Widespread Storm Event - Southeast to Maricopa County

Storms ranged from southeast Arizona northwestward through much of Maricopa County during the late afternoon and into the night. The first wave of storms split around much of metro Tucson, and as this happened we had some lightning and thunder and spits of rain here at the house. The WRF-GFS had forecast the first storms to split around much of the metro and redevelop on the Catalinas and to the northwest - alas, an amazingly good forecast. The airport had gusts to 46 mph with the first storms, and atmo (see time series of T and Td above) had a gust to 62 mph on the roof as the strong outflow passed. The WRF-GFS also forecast the storms to move into eastern Mariciopa County (the o2Z forecast shown in middle and the 04z regional radar shown at bottom). This also was a quite accurate forecast, with the model being about 2 hours or so too fast.

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Rain amounts with this event were not great, but coverage was quite substantial. In the ALERT network 75% of the stations had rainfall. All of the regular NWS reporting stations had storms and rain and all of the RAWS stations in southeast Arizona had rain with the exception of Sells. Amounts were generally a tenth to a third of an inch. Here at the house we had only 0.13" in a brief second round of storms after dark. Eight of the ALERT stations at higher elevations had a half inch or greater rainfall. I noted two amounts of just over an inch - 1.08" at Columbine on Mt. Graham and 1.02" at Luke AFB northwest of Phoenix.