“This (dry air) will not stand”

Pretty tough day, yesterday.  After a few altocumulus floccus shred clouds around dawn until around 7 AM, the sky became absolutely, totally clear.  Once again, I did not expect this.  (There are a lot of surprises in life when you are a weather forecaster.) I thought shirley1 a few small Cumulus would form later that morning.  Nope.  Absent clouds,  I had little to say to my riding partner yesterday on our mid-week ride.  I think she took it as a pleasant departure from the continuous stream of cloud commentaries she normally experiences. (hahaha, sort of).  It was wondrous seeing the carpet of green erupting from oven baked soil of this past late winter and early summer.  That has to be one of the truly great things about living here, that second greening when the summer rains come.

However, I am heartened by the presence of Cirrus from the tropics this morning and a clear push of tropical air back toward Arizony already,  as seen in the water vapor loop here.  Look to the south of us and see that massive “army” of water molecules (that whiter area covering northern Mexico) push westward against the bad dry air (darker regions) from the Pacific that invaded us yesterday.  Fantastic.   Maybe a storm chasing trip to Douglas tomorrow is in the cards.  I really dislike a day without thunder in summer! (Perhaps I should have moved from Seattle to Tampa-St Petersburg, the latter the lightning capital of the US, instead.)  Just kidding, though it would be fantastic to be there in June!

Mods say that the summer rains will begin recurring maybe as early as Saturday in the vicinity of Catalina.  How fine that will be.

 

The End

1I once knew a Shirley.  We were just friends, though, nothing lurid that’s worth re-tellling here.

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.