The last three days certainly did not pan out as per the optimistic forecasts, driven by the NAM, starting about the middle of last week. The exception was western Cochise County which appeared to be pounded by a number of very intense storms, especially Friday and Saturday.---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Yesterday's U of A Atmo WRF runs were excellent, showing about 10 to 20% coverage of mostly light and some moderate showers. This is exactly what the observations show happened - about 10% coverage of light showers yesterday up through 00Z (see above satellite images) and about 20% coverage after 00Z through the evening, with some moderate showers mostly over the Catalinas, with several ALERT gauges reporting just over a quarter of an inch. There were no CGs detected in all of southeast Arizona as far as I could tell, and the showers had slight VILs and tops in the 20 to 30 thousand foot range - this fits with the two satellite images above - the visible (middle) image shows showers from central Pima County eastward; but the water vapor image (top) indicates that most of these showers weren't deep enough to be detected in upper-tropospheric water vapor data. I missed my guess yesterday that the demarcation line between showers and no showers would be nearly overhead - so it goes in summer forecasting.
---------------------------------------------------------
Finally, the TWC sounding last evening at 00Z (bottom image) was clearly garbage, due to a shower, but was transmitted regardless, and will lurking out there in the data archives to foul up future research.
No comments:
Post a Comment