“The answer”, as well as a lot of other things, will be “blowing in the wind” tomorrow

What did that mean, anyway, the “answer” is blowing in the wind”?  What a crazy thing to say!   What “answer”?  I never heard it.  Me?   I liked, “Everyone Knows Its Windy”,  by The Association.   Now there’s a song…and “everyone” will know its “windy” tomorrow afternoon just like they said back then.  Very accessible song.  But first this diversion/tirade.

So much for the “plethora” of storms foretold by our models some nine days ago.   It even appeared that Catalina could have a snow day yesterday or today.  Poof!  The Catalina snow day was moved to Boise, Idaho.  Imagine a week before the Tucson Rodeo, it was announced that it had been moved to Midland, Texas!  Well, the models need to shape up!  They’re just awful beyond a week or so, always indicating, it seems, a big storm here.  What have our weather scientists been doing all this time with all that government money they get year after year????  (hahahaha, sort of).  ((Just kidding guys, now that I don’t get any government money to study weather and clouds at the big university where we all know its hobby work and we’d do it for nothing but don’t tell anyone….))

OK, one of the many “storms” foretold in the model will pass over us tomorrow.  It won’t rain.  The jet stream in the middle of the atmosphere will be a hair too far north, and the lower moisture  needed for precip and circumscribed by it will be so close that we will likely see some Stratocumulus off to the NW-N shedding some virga or snow and maybe some small Cumulus here (Cumulus humilis).    Probably most interesting tomorrow, if there is enough moisture in the mid-levels, say around 2o,ooo feet or so, is for a couple of Altocumulus lenticularis clouds to form, those almond like clouds.  Those can be pretty cool, and sometimes cause people to call in about seeing a flying saucer.  Really, its happened.  But we’re smarter.  We know “a” Altocumulus lenticularis when we see one!  In case you forgot, here’s one near Ashland, Oregon:

The low pressure center with this system is going to be pretty intense as it deepens over southern Nevada and then scoots on across Utah tomorrow.  “Intense” means it will have a lot of isobars around its center, and lot of isobars means wind because the pressure on the outside of the low is so much different (higher) than at its center.  I guess that is something; it will feel like a storm is coming, and the relative humidity will go up after the front passes.

 

The End.

 

 

 

 

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.