Dammitall! Of course, being quite jaded, and knowing drastic changes in model predictions from one run to the next are usually bogus, this disappearance of all that predicted rain in 10-15 days ahead of us on yesterday morning’s National Center for Enviro Prediction “GFS” model has hurt. People don’t realize how hard it is to be a weatherman/meteorologist. You get hurt like this a lot. I already was thinking about the headlines. “Farmers beg for dry weather!” “Tucson becomes sister city of Venice!” Sign in downtown Tucson: “Water skiing rides, $10.” “Tucson surf report: 1-2 feet with a slight chop. Winds NW 5-10 mph.” “NWS, police caution Tucson boaters about drinking and boating.”
OK, now those potential headlines and story lines are gone. Not a drop of rain is shown in all of Arizona over the next 15 days in the model run executed last night. That run was based on global data taken just 12 h after the Wet One yesterday morning (that is, around 5 PM LST). Not a drop in the next 15 days, just like the Dry Ones had before the Wet One! Its too depressing to show them so I will just blab some.
However, here’s is another secret about models. They don’t always “forget” an outlier prediction like yesterday completely. As new data comes in this morning, and in the days ahead, one should not be surprised to see SOME rain start creeping back into Arizona in those later predictions for that wet period, now 9-14 days ahead. So, as in a relationship in which you’ve been spurned because of a tempest in a cloud bottle, really not that much, i.e., if it was a rainstorm it would only be a trace; it might be rejuvenated, though it might never be the same (that is, the model runs will never show as much rain as the Wet One did).
What is always interesting to meteorologists is to ferret out the region of the globe that was in error, what measurements caused the Wet One to appear?
Consolation: at least the cloud drought is over with some pretty Cirrus this morning. Should be a nice sunrise. Remember, too, that Cirrus clouds, composed of tiny ice crystals that fall out, is considered to be a precipitating cloud though those ice crystals are too small to show up on radar. “Hey”, if you were on Mt. Everest you’d think it was snowing that bit (dust-like snow, which we can identify with here in the SW because we have dust).
Maybe a trip to Mt. Everest would be something you should check out, though personally I would like the Cherrapunji region of India-Bangladesh during the real monsoon, the one in Asia. Why? “Factoid”: Cherrapunji once had over ONE THOUSAND inches of rain in a 12 month period! Still reigns as the world record for that amount of time.
The End
