Cloud-maven – Page 82 – About real clouds, weather, cloud seeding and science autobio life stories by WMO consolation prize-winning meteorologist, Art Rangno

On a clear day you can see Flagstaff

Of course, you can’t see the TOWN of Flagstaff, you silly person, the title was just a hook to get you here to read about clouds! The earth curves too much for you to see Flagstaff, for Pete’s Sake. How could you even imagine that such a title could be true?

But, you CAN see the tops of Cumulonimbus clouds boiling upward OVER Flagstaff, maybe there is someone you know there and you could call them about it, find out how much it has rained. Those Cumulonimbus tops stick up above the horizon in that direction about a quarter of an inch if you were to take a ruler out and hold it out in front of you. Thought you’d like to know this.

Here’s the scene I am describing from yesterday afternoon. In case you wouldn’t know what to say to your Flagstaff friend, I’ve tried to help you out in the caption for the second photo. Maybe its your mom you haven’t called in a while…. Who knows who it might be that you know up there?

SONY DSC — 1:27 PM. The scene. Cumulonimbus tops, likely above 40,000 feet above sea level, lined the higher terrain of the Rim to the NW-NE from Catalina yesterday afternoon. BTW, I really like Catalina. Who would have dreamed I would end up HERE coming from Seattle!

Finishing off today’s lesson: The tops you see are ALMOST always completely composed of ICE crystals and snowflakes because they too damn cold at 40,000 feet or so (temperature less than -40 C, less than -40 F; they are the same numeric at that temperature, yet another piece of knowledge for you) for anything but ice we think.

Some embarrassed people have reported liquid water at temperatures below -50 C such as Robert H. Simpson, former head of the National Hurricane Center and also husband of the late Joanne Simpson, famed Cumulus researcher and FIRST WOMAN TO EVER RECEIVE A PH. D. in meteorology¹. Must’ve have been an especially great marriage because they both loved weather and clouds and hurricanes and probably talked about ’em all day.

Continuing with something relevant, once when Bob (Simpson) was in Seattle giving a talk, after the talk I said to him, smiling, “You must be pretty embarrassed about reporting liquid water at -62 C”, as he did in 1962 in a conference paper, and again in 1963 in the peer-reviewed journal, the Monthly Weather Review.

He smiled and said, “The theoreticians don’t think its there, but its there.”

Hmmmph.

The weather today and the next few days into August?

Scattered rains, lightning thunder EVERY day into August! I am so happy. More rain is on the doorstep. Take a look below at what this extra rain we’ve had so far in July has already done to our desert as of three days ago, July 25th. Its incredible, isn’t it? I call it, the “re-jungle-ation” of Arizona accompanied by the appearance of new life forms; see last photo.

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¹Joanne Simpson, after reviewing my grades, advised me to give up meteorology. She was a professor at UCLA then (1963), and I wanted to “walk on” as a met student in their program. In effect, though I didn’t realize it then, she saved me from myself since UCLA was WAY too theoretical for me in the approach to weather. Later I attended San Jose State², a program much more suited to me with my weak math skills. (Can you put a footnote in a footnote?)”

²While at SJS in the later 1960s, I was forecasting weather for the college paper, forecasts that devolved into silly, juvenile, lame topical humor, much like the “humor” here. To drop another name in this blog, I loved what KRLA-AM, a top 40 station in Los Angeles, where I grew up, was doing in those turbulent days of the late 1960s. They had dared to start a news parody program, recreating news events that they would first report in a serious manner. It was bold and courageous for a mainstream media station; they dared to offend. I wanted to be a part of it, and went down to apply for summer work there in 1968.

My interviewer? A young Harry Shearer. The “Credibility Gap“, the KRLA news parody team in those days, consisted mainly of Harry, Richard Beebe, and David L. Lander. An example of their work, “Dawn of New Era for Man”, KRLA’s 1969 Apollo 11 counter coverage to the major networks; its 8 min long, Arizona’s Papago Indians mentioned. You can’t find this on the internet!

Back to the interview: Harry briefly examined my topical forecasts for the SJS paper, ones I presented to him pasted on a blank sheet of paper. After just a minute or two, he said, “I don’t think they’re that funny.” It was painful to hear, but upon later reflection, oh, so true! I left immediately.

I had some low moments in the 1960s, but here I am!

“Do meteorologists suppress thunderstorms?”-Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 2005

In view of the serious consequences of missed rainfall in an Arizona summer, and being a meteorologist, I felt it was important to address a longstanding question among fellow meteorologists, to clear the air, as it were, about what my role might have been in the deflection of massive storms that appeared to be coming to Catalina, but then dissipated mysteriously. Perhaps this investigation will shed light on the three recent consecutive missed days with no major rains in Catalina while major rains fell very nearby.

There have been some rumors and innuendoes.

Perhaps if a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can affect the weather (eventually) in Texas (from “chaos theory” where itty bitty things can mess everything up), perhaps my excessive running around in the yard taking photographs of giant clouds could have had an effect, changing the airflow in some counterproductive way.

In pursuit of truth, I am providing my three readers with some intellectual, philosophical material to consider today; this research published in a respectable peer-reviewed journal, the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (aka, Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., or just “Bull.”, for short). This article is in the same philosophical domain as that article in Physics Today (I think it was) many years ago: “Can watching the Mets play baseball (on television) affect the outcome of the game?¹”

Please contemplate this article below today, and then look into your own heart about how YOU yourself might have been deflecting storms. Maybe there aren’t any studies out there answering that question yet, and so we don’t know do we? But…..

Do Meteorologists Suppress Thunderstorms?

No.

While a quite technical, comprehensive article in which meteorologists in 28 cities around the US were examined for their effect on storms. If you don’t believe MY answer, the gist of this article is on p353:

“According to our data and methods, a meteorologist’s hometown is no more likely to be a weather hole or hot spot than is any random place around the conterminous United States.”

I guess that settles that…or does it?

(X-Files, Twilight Zone, etc., music here (11 11_Extraordinary Claims 1)².

The weather ahead

The Canadian model has us on the edge of rain for another two-three days, then the summer rain season resumes. Similarly, the WRF-GFS model run from the U of WA has rain moving back into our area this Saturday afternoon. Maybe I’ll run around the house a couple of times. move some air around, and see if I can speed this return up some….

Anomalous cloud sighting

Now this was truly strange, I thought, in view of the totally flat, Cumulus “pancake-us” clouds. Off in the far horizon to the SW, was this ONE towering Cumulus! Not sure I have seen such a cloud anomaly, and not really sure why THAT one stuck up so much. You’d have to guess that the moisture and temperature profile down that way was quite abit different that what we had here, but then, you would normally have seen many more clouds like that off on the horizon. Strange indeed, to me. There it is.

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¹Haven’t been able to find that classic, but will eventually.

²Credit: The National Science Foundation for funding Bill Nye the Science Guy programs, and to the Walt Disney Studios for creating those wonderful liittle ditties at the end of each show.

“Curve ball” of a Cumulonimbus strikes out Catalina again

It looked like it was coming straight down the middle. I didn’t see any rotation on it. It was coming toward ME… and to Catalina. We were going to get “shafted”, rain shafted that is, at last!

I started taking video, shooting numerous still shots of the mammoth-behemoth, churning, tropical-like, boiling-roiling Cumulonimbus cloud rolling in from the southwest toward Catalina, lightning sparking every minute or two at one point. Pileus veils appeared and disappeared as the tops shot upward through moist layers. What is a pileus? Hint: Its not Latin for somebody who flies an airplane. But, continuing about airplanes….

If only I had a plane, I dreamed, to go inside them, fully explore and experience them in a quantitative way, those voluptuous turrets! To penetrate their depths with instrumentation like we would used to do in the olden days at the University of Washington, recording the hail/graupel bursts on the pilot’s window, ones where it was like someone had thrown rice at the window, the huge amounts of supercooled liquid water piling up on the airframe, the plane trembling, rocking in turbulence, turbulence whose effects could only be mitigated by Marezine, the lightning strikes on the fuselage, the white knuckled, almost euphoric, glad-to-be-alive feeling afterward.

Yes, those were the good old days.

While our dogs were cowering, made restless by the approaching thunder, I dusted off my rain gage collector, looked inside it, as you all should do, for telltale signs of recent bird visitations, droppings that might hinder the rush of water into the inner collector, or even block it all together. Once having cleaned it off, I sprayed the outer collector with WD-40 so that the drops would roll quickly into the inner collector without the least resisitance, allowing the tipping bucket of the Davis Vantage Pro II Extra Deluxe Mark IV rain gage and weather station system to report rain as rapidly as possible.

This was going to be a great rain, it would make up for the prior two day’s of disappointments and sadness, really. BTW, its quite normal for meteorologists to feel like they live in a “hole” where the best rains hardly ever hit.

In case you didn’t call in sick yesterday as was suggested here so that you could see the those majestic Cumulonimbus clouds roll in, and in paritcular, missed this one below that literally rumbled toward Catalina from the direction of Twin Peaks, here is a sequence of shots taken at 12:53 PM, 1 PM, 1:07 PM, and 1:28 PM. Rain seemed imminent.

Of course, it fizzled out. Three strikes! Three days in a row of near misses!

This one got SO CLOSE! And as you see below, there were flanking bases even as it neared, absolutely necessary for continued life of the storm. Without those flanking clouds, a Cumulonimbus can have a shockingly short life span, maybe 20-30 minutes of rain to the ground.

As you can see below, those dark bases sans rain shafts (flanking dark cloud bases) were a good sign that the approaching storm was going to continue propagating into Catalina with gusto, and gusts as well, as the flanking clouds piled up into new Cumulonimbus clouds, riding on top of the outflow winds of the rainshaft.

But no, the flanking clouds disappeared in minutes, leaving only the sad stratiform remains of that once proud Cumulonimbus. Below, 2:57 PM, one of the saddest cloud sights of all, Altostratus cumulonimbogenitus, orphaned from their parent Cumulonimbus cloud, set adrift, and adrift, without being fed from below, well, they die. Light, ever so light, rain was falling when this photos was taken.

Eventually the steady, very light rain added it up to 0.02 inches. I felt like I was back in Seattle because the way that rain was falling yesterday afternoon, was EXACTLY like the rain that Mr. Cloud-maven person experienced year in and year out in Seattle, Washington. Yep, that’s how it rains in SEA most of the time and you experienced that right here in Catalina yesterday afternoon.

The day ended with a remarkable clearing of all the low clouds, not a Cumulus could be seen from horizon to horizon. But we did have “pretty Cirrus” (spissatus) clouds, also orphaned from Cumulonimbus, to make a nice sunset.

Today, after the early morning rainbow, one that I didn’t get a photo of?

Gee, the dewpoints are still high, we have a surprising amount of mid-level clouds this morning, some with turrets and showers, yet the U of A weather model suggests no rain later today based on what it sees. Hmmmm. Its usually correct in these matters, though I hope some surprise is waiting for us late this afternoon anyway.

The End.

Kind of upset I missed getting a shot of that unusual morning rainbow because the camera had no SD card again, so I think instead, out of spite, I will put in a recent photo of some kind of beetle.

Grazed and confused

Man, its tough to get rain here sometimes. Not sure why we seem to be in a death zone for Cumulonimbus clouds lately. Yesterday, a really great shower plodded toward Catalina and only to fade on the east side, and propagate off to the west and over the Tortolita Mountains (veered down the sideline, in football speak). I guess we should feel lucky that, due to the lightly raining “stratiform” (blanket cloud) residual cloud from this strong storm, we got 0.02 inches here last evening. Coulda been worse, of course. (BTW, if you’re an old rocker and want to hear, “Dazed and Confused”, to which I allude to in the title, go here.)

Here’s the photo record in thumbnails, which I thought was interesting enough because this moderate-sized shower really exploded into something large as it approached from near the Tucson Mountains. You can also go here to get the full version as seen from the top of the Wildcat Dept of Atmos. Meteoro.

4:54 PM. Nice and cute; its even heading this way, but way too far away to make it, given the short lifetimes of small Cumulonimbus clouds.	5:04 PM. Huh? Its STILL coming, and seems to be developing a new “crop”; those flanking, non-raining clouds that might grow to take the place of the raining one. Oh, it’ll never make it. Too small.	5:36 PM. Its not small anymore! Holy Smokes! And look at those “fountain-of-youth-required-for-new-life-new dump for Cumulonimbus flanking clouds! This could be great dump here!
6:04 PM. Here, the side of the storm approaching Catalina. The flanking lower cloud deck has disappearing and only light to moderate rain is upwind now. Without re-inforcements from below, that approaching rain will only get lighter and lighter as it approaches. Dang.	6:11 PM. Awesome, but somehow “wrong”, falling over there. An almost black flanking cloud, piled high on top, was forced there by the outflow winds from the original storm as it dropped its first heavy load in Oro Valley. Because those winds aren’t symmetrical blowing out from the rainshaft, it happened that the strongest winds and uplift over them went over there. Dang#2	7:07 PM. Its raining lightly here now, coded “R–” or “RW–” in your log book. The cloud would be termed, Altostratus cumulonimbogenitus (namely, debris cloud, trash clouds from our glorious Cbs).

To finish off with something more positive, this sunrise photo taken just now while a few drops of rain were falling.

The Weather Ahead.

Drying trend starts on Wednesday, the 25th and lasts a couple of days. The Enviro Canada model saw this coming some days ago, the US WRF-GFS not so much, but they agree now.

The clouds and Cbs return on the 29th with July finishing strong in activity.

In the meantime, another great day ahead, one with large Cumulonimbus clouds and scenes like the past few days are on tap.

More, later.

It is later.

Here is the U of A model output for today, hour by hour. Lots of activity seen for us in Catland beginning after 12 Noon with numerous showers developing by then, but nothing for tomorrow and the next day.

Maybe you should call in sick today, and enjoy the sky all day.

The End.

Stuck in the middle; only 0.03 inches in Catalina from Kansas skies

“Shafts to the left of me, shafts to the right of me, but here I am, stuck in the middle with you.” (Yeah, and without any rain.) Who can’t forget Stealers Wheel? Most everybody I guess.

Here is an example of a “middle”, an empty region between rainshafts in this case. You don’t want to be there. Boring, as in “baby I’m bored”, for emphasis. But that’s what we “Catalonians” got yesterday, the middle.

As the three of you who follow this blog know, I don’t usually concentrate photographing the “middle” or “tweeners” as some baseball-cloudcentric fans might call these kinds of scenes; I like to show the shaft. I NEVER get tired of shafts, or, in fact, being “shafted” by rainshafts.

Never will.

I did think, in taking this first shot, that the dark base ahead of the “middle” would drop its load on me. I had already prepared a story in my mind with a “happy” flash flood ending. I readied my camera, got the tripod out.

But, no. It missed me and my gage, slipping off to the right, or to west from the spot above, dumping its load on north Oro Valley and Saddlebrooke. I can’t wait to see how much rain the rainloggers over there report this morning compared to my crummy 0.03 inches. Oh, well. There was generally about 0.4 to an inch in the Catalinas. Hooray! More green, more water!

Commercial break:

In trying to make the best of a situation that was fast becoming a disappointment, I noticed some birds floating around in the updraft of the dark base as it came almost overhead. Suddenly, I realized, as I started to carry out my niche of photographing cloud bottoms, that a cloud bottom photo with some kind of bird in it, who knows what, probably using the updraft into this cloud base to ride on, a kind of “bird surfing” would likely appeal to the “bird set”, Audubonners and the like, etc., thus expanding my commercial base beyond just the cloud bottom crowd. It was a quite a striking, moneyful thought.

BTW, these birds are doing what cloud seeding aircraft do, circle in the updraft below cloud bases and release nuclei, sometimes “hygroscopic” nuclei, ones that form drops, and sometimes “ice nuclei”, ones that form ice crystals. See, at last I got some education in! You got schooled! Didn’t see that one coming did you?

I’ll address whether cloud seeding works in a rant some day…

Below, the resulting symbiotic photo, now named, “Base and Birds, or the more accessible, “Surfing Birds.” It will cost you one dollar to download it….hahahah, sort of. “Hey”, let us not forget the words of the great Danny Elfman, Oingo Boingo: “There’s nothing wrong with capitalism…don’t try to make me feel guilty…”)

—-end of commercial break

BTW, the discerning cloud bottomer will notice that this base has some inconsistencies, is not quite solid, suggesting its not due to a large continuous updraft area; only part of it is. This was a clue that there could be a disappointment.

Kansas skies?Oh yeah, there were some itty bitty tubes on the front side of that jack hammer of a storm that rolled into Oro Valley from Tucson yesterday around 1:50 PM. Take a look below. Second time in a week have seen a “tube”. Getting very tubular around here. Check out the U of A time lapse movie for a real fright night day as that big boy goes by. “Totally awesome!”

Some nice lightning around, too. Here are a couple of those shots to end things off with.

Finally, a nice sunset peering through a hole in an Altostratus cumulonimbogenitus opacus overcast that ended our day–english translation, thick debris clouds leftover from our many thunderstorms yesterday.

Today?

Another day, another dollop? Photogenic Cumulonimbus clouds all around again this afternoon. Let’s hope its more than a dollop today.

More details here from the U of A and here from our friendly NWS, always there when you need them and when you don’t.

The End.

Yesterday’s drama, forecasting for picnics, etc.

In case you missed it, and you probably did because you were still in bed while I was doing things for you, there was a pretty sunrise to start the day yesterday, one that would not disappoint later by being a dry one. After all, we’re here in the peak of our summer rain season.

Got 0.27 inches here, and 0.40 inches in Sutherland Heights. (The U of AZ rainfall network will have lots of data, some places getting over an inch yesterday. Pima County amounts here.)

BTW, as mind wanders, the real monsoon in India is a a little below normal this year so far. But, check out these forecast maps from IPS Meteostar and look at the west coast of India. It rains every day all day for the 15 days of the computer model run. Nothing really too unusual about that, rain every day all day on the western Ghats, 10-20 inches a week. Now THAT is a monsoon! Thought you might like a little distraction, get you out of any ruts you might be, get you thinking “outside the box” for a change.

OUR story, the long and winding one, continues below, though it can be seen in totality, in the short form in the U of A time lapse movie. This is a great U of A movie, with several “dump trucks” going by. Its amazing how much water can just suddenly be unloaded by a cloud!

Also, lenticular clouds (hover clouds) can be seen at the beginning and end of the movie downstream of the Cat Mountains, unusual for summer.

The weather ahead.

U of A mod results not yet available at this hour (5:08 AM), but other model outputs suggest another three days, including today, of the kinds of scenes shown above.
Every day will be that bit different in shower coverage, of course, that governed by subtleties in the flow aloft, grade of moisture supply, dewpoints, etc.

But those days ahead will be great enough, our deserts being drenched here and there, the desert foilage exploding. Enjoy those clouds while they’re here.

The End.

Black is beautiful

Here in this part of Catalina another 0.11 inches dropped from the sky in two weak, but great thundershowers yesterday afternoon, one that will help keep the greening of the desert coming on strong. As many of you know, my photographic niche is cloud bottoms, particular dark ones, and to me, beautiful, dramatic ones when rain or hail filaments begin shredding the air below them, followed by the dump.

Below are a couple of those bottom shots from yesterday. This cloud trucked off from over Catalina toward the SW and over Oro Valley/Marana where it began to rain.

Later, two weak, but welcome thunderstorms rolled off the Cat Mountains from the NE, giving us 0.05 and then 0.06 inches in the second. Below, here they come!

Yesterday’s rain totals can be found here (rainlog.com) and with the Pima County Flood Control Network. Some areas in and near Tucson recorded over an inch again. How fine.

Today?

The dewpoints are higher, cloud bases are a bit lower, and so monster dumps in the area are VIRTUALLY guaranteed (never can tell exactly where they will be). However, conditions aloft are also conducive to larger shower areas than yesterday’s were, that is, large clusters of Cumulonimbus clouds are more likely today, meaning larger areas covered by rain, and longer durations of rain. Cool. You can get the “skinny” from the U of A model here.

Quiz

The weather ahead.

Rain in the area, the models say, every day for the next few days. Check here and with Bob (our local expert), who seems to be mad a lot, even titling his blog, “madweather.” I guess he’s not afraid, like some men, of showing his emotions. I get mad myself, but usually its when it doesn’t rain on me that day.

The literal greening of Catalina and its environs

Yesterday in the State Lands:

OK, enough about ME; what about the weather?

No rain today around here, according to our best model output, which, of course, is that issued by the University of Arizona Wildcats Dept of Atmospheric Meteorology. But tomorrow, oh yeah, tomorrow, its BACK!

The end.

The greening of July

Update at 7:17 AM: while mods had a dry day today (e.g., U of A yesterday), NWS has a much higher chance at 30% for our area today, and it sure looks like a higher chance. (U of A Beowulf Cluster mod not available this morning for hi res check.)

While trying to get through the next couple of predicted days with lesser chance of rain though it doesn’t feel like it right now at 7:17 AM, and after a disappointing 0.02 inches yesterday afternoon, I wanted to check the Arizona rain futures in two models, the N-viro Can U-ro (as we would write it today) and the USA WRF-“Goofus”, both spoken with affection, to see how much “green” they have for us. “Green¹” has been the chosen color for rain by meteorologists, a particularly colorful people, who as children had an extra wide assortment of Crayolas and colored pencils.

Both models have a LOT of green in Arizona during the next 6-15 days except, as noted, for today and tomorrow where rain is marginal.

Below, as example from the Environ Can mod result for the evening of July 22nd. Note green splotches in AZ, lower right hand corner (blue is very light rain; yellows and reds are heavier rains).

Along with the positions of rain here, in the upper left hand corner, is the forecast for where “our” big fat summer anticyclone is going to be on that day: centered way over the state where Dorothy used to live. The air circulating around that high, clockwise, is circulating moist air into Arizona (while baking Dorothy and a lot of other people in the nation’s mid-section). I love these maps and what they portend for AZ over the next week!

Below a sample chart for even farther out into the future from a rendering of WRF_GFS from IPS Meteostar for the evening of August 1st. There is still “green” in Arizona, this time around Yuma, and there has been green in Arizona every day! With our great start, it could mean that we will experience one of the wettest July’s ever in SE AZ! The droughty weather pendulum may have swung back to make things up to us.

How do we know such medium range forecasts are have a better chance than usual of verifying?

Of course, if you are a regular part of this blogpire, you will know the answer.

It comes from the NOAA Spaghetti factory. We meteorologists, not satisfied with one model run, like to mess them up at the start, and then look at the various “perturbed” model runs fro the 500 millibar level, and see if there is one “answer” that remains “strong”, still visible in the output amongst all the many contours of the wrecked ones. The middle of the troposphere, that domain where all weather occurs, is at about 500 millibars of pressure; sea level pressure averages around 1000 millibars (1013.6 millibars is the bottom of the “standard” atmosphere. We like to see what the pressure patterns are like in the middle because things clarify up there, that’s where you can find jet streams, those steering currents for storms at the ground.

OK, now the punch line, don’t laugh too hard.

Below is the (humorous) plot from NOAA based on last evening’s global data for the 500 mb level due to combining:

1) the model run using the actual measurements made around the world at 5 PM AST,

2) and along with that one run, many model runs due to inputing slightly erroneous data at the beginning of the run.

Many of you will see this as a “knee-slapper”, and it really is because its a faulty production with too many contours.

But, in spite of a faulty NOAA run, there is still some information about our “big fat anticyclone” and where the most likely position will be on the evening of August 1st, some two weeks from now. Believe or not, it is a powerful tool.

That likeliest of positions of our big fat anticyclone is that little dark spot over the Four Corners area mostly devoid of lines in this humorous output. On this map, the Four Corners area is straight above the yellow legend line segment. At left, a close-up of that Four Corners area with the fewest lines.

In the summer, Arizonans “need” to have a high in the middle of the troposphere to the north or east. And that’s where the signal is strongest, represented by a center of that high situated over the Four Corners area even when the model has been degraded by bad measurements.

So, in sum, look for lots of rain in Arizona overall during the rest of July. How nice, except when telephone poles are blown over, as happened on Sunday.

PS: I took a lot of great cloud scenes yesterday afternoon and evening, but you need to have an SD card installed in your camera before a photograph is recorded. So no photos. I hope this is a useful hint for photographers out there.

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¹“Green” in the meteorological color scheme of things, means rain, an area where the models think it will have rained is colored green as a rule. Green has been the choice of meteorologists for liquid precip ever since weather began, back in the early 20th Century at the Bergen School of Meteorology in Norway. Why did those Norwegian meteorologists with names like Bjerknes, Palmén, Holmboe, Godske, Petterssen, Rossby, Bergeron, choose green for rain? Just because.