Tuesday, September 08, 2009

Where Have the Winds Gone?


Remnants of the little orphan Cb less than an hour after photo below - very sad show.

This morning the Tucson sounding shows a troposphere that has very little flow - winds are essentially light and variable below 200 mb! There have been some subtle changes since yesterday:

Lapse rates are now very steep up to 600 mb; little surface heating is required to establish a very deep boundary layer; yesterday's hostile layer (see below) seems to have drifted away somewhere; precipitable water remains highest over south-central Arizona (note that we're in a cycle where the RRS sounding data are too moist in the morning and too dry in the evenings); there appears to be some CAPE present over low elevations, although best instability remains over the mountains; since there is little in the way of a defined steering flow, storms today will drift wherever the CAPE leads them.

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