Cloud-maven – Page 80 – About real clouds, weather, cloud seeding and science autobio life stories by WMO consolation prize-winning meteorologist, Art Rangno

Lots of thunder and bluster but only a trace in Catalina

Heard thunder for about 12 h it seemed yesterday, but little came of it. Even the rainshafts looked anemic for the most part for the second day in a row.

Current 24 h rainfall totals from the Pima County ALERT gages here. U of AZ network here. “Coco” for Pima, here.

Got hopeful after a disappointing afternoon when an evening shelf of Stratocumulus with buildups spread westward from the northeast, shown in the first photo. Rain shafts began to appear in the upwind direction as the sun set with occasional cloud to ground lightning strokes, ones that continued until after dark. Those showers grew and then were almost dead by the time they passed over Catalina. So another disappointment. Seems you end up saying that a lot when you’re living in a desert and wanting some rain…

Canadian prediction mellowing.

That Enviro Can model isn’t going to win a Gold Medal, another clever play on the Olympic Games now underway in London, with its forecast track for Hector-Ernesto. In our last episode, the Enviro Can mod had H-E drifting northward in a timely manner, and it had been that way in model run after run, so that portions of its remnant produced significant rains in southern Arizona.

The medalist in the H-E track forecast? The USA! WRF-GFS model. It had tropical storm Hector-Ernesto staying far away until it was dead, drifting glacially northward off Baja until it disappeared (as it is shown to do today) with only modest effects here. That USA forecast was better forecast all along.

We just did not get that upper level trough along and off the West Coast, required to steer H-E rapidly northward before it faded over the cool waters off Baja.

The good news is that there is no real droughty days ahead either, which means a steady diet of scattered thunderblusters for another week or so, and if we can get the cloud bases down from 14,000 feet above seas level to 8000-9000 feet (at the top of Ms. Lemmon), we could be back in the 1-2 inch rains in those scattered intense rainshafts. This morning’s sounding from TUS suggests they will be a couple of thousand feet lower than yesterday! Yay!

Here is the hour by hour forecast from our weather friends at the U of AZ and their local model run from last night’s data.

A quite active day is forecast for us today, beginning in the early afternoon rather than mid to late afternoon as has been the case. The first shower/Cumulonimbus cloud is forecast to form today on the Cat Mountains is by 1 PM, hours earlier than prior days. That would go along with the 5 AM sounding just in which has is more moist than previous days. Note that last night’s model run would not have had this new data.

So, chance of a hard rain in the afternoon if we’re lucky. But what could be really nice is that rain (in the model) continues here off and on overnight at a moderate rate, pretty unusual.

Fingers crossed that the “initial conditions”, the starting point for lat night’s run, are accurate, one of the biggest bugaboos in our models.

The End.

Lots of bluster, little rain except at Sutherland Heights where 0.39 inches fell last evening

Another day with hours of thunder, but with those high and cold cloud bases, not much rain reached the ground. Also hurting the rain situation, too much ice. An afternoon sprinkle, a very close, rogue lightning strike, followed by an early nighttime “chaser” storm that, with all of its bluster, wind and vivid lightning, produced only 0.02 inches here, but a lot more at Sutherland Heights, a robust 0.39 inches (new knowledge, gained after dip sticking gage up there at around 7:30 AM) To see how remarkable that Sutherland Heights rain amount is, go here to the U of AZ rainlog network.

Here’s a smaller, but typical example of yesterday’s generally “low output” Cumulonimbus clouds:

Here’s another quite bad cloud (shown below), though it was good one one hand, because it was an early afternoon, frequently thundering cloud which gave promise of rain later in the day. But that rainshaft? Pitiful.

It was also a forerunner of the kinds of storms we would have. Again, with high and cold bases (and oddly to me), there seemed to be an awful lot of lightning for the size of the Cumulonimbus cloud at 1:55 PM, much of it in vivid cloud to ground strokes. You may have seen a another example of that last evening around 9 PM on the Catalinas when there were a series of frequent and spectacular cloud-to- ground strokes, but little rain. The most that fell up there was 0.28 inches at Oracle Ridge. Map here. BTW, you can see the “1:55 PM”
Cb in the U of AZ time lapse movie at the far left beginning around 1:40 PM.

Well, how high were cloud bases? Rendered by the Cowboys, this 5 PM sounding for Tucson:

Reading this sounding, it makes bases appear to be around 16,000 feet Above Sea Level (subtract our elevation for above ground level) and a few degrees C below freezing. With bases that high and cold, the amount of water condensing at the bottom of the cloud is less than on days with bases, say, at 5 C and at 10,000 feet ASL.

So, less condensed water input means less rain coming out the bottom later.

If there is “too much ice” for the amount of water coming into the bottom of the cloud as we saw yesterday, its like a glass of water filled with ice cubes in which only a tablespoon of liquid water can be contained in it. The analogy is only somewhat representative since with “too many ice crystals” competing for the available water vapor, you end up with high concentrations of smaller crystals that hang in the sky rather than fall out.

So you get big anvils and debris clouds with little rain to the ground even in the peak stage of the storm.

Since the best rains in the shafts we see are due to melted graupel and hail, icy particles that generally start as an ice crystal at high elevations in the cloud, if there is little “supercooled” water there isn’t much graupel or hail, the type of precip that can make it to the ground from high bases (melting snowflakes wouldn’t from bases as high as we had yesterday because they’re essentially like Rice Krispies, there’s not much mass in them).

Well, this is pretty boring, so will end here with a sunset photo from last evening:

Today?

The U of AZ WRF-GFS rendering of rain in the State of AZ sees early afternoon Cumulonimbus clouds breaking out over the Cat Mountains today.

Why not?

Starting out with pretty similar sounding this morning, but a bit more moist than last evenings above 600 millibars (about 14,000 feet ASL).

Longer view?

Hector marches slowly toward the Southwest (Canadian model outputs), promising an enhancement of August’s meager rains so far in southern AZ.

The End.

^{—————————————————}

¹Reminded one of summers in Durango, Colorado, where high, cold cloud bases and “too much ice” is normal.

Massing bases, smiling faces

Yesterday’s surprise thunderstorm, rolling off the Catalinas, provided relief with 0.22 inches here. More rain tables/maps here and here. This sight in the first shot, showing it in the formation stage yesterday, was cause for joy:

Due to global warming-induced extra heat over the past few days here, as all extra heat must be automatically assigned (go here to a critical commentary on recent claims like mine above by a still-employed University of Washington Atmo Sci. prof.–wonder how long he’ll last?) combined with a break in the summer rains, our grasses, amaranth, pig weed and such were looking pretty stressed out; wilted, turning yellow due to global warming. One felt helpless to see the green of summer fading so fast due to global warming. (Want to make sure I am on the RIGHT side of this issue, you can’t be too careful these days about what you say in this domain; who might be watching.)

Then, after a near miss to the north yesterday around noon, an initially small thunderstorm that dumped on Saddlebrooke, moved off to the NW, multiplied, and became a real giant on the north side of the Tortolita Mountains, this new, large cloud base (at left) began forming over the Catalinas upwind of us. Time for hope.

Rain was already falling out of the downwind leaning upper portions of the cloud (arrow), shown in the second shot. You might recall that rain that falls out like this is not going to be what it could be, all that it could be.

Imagine dropping a cup of water out of that cloud where the bottom is (arrow), to drift away from the main discussion for a second. What will happen? Since the humidity must be less than 100 % all the way to the ground after it leaves the cloud, a lot of that water from that cup will evaporate. If you could capture the water that originally came out of that cup, it might be 10% of what came out.

How high was that “base” that’s not really a base but an overhang (above arrow in second shot)? Probably at the freezing level, or about 12,000 feet above us. So, if you’re storm chasing, and want to collect the most rain, avoid rain from overhangs!

The next shot shows where you want to be to get the most rain, and in a hurry. Those dark bases managed to hold together and keep reforming as rain fell on the Catalinas. A new strand of rain has overcome the updraft associated with new dark bases, and is beginning to fall out this side of Samaniego Ridge. An arrow has been added to point out this new rain streamer. It reaches near the ground beyond the dead yucca stalk in the foreground. This is where you want to be to collect the most rain, should you be trying to do so.

This time, pouring out a cup of water at the same height as in overhang rain, but inside the cloud, several thousand feet above the bottom, means that there will be no evaporation, and MORE IMPORTANTLY, the cup of water will grow in volume until near the very bottom because the falling drops will bump into and collect floating cloud drops that got in the way. So, if you could collect that water somehow, there would be more of it than what you dropped originally. So, those rain streamers, forming high in the cloud, are doing the same thing, pulling water out of the cloud on the way down, growing in amount.

This was a heartening sight since this new shaft, and the movement rate of the storm as a whole, meant that it would reach ME and Catalina in general) before it dissipated. As it turned out, probably another such shaft dropped right on top of us, judging by the low visibility in the intense rain. Air, rudely pushed out of the way by all that water, created winds to estimated 50-60 mph for a brief time, followed by an almost instantaneous reversal to 5-10 mph. That reversal was really something, as was as the lightning strike back behind me about 100 yards.

Today?

Expected to be dry. End of story. I really don’t enjoy talking much about dry air.

What about Hector-Ernesto, that schizophrenic tropical storm that has come all the way into the eastern Pacific from a birth place in the West Indies, home of calypso music, some weeks ago?

The Canadians think Hector-Ernesto is going to end up as a big rain producer southern Cal, with some rain enhancement here as well. The USA! models think its going to drift north and die before getting much past Baja, where it drifts off to the west. Due to a rain bias, I am only showing the Canadian model result with a tropical storm approaching San Diego and a huge crescent of rain over the Southwest, including over ME (oops, I mean us).

Royally “plugged in”, big and small

Yesterday’s higher based Cumulonimbus clouds were hyper-electrified for some reason. Their bases were running about 11-12 kft above the ground over Catalina at 5 C (41 F). Here’s are two examples of the tiniest thunderstorms I have ever seen (and I seen a lot of ’em, having chased them in the southern Cal deserts in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and for a few days here in the summers of 1964 and 1965. (Egad, you’re thinking; me, too.)

Here are those “tiniest thunderstorms” in the first two shots.

At this point in mid-afternoon, even though the temperature was a baking 104-105 F here in Catalina, hot enough to send plumes of warm air into the ionosphere you would think, the cloud situation for rain was not looking so great upwind toward the northeast.

But those big rollers came, didn’t they!

What these little thunderstorms were telling us about the big boys that grumbled in from the NE eventually, and the ones that developed near us later, was that they were going to throw a lot of electricity at us.

They did not disappoint, though we only received 0.04 inches here in Catalina at this site.

The frequency of cloud to ground strikes was incredible, I think the most frequent I have seen. Here are some shots, in case you were inside watching TEEVEE and Olympics’ beach volley ball from London, which is somewhat understandable:

Some rainfall tables for you to peruse for yesterday:

Pima County Alert gages: http://159.233.69.3/temp/pptreport.txt

U of AZ rain network rainlog.org

“Cocorahs” for Pima County, another, but national rain collecting network

Why were our Cumulonimbus clouds so hyper-electrified?

The simple answer is, I don’t know.

We know that electrification is related to updraft speeds in clouds and separation of hail/graupel (soft hail) and smaller ice crystals like dendrites, which leads to separation and build up of charge centers in clouds because, after bumping into one another, they collect in differents areas of the clouds. They build up charge and spark to one another, and to the ground. I am really oversimplifying this, but that appears to be the main source of cloud electrification, and why stratiform (“flat”) raining clouds and clouds that produce rain without ice, do not spark.

There was nothing in the lapse rate from the TUS sounding yesterday afternoon to suggest higher updraft speeds would develop that I could see. Was it the extreme heat that drove this occurrence? Also, crystal type in the clouds may have something to do with it.

Idle speculation: It has seemed to this observer, that the warmest based Cumulonimbus clouds have not been highly electrified here, at least, not like the ones yesterday. Warmer bases lead to different collections of ice crystals in the clouds, such as huge concentrations of columnar types (rods) called needles and sheaths (hollow columns). At lower cloud base temperatures, these do not occur except at very great heights, and very low temperatures, not in the middle of the cloud as needles and sheaths might.

The weather ahead…

Today: I could not find a single model that had rain here in Catalina today. It’s supposed to dry out due to dry air invading from the east. You can see that here in this water vapor loop from the U of WA Huskies. That dark area in New Mexico and extending into the central Plains is how the imagery represents dry air as seen by a satellite. You can see that while we are moist air right now, i.e., dewpoints are high, we have mid-level Altocumulus castellanus around, distant Cumulonimbus clouds to the WSW as I write, this moisture over us will thin. Still, I have to think we’ll see something in the way of a Cb off somewhere, probably not here, though.

Tomorrow: About the same as today, the mods say. Darn.

The End.

Bulimic Cumulus clouds, filled with portent, disappoint

Why would such skinny, towering clouds be filled with thundery, gushing portent? Its really hard for a cloud to be tall and skinny. Why? Because too much dry air comes in as it rises, both from the tops and sides, and if that air is dry, it can’t go far without evaporating. Too, the drop in temperature with height has to be larger than normal for clouds like yesterday’s to shoot up to well beyond the level where ice can form (glaciate). But they did off and on all day. Mt. Lemmon functioned as a smokestack for Cumulus and even skinny Cumulonimbus, clouds all during the late morning and into late afternoon. There was some thunder here as ONE got big enough to rain that bit toward Charoleau Gap. So, you do get to record a TSTM (thunderstorm) in your log book. No rain fell here.

If you missed those bulimic clouds, here’s yesterday’s movie from the U of AZ. If you watch that time lapse, you will see some of the tallest turrets shooting up awfully fast; I thought they were rising about fast, at times, anyway, as any turrets I have seen in these movies, a marker for how rapidly the air cooled with height yesterday.

Also, here are a few shots of those skinny clouds from this angle here Catalinaland.

OK, quiting visual cloud displays here. You’ve seen enough disappointing clouds, ones that did not live up to their potential like so many of us.

You would have thought massive clusters of Cumulonimbus clouds were about to roll in, spawned over the Rincon Mountains or from the high terrain near Pie Town, NM, rolling westward to pummel the townlet of Catalina again. Some of our more gigantic area storms have been preceded by morning “long tall sallys” like these.

But no.

Looking at today:

The boys in the weather club, like Bob and Mike, were talkin’ good storms today based on their very great and decades-long experience. I, too, am riding the Bob-Mike wave.

Way out ahead; major rain joy, maybe…

I am more excited about the longer term view, one in which when it gets here, will remember what I said with enthusiasm now. Remember our logo, one just like the big TEEVEE stations have:

“RIght or wrong, you heard it here FIRST! Live!”

What “first”?

Tropical storm remnant has been probably unreliably, but hopefully, forecast to come into southern Arizona in 192 h or so. Could be worse; what if it was a forecast that was 360 h from now?

Here it is, courtesy of those folks at IPS Meteostar who have rendered the 00 Z (think Olympics Time Zone) time maps for us. Here’s the low, shown on the first map, on Baja coast. The next map shows that the ENTIRE remnant has moved into AZ! Could be great.

What gives this storm a better chance of getting here than some? The upper level steering is set up to draw tropical storms northward should they drift too far northwest, like a bug getting caught in a spider web; the spider then hauling the bug to its hiding place. Gee, I never thought I would write about spiders here, but there it is; it just kind of popped out.

But, you ask, how do we KNOW, have any CLUE, that the steering, as by an upper level trough, is going to be properly placed to draw tropical storms northward so that they get caught up like a bug in a spider web which after being caught in the web, the spider comes down and takes it back to its hiding place. I really liked that metaphor. We are like that place where the spider is hiding!

Of course, you say, we go to the NOAA spaghetti factory and try to discern how likely it is that a trough will be along the West Coast, positioned to draw storms up thisaway.

The last image is a spaghetti plot of trough contours using what be called, “the bad balloon” approach. Hard to imagine, but the starting points for the model is deliberately altered a bit just to see how wild a few of the contours get. The wilder they get, the less reliable a longer term forecast is.

20120809002012080800_NAM_GFS_SFC_SLP_THK_PRECIP_WINDS_192 — Valid for August 15 at 5 PM AST. Note all the green, denoting rain that fell in the preceeding 6 h.

NOAA “spaghetti plot” valid for the SAME time as the first map, 5 PM AST, August 15th. Shows that a trough along the West Coast is virtually assured. But the “devil”, the storm here, is in the details. While it is a necessary condition, it is not sufficient, since the flow might not exactly draw a tropical storm right to ME. Oops, “us.”

Tracey day

Two maybe three sprinkles occurred in the early afternoon between 1:30 and 2:40 PM for a total accumulation of “trace.” The first from our very own Catalina cloud street off Ms. Lemon. Here it is in mid-afternoon when it was was still right over us, but the clouds in it not tall enough, as earlier, to have something in them that causes precipitation to fall out. (What is it? Hint: Think of the Beatles’ anthem about something that is, “all you need¹.”)

Bubble Cu drifts away, later becoming a “quarter pounder”… Watch the sequence below.

So, what did we get out of this sequence?

Even small clouds, really modest ones at the start, can boil upward and produce a useful amount of rain, albeit in a short-lived life. Between the time it began to rain from this cloud and the end of it from this little cloud was barely more than six minutes, maybe ten. But don’t overlook them; they can still get you wet.

And with that happy ending, let me leave you with this happy ending to our day; yesterday’s sunset Cumulonimbus cloud, and the thought of more of them today! (The weather service says so…here.)

¹ice

Rainbow? Or, after THAT storm, was it the “‘Arc’ of the Convenant”?

What an amazing, Biblical sight¹ that came across the Catalina Mountains yesterday evening, that shaft of intense rain and attendant rainbow! After a day where it looked like rain might not happen here, those earlier Cumulus clouds being pretty lazy really, this behemoth powered across Tucson and the Catalina Mountains dropping 0.56 inches in momentarily blinding rain blown on 60-70 mph gusts, with numerous cloud-to-ground lightning strikes, taking down power lines, and causing a 6 h plus power outage in Catalina. 0.51 inches fell here in 10 minutes!

Oops, forgot to remind you: Don’t forget to go to the movies. Shows the backside of what hit us just as the day ends.

How great this rain will be, too, for our stressed desert-thornscrub vegetation after almost a week of dry conditions. (Only 0.17 inches at Sutherland Heights, though.)

For me, yesterday evening produced the most dramatic sights I’ve seen here in four years in Catalina. I hope you caught it, but if you didn’t, here are a few of the most dramatic ones. The first, penultimate shot was from the front porch about three minutes before bedlam hit Sutherland Heights. Below this, those shots leading up to it.

A repeat of yesterday today? Not bloody likely.

Oh, well, any rain will be great, but drier air is moving in. Check it out here from the University of Washington Huskies’ (some former of whom, if that is correct english which I doubt, are in the Olympics, for example, women’s volleyball, but not in beach volleyball which I seem to be watching a lot of) Weather Department here.

Note the drier air moving in from New Mexico and west Texas in this loop. Just the same, it can still rain here some because while drier, it’s not dessicated air and so the usual isolated Cb should be around. So, keep watching, keep cameras ready and charged.

The End.

^{————————————————————————————————————————————————————-1}Biblical allusion is to the “ARK of the Covenant” whose activity was demonstrated in a movie with Harrison Ford some years.

“Feint” rainbow

For a few minutes yesterday afternoon, it looked like some unexpected rain was trucking over the Cat Mountains from the east-northeast late yesterday afternoon. No one could blame you for getting your hopes up and misleading your neighborhood by saying it might rain in half an hour. Those clouds rolling in from the Catalinas (shown below) were great sights for soaring eyes, ones that look to the skies all the time for rain.

But within the hour, the clouds had broken up, and the shower they produced was reflected by a faint rainbow. Rainbows to the east and northeast are often precursors of rain and wind moving into Catalina. Here is the sad remnants of those albeit weak, Cumulonimbus clouds with their feint rainbow, one that was not followed by one drop of rain here.

A big patch of Cirrus kept the temperature down some during the first half of the day, and so our Cumulus were behind in development compared to areas around us. Here is that bad Cirrus spissatus in case you missed it, that which hung over us so long.

It was quite visible even in the visible satellite image all morning. When it shows up there, you can bet that the Cirrus in that image is thick enough to produce shading and mess up the development of Cumulus under and around it, particularly on marginal rain days like yesterday.

Much Cirrus is virtually invisible in visible satellite imagery; get it? You can see it from the ground (i.e., its visible), those thin wisps of Cirrus, but try to find it in a visible satellite image! This whole line of reasoning and befuddled exposition here reminds me of that Science knee-slapper of a few years ago; that article entitled, “Where are the invisible galaxies?”

Today?

Raining lightly now at 5:25 AM! Yay. A night stalker mass of rain is moving into TUS now as I write. They don’t usually like the daytime and fade as the sun rises in the sky. Sprinkles, very light rain showers (and as always pointed out here, quite emphatically I might add, “sprinkles is not DRIZZLE, dammitall”, to be a little colloquial there!).

Let’s hope this heavy cloud cover we have now (5:30 AM), which you could call, Altocumulus opacus and castellanus due to its height above the ground (its at about 11-12,000 feet above the ground and has turrets here and there). But, to get a little pedalogical you could label it in your log book as Stratocumulus, perhaps with the appendage, castellanus, since turrets are present–those are what’s causing the sprinkles/light showers.

Sunset was nice….

U of AZ mod shows this is our best day for a significant rain, some of that this morning, and some arises later with those afternoon and evening giants we get around here. Hoping so. Tomorrow is supposed to be drier.

The End.

Long distance Cumulonimbus top; cloud review for yesterday, and, big day tomorrow?

The only good Cumulonimbus (Cb) clouds seem to be occurring north of Golder Ranch Drive, about a 100 miles north. which of course, astronomically speaking is actually quite close. Yesterday, with no intervening clouds, it was another chance to see how far can you see the top of a Cb, then use the NWS radar to place it. The Cb top, with an arrow pointing to it in the first photo, is followed by a zoomed shot. The radar indicates that lone, very tall cell was about 10 miles SE of Kingman, or more than 150 miles away! It was common in South Dakota, working with radar in Mitchell and Parkston, to see Cb tops and anvils on the horizon that the radar was unable to see, partly because the radar beam is pointed slightly upward to minimize “ground clutter” as seen in the radar image below around PHX.

annotated 0001E6 — 7:20 PM NWS radar mosaic rendered by the U of AZ.

Review of yesterday; another quiet day (Ed. Note: Getting tired of quiet days)

Yesterday was almost exactly like the day before, with a brief period of glaciating cloud in the same spot beyond the Charoleau Gap from Catalina as the day before. Here are a few representative shots of yesterday.

Can you pick out the icy top in that one little glaciating Cb? Its a little harder to detect this time compared with yesterday.

I feel uncomfortable labeling this little mush of cloud a “Cumulonimbus”, maybe “Cb calvus”, because the fibrous nature of the ice is not yet obvious.

Still it has the attributes of a Cumulonimbus, glaciating top, precip out the bottom, though we can’t see it here. It will produce a radar echo like the little Cb the day before. What we really need, to editorialize some, are categories for these situations like “Cumulonimbus humilis”, “Cumulonimbus mediocris” so that we know that we have miniature versions of those clouds.

We do have, though I avoid it, a category of “Cumulus congestus praecipitatio”, because visual examples, as shown in the last (1987) World Meteorological Atlas, cannot be differentiated from Cumulonimbus clouds, at least, not by me!

The weather ahead

“Quiet time” is coming to an end, not today so much, the computers say, but tomorrow, oh my, could be huge!

Check it out here, courtesy of our U of AZ weather program and their massive Beowulf Cluster of computers.

The End

Official climatologist blasts “educated fools” for mischaracterizing “Arizony”

This just in! Well….I didn’t see it until just now, so its kind of “just in”, the input domain smaller than one usually thinks of when you hear the phrase, “this just in!”

Please begin reading at the second paragraph, which discusses prejudice. It seems some people were carelessly calling Arizona a desert!

Checking your cloud log book for yesterday

My attention began to drift toward a fattening Cumulus cloud beyond Charoleau Gap. After days of Cumulus humilis and mediocris, I was buoyed by the sight of a real congestus cloud there. Would it, could it, GLACIATE, get cold enough on top to form ice crystals and snow?

As you know, and I think the Beatles said it best (a boy group from Britain in the 1960s), in their famous anthem, ” All You Need is Ice”:

“All you need is ice, dah-ta-dah-ta-dah, all you need is ice, dah-ta-dah-ta-dah, all you need is ice, ice, , all you need is ice, etc, etc., etc. (it was a very repetitive song) Furthermore they claimed, “it’s easy.”

It was going to be a great song, scientifically speaking, in many ways, though we know that rain can form without ice at times. However, and I think the boys realized later, that its not always THAT easy (to make ice) when the freezing level is at 15,000 friggin’ feet, and the tops have to reach -10 to -15 C, or about 24,000 feet, as we had here yesterday.

Later, the “Beatles” (BTW, the British spelling of “beetles”, which I doubt many of the Ancient Ones out there knew before I posted that information here) realized, having long been interested in precipitation in their homeland, that the original lyrics were misleading. They decided to update the lyrics to something more accessible and commercially viable, changing “ice” to “love” soon after the first production. You can hear the revised song here.

However, If you replace “love” with the origiinal word, “ice”, it will help you understand the precipitation process here in “Arizony” better.

Where was I?

Oh, yeah, I began to see a ruffle in a Cumulus congestus cloud top that looked like it might be converting from supercooled water (water at below freezing temperatures that aircraft like to avoid) that MIGHT be converting to ice. Then after a few more minutes, much of the time having to talk with another human and missing the important transitional photo stage, it was completely iced-out, this meaning rain was falling out the bottom! Somebody got wet!

Now this was NOT a large Cumulonimbus cloud, but rather, for us, a “mediocris” but here it is. I wondered, in view of its small size and brief lifetime, how many of you logged this cloud? It could have easily been missed.

I am posting photos to help you fill in the correct and complete cloud observations for yesterday in your log books. There were also several forms of Cirrus above the small Cumulus clouds that were prevalent. I figure you were “all over” the Cirrus, but likely missed our little, and brief, Cb.

Here are a couple of cloud photos from yesterday, to check against your log of cloud observations, to help you make sure you got them all. I’ve added some “excitement captions” as well, ones with exclamation marks to kind of get you going.