Tough Weekend For Forecasting!

Was a tough weekend for forecasting: Quite a few severe storms on Saturday with no outlook area or watch, and then an outlook and watch yesterday with one marginal report in state. The NWS POPs were low on Saturday and were just right at 20% yesterday morning, however, by 3 pm the POPs had gone up to 50% for this afternoon and again tonight - but were dropped again at 5:20 pm to 30% for tonight. I thought that Saturday would be like Sunday turned out to be, and way underestimated the storms that occurred on Saturday. We even got a bit of rain here at house on Saturday with a very hostile vertical wind profile! The models were hardly perfect either. Nice weekend example of how even short-term weather forecasting is not yet honed to perfection.
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Rainfall yesterday - nothing here, no thunder nor any sprinkles. Across the ALERT network 19 of 93 (20% areal coverage) had measurable rain in past 24 hours with almost all of that prior to 7 pm yesterday afternoon. The only regular reporting stations with rain were the 3 most southerly and easterly ones, with Nogales having 0.77" and Douglas coming in with 1.24". Six of the RAWS stations had rain but all amounts were very light.

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The Tucson morning sounding (top) still seems to have a little CAPE, but it is 4 to 5 mm too wet wrt GPS data. I suspect that as part of the large Pacific tough pulls east today, winds will become more westerly in low levels, leaving the only CAPE off to east and south along border. As for this morning, winds are still fairly strong from the south in the lowest levels - see Marana profiler winds in middle image. The GFS from last night seems to keep this going with all ensemble members having precip over southeast Arizona this afternoon, while the morning NAM has none. The last couple of days the GFS has appeared to be considerably too moist for this area - a confusing turnabout.

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Finally, the national weather attention this week will focus on Hurricane Earl (bottom image) and the trailing tropical wave. How close will Earl come to the northeast coast and the big megametro areas? Will the trailing wave also become a hurricane? If it does, will it make a landfall in the US?