Friday, August 25, 2006

Difficult forecasts down in the Borderlands

Copy of e-mail sent earlier today to local weather watchers.
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Mike and all,

Well I sure goofed yesterday by not paying attention to the outflow/mesohigh spreading southeast over us. That's of course a real kiss of death. What happens when you're trying to do too many things at once.

Today seems really a mess - westerlies with drying in top half of troposphere - how far will it mix down? No matter how I fiddle with TUS sounding in low levels, I get afternoon max theta-w of 22C and thus only a tiny sliver of CAPE.

PHX sounding looks like it should be thundering there right now - maybe a bad sounding point? Definitely some CAPE up there but stronger west winds lower down bode ill. Guess that we can say mountains should be active yet again - so what's new?

The upper-air charts show cold advection west of trof in NW U.S. at 500 and 300 mb indicating southward movement as per models' forecasts. I guess that I am not sure what a fairly strong wave like this coming south over continent in summer might actually evolve to. The first waves that have come by here have come off Pacific. A piece of the northern S/W may end up abandoned by its mother wave and wander around in the subtropical ridge after tomorrow.

NAM shows two tropical and one baroclinic 500 mb vort centers at play through the weekend - we know two are real but third?????? The GFS hints at the end of the monsoon in about 7 days - although it may be happening next couple of days. Then the GFS let's it come back in at longer periods. But the GFS doesn't seem to know about TD 5, potential hurricane Ernesto. Of course, neither of these models seems to have had much reliability for weeks.

I'm plenty confused and so, I'll just sit and watch what happens!

Bob

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