Saying goodbye to green

Might get a shower today, likely our last day for a summer one, one spawned by all that residual tropical humidity we still have today in our lowest layers.  Don’t really have a great chance for rain today, and the whole rest of the month looks dry, but you might see a shaft somewhere off in the distance.  That would be nice.

Then it gradually dries out more and more in the days ahead, and, without the high humidities we’ve been immersed in for some months now, we’ll have to suffer through cooler nights, even a cool daytime snap is foretold in the models around the 20th.

Kind of sad when you think about it, because all that green we have been enjoying with our bountiful summer rains (8.91 inches here since July 1st), will be turning brown.  Makes me think of that California song that was so popular some decades ago, “All the leaves are gray, and the sky is brown, I went walking for awhile on a winter’s day…”, etc. etc.,  the song referring to the gray coating of smog on the leaves that fall off trees there.

Here is the radar-derived rain report for the nation for the past 90 days, pretty much mid-June through mid-September (June 11 to September 11).  Except where blocked by mountains, radar-derived rainfall amounts are really quite good.  Check out those 8-15 inches blobs in southeast Arizona, and along the Mogollon Rim!  Cool.  What’s best about this period is that it took a huge bite out of some of the nation’s worst droughty areas during this spell, here in AZ, mountains of CO, KS, the Southeast.  You can go here to create your own maps of rain.  Below that is the AZ radar rain map from Intellicast for just the past WEEK.  Its amazing.  Check out those 4-8 inches (!) blobs in the south part of the State.

I think I will go walking in the desert this week and say goodbye to all that green because in a couple of weeks a lot of it, our grasses and remaining wildflowers, will be as dry and dead as Mars.

In the meantime, a reprise of yesterday’s clouds in the usual “cloud diary”;  the light rain that produced 0.15 inches, somewhat disappointing.  No thunder, either.   Here are some of the best scenes, to me, anyway:

6:49 AM. Early morning rainband approaches from the S, but weakens and is a “no show” here. At least somebody toward Kitt Peak got some rain.
1:38 PM. Sun comes out a bit, creating this upward-surging, imitation-of-whipped-cream, or maybe a big muffin, Cumulus congestus cloud on top of a green Samaniego Ridge and Mt. Lemmon. I wanted to be inside it.  No rain was seen to fall from it, however.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1:38 PM. At the same time as the prior shot, a second rainband moves up from the S. This is looking very promising, but why don’t I hear any thunder?  Reason to be concerned about how much rain is going to fall from it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2:03 PM. Still no thunder. Rain not looking all that thick, and the “stratiform” part of this system seems upwind of Catalina, not the part with the thicker shafts. Going into a funk, properly so.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2:33 PM. Its just about over. Here a superb example of the boring Nimbostratus cumulonimbogenitus cloud layer, one still able to produce boring R– (very light rain). I guess any rain is good, so I will stop complaining here.  I do like complaining, though.  Complaining is fun!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

6:37 PM. At least we got a nice sunset out of all those debris clouds left over from the Cumulonimbus ones earlier.

 

 

 

Will be hanging clothes up to dry in the house for extra humidity until July 2013 I suppose.

 

The End.

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Categorized as Definitions

By Art Rangno

Retiree from a group specializing in airborne measurements of clouds and aerosols at the University of Washington (Cloud and Aerosol Research Group). The projects in which I participated were in many countries; from the Arctic to Brazil, from the Marshall Islands to South Africa.