Sounds mysterious…maybe another sci fi movie title. I wonder what they are? Oh, here they are (I bet you weren’t expecting that):
If you had giant lobes like this on you, you’d want to go to the doctor right away.
This is a common pattern, one that produces, “toasty in the West, and people who complain a lot about cold in the East and wish they’d have gone to Arizona for the winter.” Comes up about every winter or so a time or two, and we got one now.
You may remember that the ensembles of spaghetti were all over this pattern; it was well predicted 10 or more days in advance. I hope you told your relatives back East about it. It’ll be interesting to see how many warm and cold records are set during this anomaly couplet. Only lasts a day or two, and then its gone, and weather returns to a more seasonal pattern for awhile.
The weather ahead
What’s ahead for us AFTER the lobes of anomaly pattern passes in a couple of days? Pretty normal for a few days after that, and then wham-bam, this monster upper low shown below, and pretty much in the bag; a near certainty to occur. (Remember your Catalina spaghetti from yesterday…) For awhile the models have been painting it as quite dry, but lately this low has been filling up with quite a bit of precip for SE AZ, quite nice to see happen.
Can you guess what the lobes of anomaly will look like on this day? Well, why waste time guessing when here they are (well, there are actually three or more visible and partly visible, maybe we should say “lobesssssss” kind of string out the plural of that word to emphasize how many there might be.
What’s the weather with this anomaly pattern? Cold in the Southwest with precipitation and low snow levels around here. Toasty now in the East, where they are now quite happy with the weather.
I am going to expeculate that while the models have been rather dry up to now as this low passes, that we’ll get measurable precip here in Catalina, oh, bottom amount, 0.10 inches, top amount (its gotta be pretty wild here at this point), 0.60 inches, substantial. The main point is that this situation will bring some precip to Catalina, not be completely dry as so many runs before this have indicated. More snow will pile up on the Catalilnas, that’s pretty much for sure.
Local water news…
there’s water now in several of the small mountain creeks/washes leading down to the Sutherland Wash above Catalina. There’s no water in the Sutherland Wash, however, just yet. Seems to disappear before getting to the Sutherland. The first shot below is from Thursday’s horsey ride and shows the dry Sutherland Wash with a donkey rolling in the sand (Hint for bloggers: more people go to your web site if you have animals in it):
Later, this nice encounter with some running, gurgling water! Likely from snow melt from our historic Catalina snowstorm. Plenty still left at higher elevations, but its melting fast now, of course, with the warm lobe of anomaly over us.
The End.
