th; Elena, our hope for rain just after the first, stays too far west now this mod says.

However, as close as the rain is day after day in this mod, even a slight model flub, a “fumble” really, in keeping with the emerging college football season,  could mean a random shower between now and the 4th.  That’s our only hope from that one.  But, to the rescue our Canadian friends and their model.  That model still drags a part of tropical storm Elena’s moisture into AZ with a couple of showers indicated around here on the 1st and 2nd of September.

Looking farther ahead at less reliable results:  green on green

The dry spell ends and a series of wet days are foreseen beginning on the 5th in SE AZ, and then spreading over various portions of the whole state (green pixels on the green of our State right now) from the 9th through the 14th in this same model.  I mention this only because it was also predicted from yesterday’s model run from global data taken at 5 AM LST.  Its not much to go on, but something.  An example for the afternoon of September 12th where so much rain is predicted the pixels have turned blue (see scale at bottom to interpret amounts).

Not so good is the fact that this later predicted rain is associated with rather weak flow patterns, ones that inherently degrade the model’s reliability.  So, don’t count on these rains, but it is there for now and has an itty bitty amount of credibility.  Namely, its not hopeless that we are done with our summer rain season, as we know,  can happen anytime now.

 

 

 

 

Silver lining

That silver lining referred to in the title,  at the top of yesterday evening’s Cumulus congestus cloud in the first photo below.  It went on to rain (second photo).  But no silver linings in our models now days, if they could have linings.  They seem to foretell nothing but dreary, soporific, boring, akin-to-a-science-talk at a major university1, dry weather today through the end of the month.

Forgetting about that tropical storm, Isaac, for the moment,  one that seems to be grabbing all the headlines lately, filling our TEEVEEs with endless repetitive reports that could have been dredged up from “file footage”, OUR last hope for rain, it seems, and a good drenching one at that, is from Isaac’s opposite, Elena, a tropical storm now in the eastern Pacific.

Elena might eventually be steered northward and then northeastward  with remnants moving into Arizona just after the beginning of the college football season; clouds and rain beginning to affect us September 2nd or 3rd.  Where are the headlines about that?

Maybe after all, THAT possibility in Elena is our silver lining for the “dark”, droughty days ahead.  Stay tuned.

The End.

6:14 PM. Potent Cumulus congestus builds west of the Tortolita Mountains.
6:29 PM. Rain drops out bottom way over there as top surges upward, ice phase in tops quite visible.
6:50 PM. Is now pretty much all ice at sunset, dissipated, concluding a disappointing day in which the overnight and later mod runs had rain farther north and over us instead of confined to south of Ina Road.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1It was said by a colleague at the unversity I worked at that, “if boredom could kill, there would be a massacre every Friday afternoon at the department colloquium2.”  Perhaps, having given several, I might killed a few people myself….  Unfortunately, the best scientists aren’t trained in how to talk about their work; its a problem we actually know about.  We’re too busy to fine tune our presentations so that they are interesting.

2John Locatelli, private communication, late 1970s or so.

Rained yesterday…

You probably don’t believe me, but at 2:08 PM, a few drops came down from this Cumulonimbus debris cloud, one that drifted off the Catalinas.  Likely you were inside watching fubball or something instead of checking on a possible trace of rain.  Oh, well.  I understand.  You had more important things to do than see if it was raining and note it in your weather log book.  You are keeping one aren’t you?

2:08 PM. Rain is falling.  Most of you will notice that this cloud is full of ice, so it COULD have rained out of it since ice means precip.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The proof?

Here, on the “trace detector”, a 1985 Corolla four-door, hatchback mini-SUV, mileage like a Prius before ethanol, some drops.   BTW, yours for $12,000, comes with University of Washington Husky “W” insignia, also shown here, because I worked for the University of Washington and was a loyal company employee, i. e., supported all the company sports teams.  Its just who I am.

2:09 PM. This photo was taken in case people didn’t believe me that it had rained yesterday.  After all, this is the internet and you never know for sure what’s true.
5:31 PM. Late afternoon Cumulonimbus spawns a rainbow for desert.

BTW#2, the Pima County ALERT raingauge at White Tail, near Palisades Ranger Station, just off Catalina Highway on the way to Mt Lemmon, had more than an inch of rain yesterday from our isolated Cumulonimbus clouds! It seems to register the highest rainfall time and again. It might be a fun Sunday drive to go there and see what all that rain has done. They must be over 10 inches for just August alone!

Today?

U of AZ mod (11 PM run) is predicting an uptick in thunderstorms this afternoon, then dry tomorrow.  Hoping for one more dump….  You never know when the last one will be this time of year.

 

Some more visual ice cream, this morning’s pretty virga:

5:59 AM, Aug. 27th (today, just now!)

The End.