At sunset yesterday, this rarely seen optical display called a “sun pillar”:
Waited for a cute bird or bat to fly above or through the pillar, making it a more popular, valuable photo; instead a helicopter came by. But it “works” as shown below. You’ll have to look hard, but its there.
Some of yesterday’s other interesting cloud formations:
Today’s clouds
Weak wave/trough passing to the south of us has some great middle and high clouds in it, splotchy ones that are sometimes incredibly spectacular, clouds like Altocumulus castellanus/floccus with virga. Just looked outside now and some of those are to the southwest of us at 5:35 AM. You can see how complex the cloud coverage is at IPS MeteoStar’s sat-radar loop here. They’ll be gone later today so enjoy them while they’re here.
The Weather Ahead
There are many troughs foretold for the Southwest and Great Basin area over the next two weeks. That the good news; it also goes with long term climo patterns that troughs like to nest in the Great Basin. But none extrude far enough southward, that is, the jet stream racing around the trough bottoms does not reach us, to bring precip to southern Arizona. Occasionally precip hits northern Arizona over this two week period, which is good, of course, for them and water supplies. In fact, its not even likely that we’ll see a cloud below 10,000 feet above ground level here if this pattern holds. And with troughs and low pressure centers nearby to the north, periods of windiness and dust will occur as they go by.
Fortunately, I guess, there’s little confidence indicated in these forecasts beyond about 11 days, NOAA spaghetti says, and so there are surprises that can pop up yet.
The End.
