Sounds more exciting if you title like that…and that’s what I’m here for, excitement, weather and cloud excitement!
Pima County ALERT 24 h precip totals, some around here below, as of 6 AM:
Gauge 15 1 3 6 24 Name Location
ID# minutes hour hours hours hours
—- —- —- —- —- —- —————– ———————
Catalina Area
1010 0.00 0.04 0.08 0.08 0.43 Golder Ranch Horseshoe Bend Road in Saddlebrooke
1020 0.00 0.00 0.04 0.08 0.43 Oracle Ranger Stati approximately 0.5 mile southwest of Oracle
1040 0.04 0.08 0.12 0.12 0.47 Dodge Tank Edwin Road 1.3 miles east of Lago Del Oro Parkway
1050 0.04 0.04 0.08 0.08 0.47 Cherry Spring approximately 1.5 miles west of Charouleau Gap
1060 0.00 0.04 0.08 0.16 0.71 Pig Spring approximately 1.1 miles northeast of Charouleau Gap
1070 0.00 0.00 0.08 0.08 0.35 Cargodera Canyon northeast corner of Catalina State Park
1080 0.00 0.04 0.08 0.12 0.51 CDO @ Rancho Solano Cañada Del Oro Wash northeast of Saddlebrooke
1100 0.00 0.04 0.04 0.08 0.28 CDO @ Golder Rd Cañada Del Oro Wash at Golder Ranch Road
Santa Catalina Mountains
1030 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.04 0.20 Oracle Ridge Oracle Ridge, approximately 1.5 miles north of Rice Peak
1090 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 Mt. Lemmon Mount Lemmon
1110 0.00 0.04 0.12 0.24 0.71 CDO @ Coronado Camp Cañada Del Oro Wash 0.3 miles south of Coronado Camp
1130 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.04 Samaniego Peak Samaniego Peak on Samaniego Ridge
1140 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.04 0.24 Dan Saddle Dan Saddle on Oracle Ridge
2150 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.04 White Tail Catalina Highway 0.8 miles west of Palisade Ranger Station
2280 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.31 Green Mountain Green Mountain
2290 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.24 Marshall Gulch Sabino Creek 0.6 miles south southeast of Marshall Gulch
As you can see, a couple of stations in the Catalina Mountains were virtually missed by the storm (ZERO total, for example, at Ms. Mt. Lemmon) or it snowed on those low total precip gauges and the snow has not melted and is sitting in the gauge’s funnel. Select choice number 2. Mountains just becoming visible; looks like snow down to 6,000 foot level.
Didn’t see any precip/virga before dark yesterday, started raining just before 10 PM, nicely, and continued through midnight when it quit. However, the main event, lasting about 6-8 h is supposed to start happening about now, but rain mostly lighting up in TUS. That means we should see some clearing around mid-day, but leaving enough low clouds stacking up around the Catalinas for some nice quilted sun and shadows on those mountains, one of our prettiest sights I think, along with our now snow-capped mountains.
FROPA, or “frontal passage” in weather text speak, occurred late yesterday afternoon. I wonder if you noticed the wind shift and dropping temperatures? However, was a very shallow depth of wind that shifted, and temperature took about 3 h to drop 10 F, (58 F to 48 F) not exactly as sharp a FROPA as was anticipated from this microphone yesterday. Also, a bit unusual, the rain band was displaced far behind the wind shift that occurred around 4:30 PM.
Yesterday’s clouds
I thought yesterday was quite an interesting day for you. Lots of cloud types to log in your weather and cloud diary. Let us begin our retrospective with Sunrise on the Equestrian:







toward


Your next storm: due in Sunday morning. Likely just something around a tenth of an inch. Nothing showing up beyond that, but lots of mod fluctuations re storms. I suspect the one that showed up a few days ago for the 20th or so will arise again in some future run. Just a gut feeling since there’s no evidence in the spaghetti plots yet to support that hunch.
The End.
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1The TUS balloon sounding yesterday afternoon about the time of the next to last photo. Shows tops WERE warmer than -10 C, in case you didn’t believe me because the clouds looked so dark yesterday afternoon. They were pretty dark because there was a higher ice cloud overcast (Altostratus) and when droplet concentrations are high, clouds are darker on the bottom. We usually have pretty high droplet concentrations here in old Arizony.
