Little low goes by at 30,000 feet

While working on a climate issues rant due to an article in the latest issue of Scientific American (May 25th), we had an interesting cloud day yesterday.  I needed a cooling off period anyway, so I thought I would point out some interesting things from yesterday, June 3rd.

Here is yesterday’s cloud movie pointed at the Catalinas, and courtesy of the University of Arizona‘s Atmos Sci Dept.  This is interesting because you will see the Cirrus moving out of the west in the morning, with some Altocumulus, Cirrocumulus underneath, then by afternoon, you will see the Cirrus moving from the east!   Hardly ever see that much change in wind direction at 30-40 kft in such a short time.

Also in the movie you will see a couple of great examples of Cirrus uncinus, tufted Cirrus with trails of snow coming out, actually more like single, tiny ice crystals maybe only a few human hairs in diameter (say 300 microns or so).  What type of crystal?  Of course, toward the bottom of the trails, you always want to guess, “bullet rosettes.”  Toward the top of those clouds they are likely simpler crystals, like short hexagonal columns or tiny hexagonal plates, not that you would care THAT much.

24 h satellite loop of water vapor channel showing itty bitty low that went just to the south of us yesterday.  Look hard in SW Arizona in the beginning and you’ll be able to just make out a little swirl in the wind.

Height of clouds above us?  About 25,000 to 30,000 feet.

Along with that low going overhead, is this strange event:  almost no wind between 25,000 and 30,000 feet, indicating that the exact center passed almost overhead.  It would be like having calm winds on Mt. Everest; just doesn’t happen very often.  Here is the TUS sounding for 5 PM AST yesterday.  And, if, like me, you thought you were looking at the same blob of Cirrus for hours, you just about were!  That due to the winds coming to a virtual halt.  Where the lines (temperature and dewpoint) pinch in together in the sounding below is where the clouds were located, and in the first column to the right of the box are the winds.  Notice what they were at the “400” and ” 200″ levels (millibars, between 23,000 and 40,000 feet above sea level):  “light and variable.”

It was about this time, 1 PM AST, that I began to notice that something was “wrong.”  When I came out of the gym an hour later, this patch of Cirrus, the one I had taken a picture of going in, was still there in pretty much the same spot.  By 4 PM AST, it had drifted ever so slightly to the north, but there it was, still hanging around, as was the case at 5:40 PM and 6:51 PM, shown in the the next two shots.  Even at sunset, those Cirrus clouds were still around.

BTW, these would not be the same cloud particles up there, since the crystals are always falling out and have to be replaced by newly formed cloud.  Those tufts and compact specs at the top of these clouds (well, that’s where they are if you can’t tell) in these photos represent that process.   In those tufts the concentrations are tremendous, but once formed they gradually spread out, much like a plume of smoke.

 

 

Catalina winter rainfall to end by 2035!

I was working on updating our Catalina October through May historical rainfall data with this past season’s total,  when a friend brought this Scientific American article to my attention. Today’s blog title is inspired by the May 25th, 2012, issue of Scientific American, one in which it was pronounced :

“Climate Armageddon: How the World’s Weather Could Quickly Run Amok [Excerpt]

Climate scientists think a perfect storm of climate “flips” could cause massive upheavals in a matter of years.” 

The full, scary article is here.   Sci Am, in this article, created the “perfect storm” of sensationalism….alluding here to their sub-title.   Worst case climate conjectures are piled to dizzying heights.  It has inspired many commentaries like the one I am going to make below.   Be sure to read the many comments at the end of the Sci Am article.

The key word in the title and sub-title is, “could.”  For credibility, the Sci. Am. also used the phrase, “climate scientists” which technically could mean just two of thousands or all of them. They quote a couple of climate scientists, but few climate scientists believe that the horrendous things conjectured in this article will happen “quickly”,  in a “matter of years”;  that there are “tipping points” that will lead to temperatures here that will melt lead (as in metal)!
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Now for today’s blog…
I realized as soon as I saw the Sci Am headine that what I was going to write about concerning Catalina’s updated rainfall from this past winter would be pretty lame; not sensational enough.  So I thought I would rework our Catalina rainfall update from this past cool season to better reflect today’s climate reporting modus operandi;  kind of “go with the flow”, grab some headlines, and that MO is reflected in today’s title.
By the way, the majority of the data I am going to show, originate with the folks at Our Garden, a place you should patronize royally for the great local climate records they have kept for us.

What I saw, thinking in the “excitement” vein after the Sci Am article, is that by projecting the trendline (best fit) of our 35 year decline in rainfall we have now just a couple of decades into the future,  is that the trendline would reach the zero rainfall point, the x-axis, before long.  With that intercept at zero comes the unassailable (or is it?) conclusion that it will no longer rain between October 1st and May 31st in Catalina by 2035!

Fantastic!  A show-stopper!   Finally, I will be popular.  But in reporting this I will have to look very sad, upset, but at the same time be glad inside that I have something great that people will want to hear.

Moreover,  these results I am reporting can be expanded beyond Catalina; more excitement!  Catalina is MUCH wetter than surrounding lowland areas in the cool season, about 10 inches vs. 5-6 inches, lower areas that include Tucson, Marana, etc. Therefore, this conclusion can be confidently applied to those lower elevation locations as well, ones that have huge populations:  No more cool season rain by 2035 in Tucson!

But, why stop even there with our local scene?

Why not assert, since no precipitation station “…is an island, entire of itself”,  to paraphrase John Donne, that this trend MAY apply to the entire State of Arizona and adjacent states as well!  Now we’re talkin’ some real excitement, 10s of millions of people getting worked up.

Now for the totality of evidence for my end-of-rainfall claim, this graph1:

 Call a news conference now!

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OK, “truth-in packaging”: its not going to happen, relax.

Here is a long term, quite soothing record of Arizona rainfall over the years, courtesy of NOAA via Roger Cohen, who was commenting on a NM wildfire story in the New York Times with his graph:

In our own Catalina rainfall graph, I don’t have enough data to draw any real conclusions about trends, and that’s clear from this long term graph going back into the late 1890s.

Of course, it is also known by the climate mavens out there, and is also shown in the long term graph, that “Mr. and Mrs. Our Garden” began taking records during one of the wettest periods in Arizona history and in the Southwest as a matter of fact, over the past 100 and more years!  Take a look at the NOAA graph above and observe those rainfall values in the late 1970s into the early 1990s.  So, if you moved here then, and think the climate was much wetter back then than it is now, you’re right, but it wouldn’t have been our normal climate, either! Get over it, as The Eagles have told us to do; after all, we live in desert where most years are drier than normal.

So, a downward trend after the first ten years or so of the Our Garden rainfall record was inevitable.  You need at least 50 years to establish climate normals and trends, particularly around mountainous regions, according to the World Meteorological Organizations statements on climate records.

Note, too, that it was consistently DRIER than here during the past 10 years of “drought” in the late 1940s through into the early 1970s, and also at the turn of the century!  Amazing.  Man, those were awful times in AZ!

You can stop reading here since most of the points I wanted to make have been made.
The End1

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OK, now to be serious for awhile;  soapbox time, rant time, what-scientists-are-supposed-to-do time, “ideals of science”, etc.  Furrowing brow now…usually people start moving away, etc.

Scientific American is a magazine that tries to be “scientific”, that is, report recent findings in science in an objective manner, and make them understandable for the general public.  Great.

Unfortunately, the temptation for a general audience magazine is always one of trying to get the most readers for each issue (“bang” for the “buck”), and the temptation to phrase article titles in sensational terms to gain readership is always present, as I have done in the title of this blog, trying to expand readership beyond the two I have.   Its understandable.   Even in our best peer-reviewed journals, the hardest ones to get into, Science and Nature, have this temptation to some degree, but mostly avoid it with staid covers and “headlines.”

But going the sensational route has a way of backfiring, like the claims made in the late 1960s into the 1970s about an imminent ice age; that our warm “Interglacial” period between Ice Ages (the Holocene)  was about to end, and “global cooling” was going to wreak havoc with just about everything.

Or, more recently, that snowpacks in the Pacific Northwest were going to disappear soon, in just decades like my claim above about Catalina rainfall.  Those claims were made by scientists who got carried away by using only some of the data, not all of it, beginning with an era of high snowpacks, as I have done with our Catalina rainfall, starting with an era of high rainfall.

Those snowpack claims, too, were ones that were ripe for a hungry media primed for global warming (or earlier, global cooling) disaster stories which, of course, sell newspapers and magazines and appeared in such media giants as Time, and numerous media outlets.  The greater the catastrophic outlooks, the greater the sales.

Snowpacks in the Pacific NW have been increasing since those claims were made, 5-10 years ago.  Nor could researchers find any evidence that the temperatures over the past few decades at mountain top level were increasing, something that had to happen to support claims of earlier melting off of snowpacks and less deep ones.  If real estate has the mantra, location, location, location, science is supposed to have the mantra, caution, caution, caution.

Now it MAY be that EVENTUALLY snowpacks in the Pacific Northwest WILL decline.  But the scientists who made the original sensational claims were incautious.  They should have pointed out that it will be a very gradual process and many things might come to bear on such an overall gradual decrease that might make it appear that nothing is happening for years at a time due to changes in weather regimes, like the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, Arctic Oscillation, etc.. Those of us who know weather know that there are tipping points in which weather regimes go into a new modes, where low centers like to be changes, and those changes can persist for many years.  Why they happen is not known but being investigated.

These kinds of regime tips from one state to another was anticipated by the “Father of Chaos Theory”, E. N. Lorenz, some 40 years ago (e.g., “Climate Change as a Mathematical Problem” when he pointed out the charateristics of atmospheres that are “transitive” (ones that don’t flip-flop into new modes) and “intransitive” ones that do flip-flop into new modes without much “forcing”.   Flip-floping is just an inherent property that an “intransitive” atmosphere has and is likely represented by the oscillations mentioned in the previous paragraph.

Interestingly, looking back at all the climate flip-flops that had occurred over the eons of the earth’s history, Lorenz ventured that “human (climate) forcings” can likely be ignored since they had not caused the remarkable climate changes in the past.

Those of us who know anything about the global warming future projected know that REGIONAL effects of GW are dicey; not well known.  Some places could really warm up, while some places could even cool off due to, for example, stronger summer sea breezes flowing toward warmer continents, something that may already be under way according to some researchers.

Or, the storm track-jet stream positions might shift and bring cooler weather to a relatively small regions while the globe overall warms up.  We know, for example, that troughs aloft (with their cold air) tend to shift inland to the western US as the northern hemisphere warms up in the spring.  As that happens, storms with cold fronts tend to move more from the northwest to the southeast, delaying the onset of higher spring temperatures in the West that otherwise might happen.

These regional effects are just beginning to be explored with higher resolution models that can capture regional effects better.

Now we’re ALL concerned today about where the climate MAY be heading.

We, the people,  are really wrecking things royally with our air pollution and trace gas emissions.  The sky is awful-looking on a regular basis due to smog in huge parts of the world now.  What’s interesting is how accustomed, and non-chalant we have become to the “white sky” so prevalent in the eastern US on humid days.

The climate system of this planet is extremely complicated and even now it is not known why the earth’s temperature has stopped increasing over the past 10-15 years while there have been huge increases in CO2 and methane, those gases that are mainly responsible for the projected and past global warmings that have occurred.

We, as scientists, should always pause, take a deep breath of “humility”, when something major like this happens, the recent leveling of the earth’s temperature, when we can’t explain it and start to rethink our hypotheses.  No climate model expected this leveling in temperature to happen back when it started.

Here in Catalina we have a “problem” with our climate rainfall data.  Its been drying out for awhile, years, really, in the cooler part of the year  (October through May), and last winter’s precip did nothing to alter this downward trend even though it was wetter than the previous cool season of Oct 2010-May 2011.   That latter one was so dry that there were no spring wildflowers at the end of that awful winter.

Global warming (GW) is the most easily, readily accepted explanation for everything these days, including that big dust devil that went through Catalina a few days ago around 3:30 PM.  In the 1950s, it was “atomic testing” that caused all manner of strange weather inthe popular lexicon, 1960s and 1970s, it was global cooling (with scientists on board), and in the 1980s and 1990s, El Ninos caused EVERYTHING strange, beyond what we know El Ninos really do.

Those were fun times for real meteorologists, familiar with the year to year vagaries of weather, ones that lead to extremes of all kinds.

The End2.

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1Since sarcasm is the refuge of a small mind its been said, I have added some more sarcasm to the legends in this graph as well.  I am exulting in the small mind!  Why pretend to be something you’re not?

 

 

“Los Angeles” Catalina

Got a little homesick yesterday looking at the white sky, the barely visible mountains in the distance, like Twin Peaks, eyes a little teary, not from sadness so much, but from smog and smoke.  Grew up in the San Fernando Valley you know, Reseda.  Lots of smog there at times, though not as much as in Burbank, thank heavens, where it banked up against the San Gabriel Mountains.

Reseda, as you know is quite famous from the Karate Kid movie and was even mentioned by Frank Zappa in his Tinsel Town Rebellion album so I like to tell people that I grew up there, went to Reseda High School, played some sports. Maybe I should add a sports highlight to convince you that I went to such a famous high school, and maybe, too, mention that overpowering, incapacitating crush I had on Rozzi R. when I was 15 years old, since a story like that would titillate your interests more than a sports story, or maybe even stuff about weather.  I think I know the people who read this blog pretty darn well.

Below is that “nostalgic” LA sky we had yesterday, thanks to fires in New Mexico, the second one of the yellowish-orange sun typically associated with smoke particles.  Of course, the “white sky” is common on humid days back East, and in the global warming domain, is our friend.

Yes, that’s right, smog is our “friend”, because, as was likely yesterday, in spite of record heat, the temperature would have even been a tad HIGHER without that smoke layer!

In fact, one of the conundrums in foretelling climate in the coming decades, is how much smoke, our “friend”, will offset the warming due to trace gases like CO2.  Imagine, a world of never-blue-but-always-white skies and no more worries about global warming!

As the cliché goes, “Beam me up, Scotty” if such a world came to pass!  So, lets knock off the fires, all smog, in fact, and untoward gases!

  More clouds, less smog today 

In case you missed it, some sunrise Cirrus today!  Finally a cloud.  Who cares if its at 45,000 feet above the ground!  It shows there can still be humidity in the air.

Probably had some….OK, your guess… on the ice crystal type up there in those Cirrus clouds.

Yes, that’s right, bullet rosettes, would be an excellent guess, crystals with a solid “germ” center from which columns radiate outward like these ones below captured in Cirrus clouds over Barrow, AK, some years ago.

 

 Update on “dusty coolsnap”, foretold many days ago for around June 5th.

 Here, from the NWS Tucson, you will see that “dusty coolsnap”,  foretold by the models many days ago, has been evolving into “breezynotashotsnap”, if you can call that a “snap”, a word that implies more suddeness that what will likely happen.  Still, a trough brushes by to the north, just doesn’t have the amplitude it once did in the models; we’ll see only some moderation in temps.  How can they not “moderate” after record highs, so that was an easy thing for me to say.

Still no rain in mods for hereabouts, but some close calls from afternoon thunderstorms in New Mexico every now and then.

The awful indications is, just beyond a week from now, more record HIGH temperatures lasting for a few days!  Yikes.

The End


 

Layered smoke, not clouds yesterday

From dawn til dusk, Catalina was plagued by a smoke layer from the fires in western New Mexico, ones you wouldn’t ordinarily think that smoke would get here from.

An example of the mid-day smoke that looked so much like a cirrostratus layer.
Ditto here.

Here is a loop of the water vapor imagery that will show you the air movement from where those fires are to us in Catalina.  Also, even more dramatic, showing this is the visible satellite image from the Atmos. Sci. Dept at the U of WA, whose sports teams are not involved in NCAA baseball or softball playoffs, BTW.  The arrow points to Catalina, and you can see that by the time of this image, 5 PM AST, we were not in the thickest part.

Now, as many of you know, air flowing down from the northeast is often a VERY good thing for rain here in mid-July since the afternoon thunderstorms over the White Mountains coming bopping on down in the evenings from that direction, driven by driving outflow winds from the northeast, pushing over and around Charoleau Gap.  Can’t you just see the blackening July sky, the cloud-to-ground strokes to the northeast, then as close as they are to us, parts of the Catalina Mountains beginning to disappear, no longer visible through the dense rainshafts!  Ah, yes, our great July weather…

In the sat image, you can also see that thunderstorms, best represented by the whitest dots in this image next to duller, smooth regions, are not so far away from us.   Those whitest parts likely represent the regions of the storms where there are liquid cloud drops and updrafts, the cumuliform part. Those less white zones that appear so smooth, the “stratiform” or anvil portions composed solely of ice.

Rain is usually not occurring at the ground in most of the anvil regions; its just icy fluff, ejecta, and in many cases, counterproductive you might say.  That’s because anvils can shade a huge area and kill of the Cumulus that might otherwise grow into storms.

Any rain indicated in the models for Catalina in the next 15 days?

No.

 

The End.

 

 


Dusty cool snap at hand

In MINUTES, the temperature will head downward as our long foretold (remember the spaghetti plots?) , “dusty cool snap” finally arrives.  This time, from Intellicast,  you can see below the blob coming, that blob of much lower temperatures with an epicenter at Las Vegas. Unfortunately, there are few clouds with this system, oh, maybe enough for a scruff over the Catalina’s a little later this morning and in the afternoon, Cumulis humilis, that sort of thing,  and THEN we’ll get some nice cloud shadows on the mountains for awhile.

If you have a barometer, though, you will get to enjoy the “pressure check”, that sudden, sharp rise in pressure as the air over the barometer gets cooler and denser, mashes down on it more as the cold front goes by!  You could be informing your neighbors about it.  (Actually, “on further review”, with the temperature in descent now (5:18 AM), and barometer on the rise,  I think the cold front has gone by already. )

BTW, while its windy here in Catalina right now, down in Tucson, they’re only reporting 7 knots, no gusts.  This is kind of usual for this situation for us to get the brunt of the winds funneling up the Oro Valley while TUS is protected for the time being.

Still enough wind/pressure gradients around for dust today, but those gusty winds should really be gone by tonight and tomorrow in Catalina as that deep low, still in the Great Basin fades.  See below for a neat looking weather map from where else, the University of Washington.  In case you want to see more maps, go here.

Feels great to be in the circulation of a big low, that one centered in Utah right now (5 AM AST.  People all around the country are probably talking about us and all the weather we’re having hereabouts, at least the ones watching The Weather Channel.

Not much ahead to talk about, just a few very pleasant clear days and rising temperatures.

HOWEVER, updating here at 6:11 AM, and having just checked the NOAA spaghetti factory, it does appear, but with moderate confidence, that another dusty cool snap is ahead for 11-12 days from now in a pattern remarkably like the current one with a “Big Trough” along the West Coast again.  That event would center around June 7th plus or minus a day or so.  It will be fun to keep an eye on this every coupla days.

The End.

Wind pummels Catalina again and again and again

Thinking about buying into the wind turbine thing….

Also, I’m hearing complaints about Catalina weather from anonymous sources.  First, in late winter, it was “too dry.”   Then recently,  it was “too hot.”  Now, I am hearing, “its too windy, I can’t take my horse out, my baseball cap blew off, etc.”

What have we become?

Hot, dry and windy, as in haboobs, dust devils, straight line thunderstorm winds, happen all the time in DESERTS.  I am trying to think of a word for it, oh, there it is, we have become, “crybabies.” Yes, we have become “weather crybabies.”   Me, too.  It doesn’t rain enough in the desert and I haven’t really seen a good dust devil yet this spring.

OK, look for more dirt in the house today as winds perk up to 40-50 mph in momentary puffs over the next 24 h or so.  However, for perspective, Hurricane Bud (110 mph sustained max winds) is about to strike the Mexican coast, so we really don’t have much to complain about in comparison except the fact that the remnants of Hurricane Bud will not come up here, but instead go over to Texas after crossing Mexico.  Had this Big Trough causing all the low pressure and winds been a few hundred miles farther west, little Bud might have been swept up this way.  Pretty upset by the bad “weather” draw we got so I didn’t want to miss an opportunity to complain a bit.

Take a look at this behemoth trough on the University of Washington 500 mb map for 5 AM AST this morning.  Its truly gigantic, and has a really cold core over northern California with snow levels down to.  The full loop is here.  The clouds of Bud are in the extreme lower right hand corner.

Below this map is the surface pressure pattern showing the huge low center in the Great Basin, like a giant vacuum cleaner up there that is sucking the life out of the air around it and that air to the south of us, hence why that air is rushing northward across us with such enthusiasm; it wants to go right into the center and fill it up.

So why are there clouds and precip?  Its too dry, of course, darn it.  No tropical air can get to us with such a strong jet stream coming out of the Pacific and around that trough.  The Pacific air, where it is deep and moist enough for rain and snow,  is constrained within the jet stream core at 500 mb, and that core air will never reach us!  Below, this morning’s sounding from Tucson, courtesy of the Wyoming Cowboys, in case you didn’t believe me that it was too dry.  If the two heavy lines come together, it would be moist and clouds would be present, and as you can see, that doesn’t happen on this morning’s balloon sounding.  And won’t happen, except for maybe rogue lenticular cloud, or, as the Beowulf Cluster at the U of A sees here,  a scattered Cumulis humilis of no consequence this afternoon except maybe to produce nice shadows on our glorious mountains.  Naturally, cooler air is on its way, too.  More details here at the NWS.

The End

 

Dusty sunset

In case you missed it, due to all the dust, yesterday’s sunset:

Moreover, if you go to the NWS Tucson site and the forecast for Catalinaland, you will see icons showing pretty much the same thing for today and tomorrow as is in these photos. It will be interesting to see how deep the dust gets.

Where did all that dust come from, that plume of dust that moved into Tucson and environs during the mid-afternoon?

The Mexican Sonoran Desert NE of the Gulf of Baja.

You can see rivulets of dust being raised in this visible satelllite imagery loop (this will take a LOT of band width!) if you look hard at the desert regions southwest of the AZ border.  Also check out the U of A’s loop here, but that one will soon be overwritten, so good luck, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

Below, a still from that loop for 6:30 PM AST, near the time of the photos, with the dust origin region annotated with a red circle, something I have only recently learned to to with Apple’s Preview photo viewing software.  Dang.  The plumes are oriented SW-NE.  So, a few tons of Mexican desert came across the border yesterday to make AZ that bit higher in elevation.

Also in this sat image is the horrible fire near Silver City, NM, northeast of the red circle, the one that grew so much yesterday in the wind and heat.  You can see that the smoke plume was already reaching as far as Texas by the time of this image, 6:30 PM AST!

BTW, smoke particles are, in general, much smaller than dust particles are (hundredths of microns vs. a few microns) and the color of the setting sun can be used to help tell what you are looking at as far as aerosol particles go.  Smoky sunsets tend toward orange and red; dusty ones toward yellow, as above.

The End.

Windy, windier, windiest

Pretty much like that title will be the scene for Catalina for the next three days, particularly during the afternoons as temperatures moderate slightly to more normal values in the mid-upper 90s today, while the series of “Tonopah low” pressure centers that will form in Nevada and then move away, are stronger and stronger.  The strongest one one is expected to form on Friday.  Of course, “as always”, there was a low over Tonopah, NV, earlier today; now its down around Blythe, with cooler air following behind it.

Check our NWS excitement here where you’ll see maps and warnings galore.  Also, here, where you can see the 24 h temperature change, a good tool for where cold fronts have passed.  At this point, the major invasion of cold air stays to the north.  Its later on the weekend it barges down thisaway.

Here are the current satellite and surface pressure map, and the “jet stream” maps (for 500 mb), both from the U of WA.  What’s pretty unusual in our domain at 500 mb is how “warm” it is south of the jet stream (where the contours are bunched the most) over central California and Arizona.  Its only -5 C at Tucson right now, hardly below freezing, up around 20,000 feet!  This suggests that the racing around and outside the jet core on the south side has been subsiding like mad, and in doing that, compressing and heating up.

So what you might say?

Well, thinking of others here, normally, gobs of precip break out in the central and southern Plains States when these big troughs settle into the SW and Great Basin, but this one, on the models for the next few days, hardly produces ANY precip!  Its pretty upsetting, really, because this could have been a real soaker out there in those droughty regions; instead the rain is mainly in Montana, the Dakotas and Canada.

And the likely reason is that the air is too hot above all warm and humid air from the Gulf of Mexico that is racing northward in the southern Plains right now to allow deep convection except in isolated areas.  So, as warm as the Gulf air is, there will be an inversion that just won’t break down as they often do when they are not so strong as this one will be.

Nice sunset yesterday due to some passing Cirrus spissatus.  Today will likely see more examples of those, along with Altocumulus or Cirrocumulus lenticulars, probably more off to the north of us because I see some over there to the north now (6 AM AST).

Bad trough! No precip, just a dusty cool snap ahead

Making its entrance today into the Pac NW is the first stage of that MASSIVE trough, foretold long ago by your NOAA spaghetti factory to begin happening about now, and peak out between May 25th-26th.

Now you’ll understand why, if you want to get a handle on the exceptional things that might be in the weather pipeline, you have to have some spaghetti every day.  (Note:  right now, 5:10 AM, the “factory” is down, has a bug in the sofware that REALLY makes it look like “spaghetti” because too many lines are shown.  Its kind of a hoot.  I will have to inform NOAA again, as I did a few days ago, or maybe you can, that something is wrong.  Their answer to me back then was that they had not yet noticed the problem; made me think I was the ONLY one looking at them, also funny!)  It is a powerful tool, one that also foretold the excessive heat we are experiencing today–recall the “June in May” writeup based completely on spaghetti.

OK, onward…

That second pulse of cold air aloft, the one shown below in the forecast map for the afternoon of May 25th (upper left panel) over Reno, NV, is REMARKABLY strong for this time of year, and will bring exceptionally low snow levels to northern and central California for later May.

And look at how much the surface map (upper right hand panel) is in a dither with the circulation around the low pressure at the surface extending all the way from Illinois to California!  Its HUGE!

But what about us?  What does all this atmo commotion mean for you and me?

Briefly, just Dust in the Wind, to allude to an old, sweet song by that heavy metal, huge hair group, Kansas, that hit the scene in the 1970s and were quite something I thought.   Yep, the dryness in this HUGE trough makes me as sad as their song does about being only a spec of dirt.

Look at the lower left hand panel in the forecast chart below to see what the moisture expected at 700 millibars, about 10 k above sea level, or a little above the top of Mt. Sara Lemmon, for the afternoon of May 25th.  It’s grim.

As you can see there are two but regions in the SW and West that have moisture at 10 K; that in central and northern California extending northward and expanding eastward, and a TINY stream from the tropics hundreds of miles to the east of us in western Texas.

Thus, there is no HOPE whatsoever of rain in southern Arizona with this huge system, because,  like almost all of our cold winter systems, the core of the jet stream at 500 millibars, that band of wind that circumscribes the Pacific moisture over northern Califonia below, NEVER gets here, dammitall!

And those powerful winds around the outside of the trough core, really representing trajectories of subsided air from the cold Pacific, just race around it, preventing an intrusion of tropical air.  The normal tendency for upward motion on the EAST side of all troughs trough is totally inadequate to produce clouds and precip with such dry air.  About the only thing you could expect to see is a few filaments of rapidly moving CIrrus, maybe a lenticular or two on the 25th-26th, and, after the cool air moves in on the 26th, a couple of Cumulus humilis.  And maybe the same kinds of cloud fragments off and on before that.  Otherwise, the only “precipitation” will be “lithometeors”, dust particles.  I suppose they might add up to an eighth of an inch over several days.  Hahahaha.

Sure looks like the Catalina area will be raked with winds above 40 mph in gusts with this system before its over.

Check the excitement at the NWS here in Tucson here.

The End.

El Nino may be in the works for next winter; stories from the field

Here you can read the latest statement from the Climate Prediction Center on the neutral conditions that have developed in the eastern Pacific Ocean–La Nina is gone–and what it sees for next winter from their computer models.  While things are not clear because they are so difficult to foretell, they are talkin’ El Nino some. As we know, the Southwest can benefit tremendously in rainfall when an El Nino develops, and so it is uplifting news to hear ANYTHING about an El Nino in the future and I though you would want to read that, too. Here you can see the last few weeks of global ocean temperature anomalies and how they are changing.

Why talk about next winter now?  We should always be looking ahead in life, planning retirement, vacations, what football games to attend next fall, the important things in life;  besides, there are no clouds to talk about, only hot air currents, maybe a dust devil, so I need some filler material.  Remember when newspapers used filler material to make columns come out even, add some little fact?  Those were great.

Too, I may have to dredge up some “stories from the field” to fill in the boring gaps in weather we have today, like that time they almost rolled over our VW microbus on that big boulevard in Madras (now Chennai), India, in August 1975.  That big boulevard was reserved that day for the funeral parade of freedom fighter, Kamaraj, (against the British) with Indira Ghandi leading it.  We should not have driven on it.  Hundreds of thousands of people lined that boulevard for miles that afternoon! You would not have believed that scene!

The crowd.   What I look like when I am in India (on the right)

I am still white-knuckled thinking about our knuckle-headed project leader who thought it was going to be OK to drive on that funeral route so we would get back to the hotel faster.  He ordered our driver to go onto that boulevard, and then told him to,  “just wave at the police”,  guarding the route as we drove down it.  We were returning from the Madras airport at Meenambakkam where we had been on standby to seed some clouds if they developed over a nearby reservoir catchment area.    We were the only vehicle on that boulevard as the people waited for the official parade.

But then some of the crowd, maybe just a dozen or so, took exception to our driving down that boulevard and rushed our microbus.   Our driver, sped up and slowed down in spurts, swerving left and right as well trying to shake people off his van.  And the ones trying to climb on it did fall off, thank god, but fortunately no one was injured (or run over!)

In another bit of luck, the windows of that microbus were completely opaque due to heavy condensation on the inner surface of the windows, and so the crowds could not see that it was three Anglos in the back of that damn bus violating that boulevard.  Heart pounding now as I relive that drive.

A bit farther, the driver somehow found a side street among the crowd and drove ever so gradually through all of those people lining the boulevard and finally onto the side street he knew was there.

That was an awful thing to have done and still regret being a party to it.  But, somehow, too, my life was spared so I could write this blog in Catalina, AZ.  Interesting.  It better be good!

The latest map below (May 9th conditions) shows that the “warms” have it overall in the global oceans, and what’s important for us is that the cooler-than-normal water in the eastern half of the Pacific along the Equator (representing La Nina conditions) has dissipated.

For comparison, shown this map for May 9th is one for February 1st conditions when our La Nina was holding forth.  Note the below normal temperatures along the Equator westward from South America across the Dateline on that map, and then look to the new one.

So there are no strong forcing factors at present to alter our climate from “normal.” Still means that the weather machine will continue doing its thing, hot, cold, rainy, extremes, etc., but there won’t be a dominant pattern, the kind that leads to a greater chance of drought in the Southwest and southern states as La Nina’s tend to do in late winter and spring. Yay!  Summers don’t seem to be much affected by either of these conditions.


 The Big One, that giant trough, is still on the way for implantation in the West, but only wind projected here

Dang.  No rain.  Likely we’ll hear about low temperature records in parts of California, Nevada, the Pac NW, extreme winds at various places, and hot and windy conditions here and in the Plains States.   Very little rain is projected out there as well, at least in the early going of this enormous trough and low system.  Starts affecting us on Wednesday; the TEEVEE weather presenters will be all over this one!