About real clouds, weather, cloud seeding and science autobio life stories by WMO consolation prize-winning meteorologist, Art Rangno
TSTMS overnight and this morning drop 0.11 inches
Well, it could have been more I suppose; some areas of central and northern Arizona have gotten between a half an inch and an inch of rain overnight. Nevertheless, it was great that a passing thunderstorms (“TSTMS” in weather texting) happened here in Sutherland Heights overnight, fabulous, really. Dropped 0.28 inches on Mt. Lemmon, btw.
More scattered showers, and maybe a thunderstorm or two, should develop today. Keep cameras well-oiled for some great cloud scenes.
Yesterday’s clouds
8:04 AM. In the beginning….. Unlike the day before, our shower clouds didn’t move in, but rather had to start from something akin to poppy seeds. Still water highlights on Samaniego Ridge.12:06 PM. Cumulus increase in size and number. No ice yet.2:14 PM. First minute amount of ice begins to show up underneath downstream cloud portions. You’ll have to be awfully good to find it!3:37 PM. Ice, and now well-developed virga, is plentiful in many of these shallow clouds.4:00 PM. Numerous light rainshowers and glaciating shallow Cumulus clouds dot the horizon to the SW,6:58 PM. Shows the fine structure of virga, trails that can be only 5-20 meters wide as they drop out of a cloud. Strands like this are usually soft hail, or what we call “graupel.” Snow virga like this tells you that cloud bases are well below freezing, and on a warm day are very high above the ground. Yesterday’s late afternoon cloud bases were up around 14 thousand feet above sea level, at about -5 C (23 F). The virga melted into raindrops behind the cloud below it.
7:04 PM. A light rainshower advances on Catalina. Where the pinkness disappears below the main cloud base is where the snow virga is melting into less visible raindrops.7:06 PM. Another fiery sunset highlight involving a Cumulonimbus cloud. Cloud tops were beginning to deepen noticeably by this time.
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.