With a thunderstorm at 7 AM LST yesterday mainly toward Saddlebrooke, you may have thought, “What a thundery day this will be! It will be like Cherrapunji during the Indian-Bangladesh monsoon season when it rains and thunders all day and inches of rain pile up!”
And of course, it wasn’t going to be like that at all, rather it was the famous deceptive weather “play” called, “thunder-rooskie”, whose first derivative was executed in a Nebraska in a fubball game in which the ball was not hiked by the Big Red offensive team, but was left on the turf for some lineman to pick up while all of the other players were too busy pushing each other around to notice the “egg” just lying there. (Actually, the name of that trick play was “fumble-rooskie”, as students of the game will know.) At least here in Catalina, we did get measurable rain in the morning, pretty refreshing, too, of 0.04 inches. Lots more toward SB.
So wha-happened? First, that mostly stratiform overcast helped keep temperatures down; only 91 F in Catalina yesterday. 100 F have sent volcanic explosions of Cumulonimbus clouds into the sky, but, except in a few isolated areas and on the White Mountains, that didn’t really happen. Too damn cool.
Also, when you have a disturbance strong enough to produce rain and the rare morning thunderstorm, more often than not it is replaced during the daytime by dryer air asscoiated with an attendant couplet of descending air motion, and a little of that happened yesterday, too. So, rain and thunder at dawn are often associated with disappointing afternoons here in Cat Land. Naturally, I hoped for more, seeing those low cloud bases topping Samaniego Ridge, even during the afternoon. But other than an occasional, and very brief tower, they did not even make it to the height where ice forms and rain falls out.
Here’s the rest of our muggy, but dry day:
