Tropical river to flow into Arizona

The summer high pressure sitting on top of Catalina in the middle and upper atmosphere, squashing our Cumulonimbus clouds with its extra warm air, is destined to relocate to Dubuque, Iowa over the next five days.  Along with the return of better showers, more bigger ones, as this happens, this movement will also allow a river of tropical air to flood into Arizona with the remains of Hurricane “Xxxxx” (hasn’t formed yet, but will shortly way down off Mexico way).

Before placing much confidence in such a wild scenario, let us examine the NOAA “Ball of Yarn After Kitty Played with It“, as my one blog reader once termed it, or, AKA, the “ensembles of spaghetti”:

NOAA "Ensembles of spaghetti, valid for
NOAA “Ensembles of spaghetti”, valid for 5 PM AST, Sunday, August 25th.  Pretty cool, huh?  Big trough off West Coast; big fat high over Plains States, tropical river flows between them into Cal and AZ.  Really, this is as good as it gets for summer rain deluges, ones that deserts are always in need of  in parts of those areas. I am pumped because the clustering of the red and bluish lines, as you know,  mean that this model forecast pattern is just about a foregone conclusion.

So,after DELIBERATELY putting little errors in the data that the model crunches to see if there are tipping points, little errors that make a big difference, then running the model over and over again to see how different the results are, we can see that everything looks pretty much the same even after little errors are put in. That means the tropical river forecast is robust. In plain language, “Count on it!”

These forecasts also include the remnant of a tropical storm or hurricane that has yet to form, being swept along into western Arizona and SE Cal. Some of our greatest floods in Arizona have occurred with these kinds of storms, as you know. Presently, the bulk of the tropical river will impinge more over the western lowlands of Arizona rather than here, but we should be in great position to accumulate appreciable rains anyway, if not the heaviest.

BTW, interested in tropical storms impacted, say, Yuma?  Go here, type in the name and you will see, oh, names like Nora (1997), Kathleen, 1976, and so forth.  It happens.  Pretty damn exciting for those folks.  So maybe it will happen again.  Atmo is set up to do this, or come close.

Now for the little cloud news for yesterday, not as good a day as hoped for, just hot with run of the mill, isolated storms. Can hardly find rain in the past 24 h in the Pima County ALERT gauges.

12:18 PM. Already 100 F here but only modest clouds have formed over the Catalinas.
12:18 PM. Already 100 F here but only modest clouds have formed over the Catalinas. Look at how confused the top is, one leaning one way, and the other another way.  Shows how still the atmosphere was at that level, almost calm.
2:05 PM. You gotta love this little guy, all puffed up but so little, trying to be all it can be against the big fat high over us.
2:05 PM. You gotta love this little guy, trying so hard to be something.   I just wanted to fly up there and hug it,  all puffed up the way it was but so little.  Kinda reminded me of the antics of my very little brother when he was, trying to be more.

Below, the human metaphor for that little cloud shown above; my little bro.  He was so cute, too.  Went on to be a tough guy, as well, a young LA policeman working the Watts area during the riots,  you know, guns pointed at, death threats from Black Panthers1, ambushes, etc.

Thanks, bro, for all you’ve done.

My little brother.
Circa 1953,
5:34 PM. Squashed Cumulonimbus over west Tucson just after a spectacular cloud to ground stroke. Didn't think it had it in it to produce LTG.
5:34 PM. Squashed Cumulonimbus over west Tucson just after a spectacular cloud to ground stroke. Didn’t think it had it in it to produce LTG.
6:49 PM. While it didn't rain, we did have our usual sunset glory, lighting on the mountains.
6:49 PM. While it didn’t rain, we did have our usual sunset glory, lighting on the mountains.
7:11 PM. Sunset colors with distant Cumulonimbus with Cirrus spissatus cumulonimbogenitus in the foreground (debris from dissipated thunderheads, of course).
7:11 PM. Sunset colors with “Cirrus spissatus cumulonimbogenitus” in the foreground (debris from dissipated thunderheads, of course).

Finishing up with a quick look at the 11 PM U of AZ model runs…. Has some more showers around here than yesterday, which isn’t hard to do.   But yesterday, this same model was foretelling a down day today. Hmmmm.

Well, gotta go with the latest, or just have a great day; lay back and enjoy whatever happens. Oh, yeah!

 

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1Across from the Watts police precinct was a Black Panther headquarters which at one point had a sign, “Off the pig Rango.”  My brother went over and told them he was upset that they had misspelled his name.  The next day the sign read, “Off the pig Ragno”, also misspelled.

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.