“Tweener” era begins today after pre-dawn sprinkles; one photo has birds in it

We’ll have to suffer through  a few days for the next storm, i. e., experience sunny weather with pleasant temperatures.  Its amazing that people all over America come to Tucson to experience sunny days with pleasant temperatures!

0.45 inches total in The Heights of Catalina in this latest round of rain, sounds of rain.    Actually, there was also some tiny graupel/soft hail in the rain yesterday, too.

Graupel indicates a lot of cloud droplet water overhead, and that ice crystals were colliding with them until they lost their identity and became little snowballs.  In regions where there are very few ice crystals,  graupel and the harder version,  hail often form.   Its likely that nearly all those rain drops that came down with the little baby graupel were melted graupels.

Graupels…..   Makes me think of that rock group, Led Graupelin, didn’t have the impact of Led Zepelin.  But I have LG’s one and only album entitled, “Compare to Led Zepelin.”   Was only $2.99, too!  Where’s my guitar?  I think I will play, “Stairwell to Heaven” now…

When graupel or hail occur,  there’s a pretty good electric charge up there in those Cumulonimbus clouds.  Its best to be indoors when its hailing until you know if a strike might occur (if there hasn’t been one already).  Besides, its not comfortable being out in hail.   And if you were listening to the rain, you heard a few blasts of thunder toward Lemmon around 2 PM that came out of one of the more enthusiastic Cumulonimbus clouds that went by.  Got 0.12 inches total to add to the night before’s rain of 0.33 inches.

Yesterday in clouds; a sojourn in clouds from morning to evening, in that order with no times noted

Then the piston of atmospheric subsidence slammed down to squash our Cumulus cloud tops to levels and temperatures where ice could not form….

The weather ahead

Kind of funny to see the Canadian GEM model internally plagiarize itself.  Compare last night’s panel at 500 millibars (below) with that same level’s panel  foretold for six days from now.

Yep, its the same thing over again in six days, though with less rain IMO:

In another interesting model development, the best USA model, the WRF-GFS is having an internal CONFLICT of major proportions.  Check these progs out generated by data only six hours apart.  The first one, showing a big trough coming into Cal, was generated by global data taken at 5 PM AST last evening.  The panel below it was generated by the same model based on global data taken just six hours later, at 11 PM AST (so it the most recent WRF output available) and has a big ridge along the California coast.

“Which one will the fountain choose?”, to quote old song lyrics¹:

Of course, spaghetti tells us which one is right, mostly.

 

The End

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¹Except that here we present only two “coins” not three.